When You Aren't Normal...

Everyone has something about them that makes them abnormal. Especially when certain aspects of normal are relative. As I've been discovering over the course of this job is that I've had a fair number of these abnormal happenings.

Take this example:

During training, one night the sixteen of us were eating in the common room with the Japanese only TV on. I don't remember how it came up--maybe the show was medical--but I said something about the "sclera". I had fifteen people whip around and stare, and ask what I was talking about. Clarified "the whites of the eye".

This confused me a bit. I asked if they ever heard the word before, and the defense was "we didn't study biology".

Now, if I left it at that this would've stayed more towards normal. But... I hadn't learned that from college biology. So, my confused reply: "But you were in second grade? Didn't you learn the parts of the eye when you did your sheep eye dissection?"

I learned that night that dissecting sheep eyes was not a standard part of second grade curriculum.

Another example happened recently during a counseling session:

I was speaking with a client, and he kept going off on tangents about a variety of things. One topic was finger prints, and how when we were kids that was the key evidence to a detective story, but now detective stories all have how the finger prints were faked. So my comment that started a train wreck, "Finger prints can change too. I got my finger cut open here by a hole puncher, so the print is a little different than before."

Now, my scar on that finger is almost impossible to see after twenty years. The scar on the finger I got from doing a knife defense with my friend (who was an assistant Krav Maga teacher at the time) is a different story. He asked how I got that one. Well... "I was doing a knife defense with my friend. She was an assistant Krav Maga instructor." What's that? "An Israeli fighting system." A real knife? "...Yes." Kitchen knife? "...No." She stabbed you with a knife?! "No... I was trying to stab her... and she defended... and there is no way to make this sound good or normal."

He commented that he liked asking me questions, because it was like hearing something from a movie every time.

The very last example I have comes from another client:

Part of my job is conversation, so lots and lots of small-talk. Which I hate. Well, I asked him if he had hobbies as a kid. He told me shogi. He mimicked my question. And without thinking "I used to sell Pokémon cards to my classmates."

After a few seconds of silence with him staring like I had six eyes, "That's not a hobby. That's a business." Then he laughed.

Those are the three examples that pop into my mind when I think about how something that to me was just a part of my life is seen as strange and somewhat fascinating to other people.