The Weirdo...

Everyone has at least one acquaintance that they would always describe as… weird. They usually serve as a source of amusement, sometimes they are just plain embarrassing to have around… and very, very rarely do they actually serve any practical purpose.

This incident is about someone just like that.

Now guys, since I don’t have a huge death wish… at the moment, at any rate… and because I certainly would not like to be clobbered by anyone for ridiculing them on a public forum, I have decided to call the main character here… Mr. W… (Mr. X would have been way cooler than he deserved and W stands for ‘weird’… so an obvious choice I guess…).

I first met W when I shifted to a new school. Being the only child of parents with transferable jobs, this was hardly a new occurrence for me. Everywhere I was met with the same mixture of cool jocks, dorky geeks… and the average middle benchers, not too bright not too lame… just about normal. I usually felt right at home among the last bunch, and this time was no exception.

However… nowhere in my already vast experiences with a huge number and variety of people my age, could I recollect meeting someone even remotely identifiable with W.

At first glance he struck me as pretty ordinary and unremarkable…. Bespectacled and bearing a huge backload of textbooks, he came across as either a intellectually stunted hard-worker… or at best a docile class topper that took it upon himself to do what all parents send their students to school to do… viz. study….

For the record, no students… ever do this as their chief priority…. You should know this yourself if you have been to any ‘educational institution’ and engaged in the ground shaking, all consuming, stupendously important discussions of movies, video games and sportspersons that take up all our energies and enthusiasms.

W tried to consistently be everywhere, and do everything… consequently he sucked at everything… always.

He tried to compete with the ‘near hundred percentile’ group of students in class, and the ‘near six foot’ giants on the field.

Needless to say he got trumped in both the battlegrounds and landed at the bottom of every chart.

Don’t get me wrong dear reader… I am utterly supportive of ambition. Only I also feel there should be a small portion of an individual’s brain devoted to higher functions such as, ‘being realistic’, ‘not dreaming’ and more importantly ‘avoiding sheer dumbness’.

W always confused perseverance with pig-headedness and was the only truly stable under performer everywhere he went.

They (that is to say, all the people… the ‘everybody’ group… the persons that always says the important anecdotes to life… the unknown shadowy figures that no one has ever actually met… but everyone knows of… well you know ‘they’…) say everyone has some hidden talent. That ‘everyone’ is ‘good’ at ‘something’, (an amazingly ‘helpful’ statement!)… And that ‘we’ need to ‘just’ ‘discover’ what our calling is.

W had certainly taken their advice and searched really hard to find his. He had tried his hand at music, at speaking, at writing, at art… even in the field of ‘bluffing’… but everywhere he had failed… with distinction… if that was any consolation.

He had found no talent of his… not unless you count being a constant cause of hysterical laughter to others.

Anyway this story is about the day all that changed… well nearly.

It was the day of our senior socials… a blessing for an all boys school where frustration levels can reach unbelievable peaks… especially in the middle of February….

Everyone dressed up for the event… in an attempt to appear presentable to the fairer sex. The only noticeable effect was that, there was far less ‘arse’ hanging out of our trousers than usual… definitely something to be applauded for.

W reliably got us all real loose, by breaking the tension right before we were set to start…. He turned up dressed in what can be best compared to a giant tropical bird… except in the area of cuteness. He was dressed in a red blazer, blue trousers, a yellow shirt and an orange tie…!

After the laughter had died away… somewhat… he was led away by kind people (still with tears in their eyes) to dress him up in a marginally better way….

Soon we were under way. Most of us needed a few drinks (strictly under the table stuff of course…) inside us in order to ask someone onto the floor, so we were busy… um… growing gonads.

W, distressed by his fashion fiasco, was determined to drown his sorrows…. Thankfully he was now dressed in someone’s spare black shirt and formal black pants. We decided to leave him alone and concentrated on things of greater importance… like calling dibs…. Oh! C’mon! As if you’ve never been a teenager!

Finally when we had all acquired our targets, and being thoroughly stocked up on ammunition, were about to begin deployment… we noticed something unimaginable.

W had staggered across the hall; right up to the hottest girl present (incidentally not one of us had been mad enough to even think of asking her…) and said… “Hi, I’m W. Would you like to dance?”

In the quite lull between the music, the words carried to all of our ears making our jaws drop, our eyebrows vanish into our hairline and our thoughts explode!

We all knew what the answer was to be… no one turned down anyone at these gatherings… (Except in the rarest of the rare cases…) and so W… W of all people would spend the best evening among us all… after turning up impersonating a peacock!

Of course… she agreed to the drunk bastard… she said that she’d love to (very sweetly… I might add)… and got up.

The silence ensued, and in retrospect I am very glad it did… since it caused me to be privy to the following dialogue….

W: What’s your name, by the way?

Hot Girl: It’s X. Nice to meet you.
(I just had to use 'X' someplace...)

W: Very nice to meet you too.

Hot Girl X: Nice shirt… I love the color black.

W: Oh thanks. It isn’t mine. One of my friends lent it to me after they made me change out of my red blazer, blue trousers, yellow shirt and orange tie….

Hot Girl X: Haha. Good one.

W: That wasn’t a joke! I think that colors are good… why would anyone come to a happy gathering in monochrome?

Hot Girl X: Oh! Why indeed…. Um… hey could you excuse me for a second? Er… I think I just saw my friend….

The last few words were delivered at a run….

W had done it… or failed to do it… yet again!

With our faith in the universe restored, our feelings of the world being unfair temporarily stalled and the ice of the event broken… the rest of us proceeded to all have a pleasant evening.

W drank a lot and eventually passed out… I hope that in his dreams he had as good a time as the rest of us.

Good old W… I wonder how he’d react if I gave him a call and asked him to check out my blog….