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I can't decide if I'm crazy or eccentric
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I am starting to think Julia Sugarbaker was right. This is the South, and we don't ask if you've got crazy folks in your family, we ask which side are they on.

We know her answer was the same as mine - "Both."

I am trying to define ‘crazy.'

I am not referring to people who have a medical diagnosis of some kind either; I am talking about those folks that are just, well, crazy.

They think the world and all the planets in the universe revolve around them.

It's the obnoxious ones, the rude ones, the ones we all run from when we see them in the grocery store.

I know one so dreadful, my husband earned some extra brownie points by texting me to say "cray cray on aisle 4 - run!" I have never got out of a grocery store so fast in my life.

He got to ride his bike that weekend with no fussing at all from me.

I was talking about this epidemic of crazy just the other day when it was brought to my attention, I may be crazy too.

"You hate to go outside the city limits!" my friend Katie said.

True. I do.

"You don't think you aren't a little bit crazy?" she asked.

"I know I am crazy," I said. "I'm just aware of my craziness and that's part of why I try to keep my crazy contained."

And I like to think that my version of crazy is really considered to be more along the lines of eccentricities.

But then I am reminded of a quote that crazy's what you call average, every day folks and eccentric is reserved for folks who have old money.

So maybe I need to embrace crazy and just get down and dirty with it.

I guess I could qualify as crazy. But not your garden variety crazy, I want to do something really unique, like collect pieces of lint or maybe only eat one color of M&Ms. I do hide chocolate, does that help make me uniquely crazy?

I wish I could come up with something that strikes me as more one of a kind. I don't want to be a normal run of the mill crazy. That would just be disappointing.

What if, after it was all said and done, I was really more normal than I thought?

This thought worried me.

Lamar seemed to think I had nothing to worry about. I think Cole was certain too, but he just patted me on the arm and gave me an "Oh, sweet girl," before he ran off to play.

I asked Mama if she thought my eccentricities were not quantitative enough to warrant me being deemed crazy.

Mama told me she thought in a lot of ways, I was kind of normal.

She quickly added that, I had nothing to worry about; I had plenty of crazy running through my veins that would eventually take precedence.

"You sure?" I asked her. I was starting to think I was not living up to my heritage as a southerner.

"Oh yes," she said. "Look at your family - we feed stray opossums, your grandmother keeps a shotgun under her bed -"

"Granny still keeps a gun under her bed?"

Mama ignored my question.

"Don't worry about the definition so much; you are the type of person who would get a pet pig and ride it around in a convertible like Suzanne Sugarbaker did. You did used to take that evil beagle to the drive thru at the Chick-fil-A, after all."

True, I did. Pepper used to bark her order into the machine and would get a chicken filet and a dog biscuit at the window.

".., and I don't even want to know what you think about me that qualifies as crazy."

"Well, you did once eat a vending machine hot dog," I said. It landed her in the hospital with food poisoning, too. I tried to limit my vending machine choices to 3 Musketeers and bags of Lays.

"Twice, I ate vending machine hot dogs twice; they were good, too."

"I can't believe you would think that. Who eats a hot dog out of a vending machine?" I questioned. Then it dawned on me. My own Mama would. She did. Twice.

"Kitten, I don't think you have anything to worry about. I think you are safe."

I may not be completely crazy yet, but I think I am close.