Why Do People Want Me To Stay Crazy?

If you know me, and some of you know me well, you will understand what I mean when I say that I am highly strung.

Whether I am skipping up the library steps to give "presents" to my fellow librarians in the form of books that go on their shelves and not ours or an origami box containing M&M's, or calling my aunt to ask if she remembers how to Hukilau, or texting Dad various "code phrases" while he travels from state to state, whether I am blogging about cleaning the soles of my shoes just in case after actually cleaning them because I wasn't making that up, I am securing my place, at least in the eyes of my coworkers, as the quirky girl.

I am okay with this.

I spent so many of my high school years pretending I didn't exist (because if I pretended hard enough, other people might be fooled into believing it too) that I am enjoying my adulthood, something I equate with comfort in my nerdiness.

That being said, sometimes things go too far.

Take for example, the singing.

The singing started at MC, because I spent all of my time with music majors, or people who lived in choral robes, opera costumes, and occasionally, the drum-holder things that you use to carry around your biggish drum sets while you march. It was not so terribly strange for the commuter lounge, dubbed The Lounge, to play host to any number of wigs, make-up kits, and sometimes men in tights (leggings) during the weeks preceding a performance.

It made life exciting.

But here's the thing.

Get a bunch of people together who are about to perform, or people who just have to know certain music at a certain time, or even people who just plain love music...and there is singing. Singing everywhere.

When your friends are James--from Hutch Off the Cuff in the sidebar over there--this is amazing. You end up spending all your time in The Lounge, because not only are all your friends in there, but there's also an Opera Preview every time you round the corner. And when James isn't singing, well...it got to be disappointing. But I guess he had to study too. And eat his lunch, like the rest of us.

Even though he so clearly should have staggered his lunch around the times that I planned on being around, so that he could sing while I ate, so my lunch would be a concert.

Oh well. He brought us cake. Really good chocolate cake, too.

Sigh...the Lounge. I miss the lounge.

Where was I? Oh, the singing.

Well, when you spend a great deal of time around people who sing, you start singing. This is not so bad, because you like to sing. Except there is this thing about music majors, or maybe just about my close friends...

The singing does not stop outside of the music building.

In fact, the singing just does not stop.

And after a while, it starts to get to the point where singing is supposed to be going on, and if the people around you aren't doing it, you start up...

So I push my cart through Kroger's, singing.

Now I sing everywhere, including inside public restrooms, which have very good acoustics. And failing that, if perhaps some thought interrupts a song because it is so very important, I say the thought out loud, because there's nothing strange about that.

And when the thoughts include, "You stupid driver, stupid, stupid jerk, get off the road you monster, the blackness of your soul has tainted your vehicle for all eternity..." just for example, your friends and family begin to believe you have become unhinged.

I may have become unhinged.

And while that certainly has nothing to do with the mere act of James or Audrey or Jennifer singing (or humming) in The Lounge, it sped the inevitable process.

I have this imagined future for myself. Several, in fact, but the one I am referring to includes me in a Rascal (one of the motorized scooter things), maneuvering through the aisles at Barnes and Nobles, singing and talking to myself at full-voice. This will continue until my nearest relations, if they care that I still draw breath, force me into a "safe environment" where I continue to sing and talk, just with less books.

Hopefully, I will have spent my life being creative enough that I will be considered "eccentric" or "quirky" instead of just "certifiable" and "a danger to herself and others."

I am nonviolent, if that helps.

Well, I did spend half of last night throwing things at my father, but they were soft things. Violence was not intentional, just unavoidable. You know, like what President Bush said.

Yes, I did just make that joke. Sorry. I tried to stop myself. But once I type it, there it is.

Here's the thing. People are trying to speed the process.

They want more than anything to make me snap before I've written the next great American novel and lit my dwelling place on fire with an overturned bottle of Dad's Reggae Red wine. I will be wearing hand knit lace, a shawl perhaps, and I will hold the bottle aloft as I spin around manically, reciting Emily Dickinson as I twirl, twirl, darting about amidst the flames until the firefighters just give up and knock me out with the high-powered pressurized water spray they use.

They want me to be the psycho girl who starts laughing at her workplace, out of the blue, laughing until she can't breathe and has to be sedated.

They want be to narrate my next novel while alone in my car, but also they want me to narrate my next novel when there are passengers in my car to listen to me.

They want me to take a sledge hammer to the work computer.

And why would I take a sledge hammer to the work computer?

Because it is infected with a super-virus, worm, parasite, malaise, dread-fungus, or Klingon battle-targ. Because it has opened no less than 30 Internet Explorer windows while I have been writing this post, not counting the insane amount that popped up yesterday, despite my running every anti-spy/mal/virus-ware thing we have in our computer arsenal, since it would be too easy on me if the evil was quickly found.

What I need is a vacuum cleaner and a priest, to exorcise this evil and allow me to suck it into the bowels of the hoover, then remove it sealed in its vacuum bag, so that it could be ritually purged. I wonder if a priest charges you extra for that sort of thing if you aren't Catholic. Could my Church-of-the-Brethren pastor dad pull off an exorcism, or do you need holy water for it, because the Church of the Brethren doesn't have holy water. I think you need to special order that from Rome or something, because they certainly don't sell it at Joy Christian Bookstore by Culver's.

I only thank God that WebMarshal sees fit to block the content of the windows that would pop up showing me various anatomical parts and how they can interlock if properly positioned. I don't want to see that. I am not interested in going blind just yet, especially when blindness would result from my gouging out my own eyes. There is a reason I stay home on the weekends. I am a very repressed young woman. I was taught that the human body is an evil, evil thing, and it should be restrained at all costs, with iron if possible, or perhaps even steel. Chain mail is only appropriate if the gaps between the chain have to be located using a magnifying glass, just in case. Girls like me can't watch Titanic without fast-forwarding, even though I am a girl and I see that every day.

This computer is going to make me start pulling out my own hair and eyelashes like that girl I saw in the book catalogue that said truth was stranger than fiction. It's going to make me start rocking back and forth, singing--this time out of key!

Joe the Computer Guy better sidle over here purty quick, because that shaky hand thing is coming back, and if it gets much worse they're going to put me on medication. I don't want medication. All I want is a glass of milk and another piece of that banana bread Mom brought home from breakfast yesterday.

Can't we just make a combined effort to bring Laura's Crazy Level down?

But all the scans I have going are coming up empty. For the fourth time. And I think I deserve better. A world without viruses or Bella-and-Edward endorsed timeless literary classics, one with chocolate cake-makers that don't live thousands of miles away (or hundreds I haven't looked at a map to figure it out), one where I have somehow managed to make Jen snort her glass of milk out of her nose while she's reading this, because she is laughing happily as she ought, and one where they don't retool pictures of me after I die to make me prettier (Dickinson again). Is that too much for the fates to offer us?

If not for me, for everyone else?