Comments on: What made you weird?

By: Griffleo

Griffleo — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:36:02 +0000

My Uncle Leonard who,when I was just 13 gave me 4 books, The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger,Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh,Junky by W.S Burroughs and the complete works of P.G Wodehouse. My English teacher at the time could cope with P.G Wodehouse and reluctently,Evelyn Waugh,but,Salinger and Burroughs were deemed rather unsuitable for school reading so hence their confiscation ( I used to resd them at brake times at school). Another situation that made me ‘weird’ was the time I came across a box of old photographs in my Grandma’s loft. She was rather an eccentric old lady,but when she was young she led one hell of a life in the 20′s and 30′s. She always seemed to be traveling,France,Spain,Eygpt,India,Africa and she found beauty in the most absurd things and her photos proved to me that one should never accept what you see but always question it,with her insight to life as she saw it gave me the basis of who I am now..I’m not ‘weird’,I am just me,a little pretensious but rather happy.

By: Ingunn

Ingunn — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:53:29 +0000

I grew up in a small town with my family of five. This town is kind of like Twin Peaks if you look close enough. It is typical for the people who live there to not really care about the outside world, they get their conversation-topics on the supermarkets, which seems to be the most important place on Earth. Coming from a family where my mother was quite eccentric; she has always been a pretty free-flowing woman with interests in alternative medicine and healing, and a father who was creative in his upbringing of me and my siblings; I was soon the weird kid. I was also the middle child of three. And I feel that this has sculptured me in a way. My older brother was a math-and-checkers-geek in his early years – which automatically made my weirdness in school even stronger. My younger sister was a very free-spirited person and always the centre of attention. With a brother who is a genius and a sister who everyone adores, I found it hard to find my place. Also I felt much smarter than a lot of the people from our society, and I still do. But I have always been a very discrete person, and realized that when I was being honest(which is not a common thing in my little town) people got afraid, – so I kept most of it to myself. I spent a lot of time in my room as I grew up, developing my artistic abilities. My mother and father encouraged me to do so, and I think they saw what a sensitive child I was.

I have always felt weird, even when I have tried not to be. Especially when I have tried not to be. I have always been very filosophical and blurted out things that noone else understands. “You are so weird”. I have lost count of how many times I have heard that.

By: JR

JR — Sun, 22 May 2011 18:31:51 +0000

I was always weird. I think my parents just encouraged it. I was always the artist and a sensitive child prone to communicating with other worlds and entities. We lived on the edge of the industrial area next to the freeway where the old neighborhood history and industry had great influence. My dad used to take me out in the back yard once a year and move the junk around and teach me all the scientific names of the creatures we found he volunteered at the zoo then. these are things I still love to do and find them great inspiration for my art.

By: phine_art_ophile

phine_art_ophile — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:19:56 +0000

*Childhood tv shows: Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Fraggle Rock (I thought they were real, and wanted to own a Doozer!)
*My parents being Child and Youth workers meant that I was raised in a very liberal household with little to nothing to rebel against. It also meant that my little sister and I were always spoken to as tiny adults, resulting in excellent vocabularies that alienated other school kids, but rendered us very popular with teachers. Go figure. Good grades don’t always measure up when your friends are taken away by the Children’s Aid Society because their parents had shitty parenting skills.
*My own passions for art kept me inside drawing when other people were out enjoying the outdoors, and movies like The Dark Crystal and anything Tim Burton was more entertaining than Friends or America’s Funniest Home Videos- everyone else’s tube of choice.
*My shitty little small town, where everyone knew each other since birth. Everyone liked country music and had no idea what Mexican or Italian food was. Our family experienced many different cultures and brought it home with us. The kids I brought home to play with snubbed their noses at anything that wasn’t peanut butter or a ‘steak-and-potatoes’ meal. And scoffed at the music we played to boot! I didn’t like those kinds of ignorant people, so I chose to be the complete opposite.
*The Marx Brothers- Knowing the difference between slapstick and wordplay, and experimenting with mature humour right from the get-go. Not always a big hit with the Stooges crowd…
*The book “Show Me”. My mother’s sexual education books were always in plain sight. Blatant pornography for those who had closed minds, a veritable anatomy textbook for me, who just wanted to draw people the way they really looked.
*Album covers. Some of the trippiest art to warp a little person’s mind, my mother would give me wallpaper sample books to draw on, or cut and paste- Much of my early works are composed like band collages, or have interpretive images of certain lyrics or song titles.
* Being one of the first kids I know with the internet- my father was self-employed at fixing computers as they were first being made available for home use, which meant we were exposed to loads of technology before most others I knew, and we were waaaaaaaay ahead of the game on experiencing and downloading different music (before we knew the repurcussions of piracy).

Many other things contributed to my weirdness, mostly just being young, artistic, in Canada, in the 80′s/90′s, and being the daughter of intellectual “Woman’s Libber/Hippie” parents, was enough to make me want to stand out for any reason, even if it was just to challenge authority and/or my peers… I still don’t give my folks enough credit these days…
Cheers Mom, Cheers Dad (RIP)

By: polly_deus

polly_deus — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:16:14 +0000

I was also born in soviet but it soon collapsed in 1990 then my family moved to the uk then dublin Ireland where i live now.
its weird i remeber the orthadox churches and victor tsois song ‘blood group’ (grupa krovi) sends shivers down my spine…
-so my ethnic background made me weird too.
-My dads music taste and when it imprinted and when it imprinted apon me
-my mam bringing me into a religious cult we went to every sunday back in London and their talks and teachings and the people of the church singing and dancing madly and me,as a child along with them,
-being the firstborn of young parants….i was the guiney pig,they really couldnt raise me as they were pretty much kids themselves
- the first time i ever saw Nick Cave and Kylie Minogues duet as a child(where the wild roses grow) and it was etched into my mind and though i didnt listen to it until many years later i could recognise it straight away…
and more stuff i cant remember

By: eliza

eliza — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:04:56 +0000

- captain picard and agents scully and mulder
- a love for edward gorey’s Mystery! animation that blossomed when my dad gave me amphigorey in highschool
- my middle school mad scientist teacher (telescopes, pinhole photography, bones and power tools will do that to a girl)
- growing up in a tiny town
- a confused middle school crush on jonathan rhys meyers in gormenghast
- and seal the deal with a week long trip to new orleans at the age of 14, giant albino pythons and all.

By: Tor Hershman

Tor Hershman — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:22:07 +0000

Let’s see, hummmmmmmm…..moi’s father dyin’, when moi ’twere five, and the “Grown-Ups” tellin’ moi that ‘God needed your dad in heaven’.
Yep, that was the main event that set moi ‘off to see the wizard’ and here’s what I discovered…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m6qC6FCiY0

Stay on groovin’ safari,
Tor

By: Adriano1977

Adriano1977 — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:39:11 +0000

- Discovering Isaac’s Asimov Foundation trilogy in a single book at age 10
- Reading Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum at 11
- Japanese giant robot anime series from the 80s
- A catholic upbringing (yeah, yeah, that is a boring one…)
- Warren Ellis
- You (i.e., Coilhouse)

By: Mer (the second)

Mer (the second) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:06:47 +0000

Today I came across something that made me remember about this entry, it may be a bit old by now, but I see I am not the only one still commenting here ;)

When I was a child, in Spain, a country just coming out of a decades long fascist dictatorship, this kind of stuff was played on national TV, Saturday morning, “children schedule”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2G4rZP-J_s

She says she is a slave of evil, a professional with identity card, toads, adders and dead bugs, etc. Oh, and she has a great frienship with Satan. It was all in great fun, and it did make my generation (77) a bit weird, but perfectly functional (really ;p)

This would of course not be aired nowadays.

By: Peechiz

Peechiz — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:48:37 +0000

-Dad was a total Trekkie
-Being the scrawny, perma-new kid. All the families in the neighborhood had been there for a long time, and I was never big enough to really be athletic. This led to:
- Lots and Lots of fantasty books. Followed by the entire Animorphs series. And:
- Musical Theatre, Choir, and piano lessons in gradeschool made me an artsy kid in a school full of Football players.
- Poetry Slams and Spoken Word (via the internet)
- A college dormitory full of Hippies, Activists, Artists, Stoners, Exchange students, and ones without clearly defined sexual preferences.
- And a year abroad in Japan