1:04am December 24, 2014

Am I eccentric? Question is not rhetorical.

I’m not too big on dictionaries defining the language, but I’m also a huge user of the built-in dictionaries on my Macbook, iPad, and iPod Touch, and Kindle. It is a godsend for people like me who have higher expressive than receptive vocabularies. I can go through my writing and look up all the words I didn’t understand to see if I actually used them accurately. Usually, thanks to the miracles of delayed echolalia and a talent for pattern-matcing, I have. But it’s always interesting to check.

Anyway, my MacBook Pro has a dictionary in it. All you have to do is right-click on a word, and the very first option is to look up the word. So I look up eccentric and it has this to say on the matte (I’ll bold the relevant parts)r:

eccentric |ikˈsentrik|adjective

1 (of a person or their behavior) unconventional and slightly strange: my favorite aunt is very eccentric.

2 technical (of a thing) not placed centrally or not having its axis or other part placed centrally.

• (of a circle) not centered on the same point as another.

• (of an orbit) not circular.

noun

1 a person of unconventional and slightly strange views or behavior: he enjoys a colorful reputation as an engaging eccentric.

2 a disc or wheel mounted eccentrically on a revolving shaft in order to transform rotation intobackward-and-forward motion, e.g., a cam in an internal combustion engine.

DERIVATIVES eccentrically adverb

ORIGIN late Middle English (as a noun denoting a circle or orbit not having the earth precisely at its center): via late Latin from Greek ekkentros, from ek ‘out of’ + kentron ‘center.’

But there’s something more to eccentricity than all those words are saying. I have a friend who was a cab driver and who held a funeral for her dead taxi. That’s eccentric. Larry Bissonette, an artist with autism, is about as eccentric as they come (and an Old Vermonter to boot, which sometimes carries with it a connotation of tolerance or even celebration of a certain degree of eccentricity).

When I was thirteen, I saw my first full-fledged psychologist, who would remain my psychologist until I was nineteen. The very first thing he wrote about me was something like “This is an eccentric thirteen-year-old girl…” One time he told me, “It’s too bad you’re not rich. Rich people get to be eccentric while everyone else just gets to be crazy. You’re not rich, so you’re going to always be seen as crazy, not eccentric.” He also referred to me as “half a bubble off plumb” — which cracked my dad up because my dad had been calling me that for years.

Which… kind of proved to me how middle-class the guy was. My family has a long history of eccentricity, and until my generation we were never anything but poor or working-class. And there’s a higher tolerance of eccentricity among poor people, too. There may not be a high tolerance of eccentricity among poor people when the purported tolerance is coming from the middle and upper classes, but among ourselves? Hell yeah there’s a lot of room for eccentricity. I don’t think my family could have existed without that.

My great-grandfather was another eccentric, probably on the autistic spectrum, and definitely far from rich. He had seven or eight kids. And so to get away from the noise, he lived in a shack in the backyard, with his shortwave radio and a gun to shoot flies off the ceiling with. He walked pretty much everywhere wearing a backpack, and didn’t trust cars very much, although he did ride in them on occasion.

My father was at least borderline eccentric, although honestly in this family he doesn’t stand out a lot. Which says more about our family than about him. He was definitely autistic, but was born before autism was even a thing, so he wasn’t diagnosed. He was the right age to have maybe made it into some of Kanner’s early studies, but he was living in Okie/Arkie/dust-bowl-refugee-land in California and they weren’t looking around for new psychiatric syndromes in that neck of the woods.

Then there are people who cultivate their eccentricity. I mostly find them irritating and annoying. I got approached by one of them during an art show featuring a few of my paintings. He was a photographer. He wanted to photograph me with my paintings. I let him even though I didn’t want to — he was a good manipulator that way. But what frustrated me about him the most was that he had an outer him, and an inner him, and they were so far mismatched that if it was translated into visual contrast I’d get a migraine just from looking at it. I couldn’t wait to be rid of him. His eccentricity was a sham, it was “Artists are eccentric so I have to create an eccentric persona in order to be a Real Artist”. This guy was middle-aged and hadn’t figured out yet that this was bullshit.

But I don’t know whether I’m eccentric or not.

I’ve been called eccentric by both professionals and laypeople.

But I sometimes feel like eccentricity requires a certain level of force-of-will, that I don’t have. Or am not sure I have. It’s a quality that’s hard to put into words. Most eccentric people I’ve known, push their identity to the front of their bodies, the front of their minds, in a way I’m not sure that I do. But I could be wrong, it could be possible to be eccentric without that.

So do any of y’all know if I’m eccentric or not? I’m not bothered either way, i’m just curious. I know that I’m neurodivergent in a zillion ways, but I’m not sure that’s the same.

Notes: