The most common words I hear when someone describes me are:  “weird”, “unique”, “different”.  They may not be my first, second, or third choices, but I embrace them as partially true nonetheless.

I was born with the gift of accepting self-deprecating humor quite graciously…most of the time.  When you do as many ridiculous, ditsy, and embarrassing things as I do learning to laugh at oneself is absolutely imperative to keeping a positive attitude. Miraculously, and mysteriously, I still manage to come off as somewhat clever despite my ungraceful shortcomings .  It’s a gift.  Examples include:  Cutting my lip with a pickle spear, having the serial number of my car manifold branded to my arm, or shutting a locked door that resulted in having to spend the night in the Entomology building with hundreds of gigantic cockroaches scurrying about—all happened.  The spear incident was one of those moments where I had to physically check my lip in the mirror to see if I was capable of wounding myself with a pickle.  I was very capable.  Being branded by my car was a secondary discovery.  I was relaying the story of my car breaking down and how I attempted to grab the starter switch but was burned by the manifold.  As I lifted my arm to display the burn I exclaimed, “Ah, jeezus! You HAVE to be kidding me!?”  Neatly branded on my forearm, in the color of freshly burned skin, “4739″ appeared clearly.  Now, the lab incident:  Initially, I tried picking the lock and gave up quickly in hopes of finding a spare set of keys.   Every janitorial closet door I opened seemed to cast light on numerous scurrying insects, so that plan was also abandoned rather hastily.  Freaked out and paranoid from all the creepy crawlers, I found an “empty” room to bunk in for the night.  I was not laughing at my plight, but my professor/boss got a kick out of the note scrawled on a paper plate (it was all I could find), “Locked myself out.  In a room down the hall somewhere…if you can’t find me, the roaches got me.  Help!”  Not hilarious to me at all, Professor.

I consider myself extremely observant and intuitive enough to catch intricate details, but sometimes the obvious is not so obvious to me.  Finding myself stranded in the middle of a Texas highway left me no other option than to locate the nearest house and call for help.  This was before I had a cell phone and solving the problem was not as easy as calling AAA to deal with it.  A few fields and tons of grasshoppers later found me more or less safe in the home of an elderly couple.  After around six hours of sitting with strangers my friends showed up to rescue me.  Once I had stopped crying, I began to ponder the physical appearance of my host.  I was telling my buddy that the man’s mouth looked funny to me, but I didn’t know why.  She responded, “He had no teeth.”  That made sense.  Teeth are pretty obvious to some, but a lack of teeth did not register on my radar.

Call it a tinge of eccentricity or whatever you would like, but my imagination leads to the development of odd…issues…well, I don’t even know what to call this one.  Something about a winking smiley face icon does not sit well with me.  I want to find one where it looks like the face is not smiling while losing an eye that remarkably reappears every other second.  It freaks me out so much that I refuse to use it.  There are times it would complement a remark perfectly, but I cannot handle the face and must hurry on to my next comment.

My laughter creates laughter.  “Jessica, did you know that when you laugh your nostrils flare?!”  Uh, yeah, ’cause a bazillion people have told me while mimicking the way it looks.  On top of that, I honk.  The noise comes out as something between a seal and goose, but only with unexpected or uncontrolled laughter.  It is rare and a shocker.  People usually have to ask if I’m okay after they utter a, “Whoa!  What was THAT?!”  Gotta love it.

Plucking stray eyebrow hair is very important to me.  It is literally a goosebump-inducing occurrence when I glance in the mirror and see a random dark hair below my eyebrow.  Is it a big deal?  No, but it feels like it is.  My reaction is probably more severe than if I were to discover a huge blemish in the same spot.  Even while typing this I have to leave and run to the bathroom to do a brow spot check…

While in there I thought of something else: my complex of people hearing me go to the bathroom.  At one point it was so bad that I would avoid going to the bathroom at the library if anyone was using the computer kiosk near the restrooms.  I reasoned that they could see me go into the restroom and hear me flush, which was similar enough to being in the restroom with me.  When I relayed this issue to my aunt she delicately conveyed she was worried I was becoming too crazy, which is apparently much worse than when I was previously considered just a little too odd.  I have actually searched my memories to find where this complex originated and narrowed it down to two incidents.  Try being ridiculously sick as a child and too innocent to realize the taboos of using a public restroom with an upset stomach.  Diarrhea does not understand those intricacies either.  From that movie theater bathroom I learned to fear needing (or my body forcing me) to poop in public and that teenage girls are mean enough to sing the “diarrhea song” to a sick little kid.  That lesson was later reinforced by a mean older sister.  I hate that song.

My hair is almost a separate entity, but some refer to is as a “fro”.  Those close enough to know me as “Juicy” refer to my hair as a “Juicy-fro”.  That mop of fine hair, curls, waves, and straight areas may be credited to my Panamanian and German background.  When you mix those two, chaotic black/brown hair is the untamed product you get.  As a little kid, my mother would chase me around with hairspray, forcing me to slick down all the wildness sprouting from my head.  From playing and sweating I would get a crown of curls that looked similar to a cartoon girl, so I called it my “Lulu” hair. On more delicate days I looked like Shirley Temple, but delicate is pretty rare for a tomboy. I’ve always been a bit more Lulu than Shirley anyways.

Now I use a headband and let it do whatever while drying, a style known as my lion’s mane. To escape the upkeep of a high-maintenance coif, I chopped it off.  I’m presently in the tedious process of growing it out because having some length helps tone down the crazy, at least hair-wise.

While this post could be never-ending, I am instead going to close for now with a big idiosyncrasy that always needs an explanation: my use of the word “outing”. It does not mean “date”. Think of it as meaning we will hang out, like at an “outing”. See how that works? People assume that dinner between a male and female, where he buys, is all that entails a date. I don’t date my friends, buddies, or strangers. We eat together, he might pay, but “date” never enters the equation. What if I want to pay for a meal? Does that make it not a date even if there is romantic interest involved? The finances of the whole scenario do not come into play in either of my interpretations.  For me, an “outing” could be considered simply going outside of the house with someone or doing something with someone outside of a routine. A “date” involves me doing that same thing, but both parties look at each other with clearly understood romantic interest. I have been on millions of “outings” but never on a “date”.  I explained the difference to those same eager suitors thinking I am playing hard to get.  I don’t play.  The definition actually sinks in when he realizes that after taking me to dinner a dozen times, he only has a dozen “thanks, man” to show for it.  Am I using the men that take me to dinner?   Shoot, no.  They ask. I answer, “No, I do not want to go on a date, but I do like making friends.”  Would I hang out with you?  Sure, as a friend.  I go on “outings” with girls, because they are platonic, friendly activities meant for having fun and learning more about a person.  If a man can be a respectful, platonic friend with plenty of patience, then he is definitely someone I would like to date, given that there is actually romantic interest on my part (that is part of the definition).  An “outing” is like an audition to find how the dynamic between me and another person will go.  The dynamic could tell me that person would be great in the role of a friend or could be suited for another dynamic, so we investigate that possibility with a “date”.  Some never get a call back for either.