Fucking Weirdo

I just had to spend three hours with a fucking weirdo. I am sure all disciplines have their own version of the weirdos. I am not referring to your average run-of-the-mill weirdo we have all encountered. Forget about the hotel weirdos, door-knocking religious weirdos, and your typical weirdo student. I am referring to the weirdos in your discipline. They comprise about 5% (upon further reflection, make that 10%) of your field. Whatever it is that you do, these weirdos take things into the bizarre realm. They represent a cartoonish version of your field’s worst stereotype. They, without fail, dress bizarrely. They also write things that get published somewhere on the outer fringes of your fields literature universe. They garner some degree of press for their writings because they are outrageous and some science reporter somewhere thinks it will make an interesting story. In graduate school their weirdoness was disguised as creativity, they showed promise and got jobs. They still have those jobs, they do publish and teach after all, but they have morphed into complete weirdos.

One came to visit my department. Weirdo would not leave. I am losing all tolerance for these people. I mean, whatever. Go ahead and spin your bizarro ideas. I am just going to sit here because I know that the fundamental fallacies on which your ideas are based are just wrong. I am happy to entertain different perspectives, but you are just wackadoodle nuts. The funny thing is we share a little something in common. There is no doubt in my mind that you have a website or blog. It is certainly devoted to even more extreme wackadoodle ideas. These ideas are so extreme that they fall well outside of our discipline. No doubt you run this operation anonymously. Shit, me too! Well, not the weirdo wackadoddle stuff, but the anonymous part? Yep. I realized this after 180 minutes, 52 non-committal head nods, 27 “hhhmms” and 15 solid minutes of staring at the carpet. It’s troubling me that we have this in common.