The Eccentricity of Idiosyncrasies
The British tend to be far more accepting of the eccentricities of our family members and friends. I’m fully aware that most of my friends consider me to have certain characteristic peculiarities. (Which could be why my given name rhymes with “peculiar” — well, if you have an English accent anyway.) Indeed, I revel in my eccentricities. They have grown with me, developing through triumph and tragedy, and I don’t doubt they will continue to multiply as I ungraciously grow older. I also enjoy to a great extent the idiosyncrasies of my friends. I *like* “weird” people. I believe I have an unusually generous view of “normality”. I’d be quite hard-pressed to nominate any one of my friends as the poster child for mental health; regardless of whether they have a genuine mental illness or merely the fragrance of odd character. Simply put, most of my friends, in one way or another, is cooking on another planet. My friends are also mostly very intelligent people although their intelligence may be concentrated in one or two areas. Some of them are very spiritual; some still hold to quaint notions of religion; some don’t care either way.
I have several quite wealthy friends, which is a little ironic considering my own financially-challenged status. But, I digress. One of these friends, a lovely man who I truly adore, is what you might euphemistically call “very financially stable”. He is also one of the most anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive people I have ever met. I love it. He can reconcile his finances to the EXACT penny. And does so. Daily. He knows exactly what he is worth at any given time. He knows exactly how much paper money is in his pocket. He is very generous in spending his money. As with my other wealthy friends, I never ask him for anything, I don’t need to, he just gives of his own volition. The particular eccentricity I want to mention here is this man’s absolute hatred of loose change. It’s almost a phobia to him to be cursed with the presence of coins. He will quite literally go out of his way to rid himself of coins at the first possible moment. One time, he found two pennies and he took them to the bank and deposited them. Two pennies. I demanded (and received) his deposit receipt for my scrapbook. At various times I have been guilty (as have others) of hiding random loose change around his house, in his luggage, etc. Each time he finds the coins he turns apoplectic and seeks to divest himself of the dreaded loose change at the earliest opportunity. Since he likes to pay for everything with a credit card, he has devised a method whereby he simply takes whatever loose change he has been cursed with and deducts that amount from his credit card total, leaving the coins to complete the payment. Quite clever … and so beautifully eccentric. He, of course, also revels in his own eccentricities.
Yesterday was my birthday. The aforementioned friend had discovered a dime that I had recently secreted amongst his things. He informed me that he had used the dime when buying my birthday gift. So now I get to tell everyone that he “bought my birthday gift for 10-cents cash”.
Current mood: bemused