Don’t pee in my Kool-Aid and call it gravy!

Did that grab your attention? Good! 

I have recently come to an admittedly half-baked, wolfing-down-too-much-cake-in-one-sitting kind of observation, and here it is: There’s a definite problem with the word normal in the 21^st century. No one seems to like being called normal anymore, and we can thank the hipsters for that. Back in 2001, the nation of Hipsters conquered what used to be a very tame existence, causing society to fall upwards into a chaotic mess of skinny jeans, envirholism, organic food binge eating, and Facebook. God help you if you don’t like craft beer. Or even worse is if you have never heard of some obscure indie band that only performs in the basement arena of what is actually a grocery store during the day time. 

What’s that I hear you say? “Stop ragging on the Hipsters and get to your point”? First of all anonymous reader, who is probably a hipster, know that it’s okay – we live in a post-racial America after all – plus I’m part Hipster part yuppie so I can get away with saying all this!

But I will get to my point. I consider normal in relation to how Gen Xers think of abnormality – i.e. the nerd in high school or homeless man. I’m talkin’ Regan era definition of normal, when the kids on Saved by the Bell were my your idols for cool. But we have, some say thankfully, come to an age where being abnormal is socially acceptable. It is cool to have a manageable psychological disorder like Sir Charlie Sheen – the man is so golden that he’s making money off of other not-normals who pay to see him having afternoon tea on stage. 

*spoiler alert*

Last night, I went to see the new film Hanna starring the creepy blonde girl form Atonement playing yet another satisfyingly creepy role of the title character. Points to the unknown writers of this film for having the guts to write about a teenage girl who can kill a 300 lb. caribou but *clincher* just doesn’t know where to belong in the world. If I had a heart, I would put a sad-face emoticon right here. 

On the walk home from the theatre, my friends and I discussed our frustrations with the movie, and while they made a valid point of Hanna’s story line feeling incomplete because of the lack of information about how she came into the world, I firmly stood my ground in saying: “yo that bitch is straight up crazy”! This girl is an actual psychopath who single-handedly killed over 100 men in the course of the movie, and had no problems doing it too. Was she the product of her upbringing, of circumstances beyond her control that forced to her to become a killing machine? If you came to this analysis, then I applaud you for finally being able to use that Psych degree for something other than serving coffee to strangers (Watch out! Haterpression!)

But was she actually abnormal? Her blood work in the spy DNA test thingy said as much. Or was she the only one normal in a world where everyone else – especially the adults – acted like abnormally with their excessive teeth cleaning and new age hippie lifestyle? What disturbs me most of all is the fact that Hanna seemed normal compared to the dirt bag assassins who were trying to beat the living shit out of this girl – and we in the audience actually liked the fact that this deranged psychopath was killing other psychopaths. Somehow Hanna’s not-normal is more tolerable than the other abnormals in the movie. Kudos, by the way, to my girl Cate Blanchet who is probably the only actress in Hollywood that can pull off Dorothy and the Wicked Witch vibe all at the same, while rocking red hair. Just fierce!

Anyways, that night my friend turned to me and said “Thepurplebanana, you are not normal. I am normal, but you are not.” It took me a while to realize that she was simply stating her observation of my weird and nerdy habits and not really meaning to offend me. So I decided not to give her a taste of the back of me hand. In her eye, I am a weird nerdy hipster who belongs in the left-wing intelligentsia but I thought that she meant that either I was Screech from Saved by the Bell or a psychopathic blonde with mommy issues. Common mistake.

copy right of the purple banana, thaz moi!