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Sometimes a mother finds in her midst a handicapped child, one child who is abnormal mentally or physically. Then, a whole new set of baffling difficulties presents themselves, and then fervently she prays and how diligently she searches every avenue to find an answer to that child's problems.
I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar.
I always say I'm one of the most normal abnormal people you'll ever meet. I get embarrassed about how many medals I've won, and I get angry when people presume that because you're gay you've got to wear pink and stilettos and camp it up, or that if you're disabled you should act like a victim and not have a life.
Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments.
I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.
For 20 years I've been screaming at these guitar companies, saying, 'It's abnormal to put your arm around an acoustic guitar that is about 6 to 8 inches deep.' Your arm reaches over, and you start to strum, and then all of a sudden you get a charley horse in your back. The older you get, the greater the charley horse.
This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.
The world will try to make you think that being good is outdated and old-fashioned and that popularity comes from breaking the rules and lowering your standards. Don't buy into that way of thinking. As you watch TV or read magazines, you might be made to feel abnormal when, really, you are the one who has it figured out.
Why did I become a Canadian citizen? Not because I was rejecting being a U.S. citizen. At the time when I became a Canadian citizen, you couldn't be a dual citizen. Now you can. So I had to be one or the other. But the reason I became a Canadian citizen was because it simply seemed so abnormal to me not to be able to vote.
In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.
In those same decades, most UFO sightings were made in the daytime and frequently at close range, when shapes and surface features could be distinguished, thus making positive identification of normal sights easier and the descriptions of unusual sights more detailed. When all normal explanations had been eliminated, the witnesses could concentrate on those aspects of the experience which were most abnormal.
With the Fall all became abnormal. It is not just that the individual is separated from God by his true moral guilt, but each of us is not what God made us to be. Beyond each of us as individuals, human relationships are not what God meant them to be. And beyond that, nature is abnormal - the whole cause-and-effect significant history is now abnormal. To say it another way: there is much in history now which should not be.
When we consider that labor is the producer of all wealth, is it not evident that the impoverishment and, dependence of labor are abnormal conditions resulting from restrictions and usurpations, and that instead of accepting protection, what labor should demand is freedom. That those who advocate any extension of freedom choose to go no further than suits their own special purpose is no reason why freedom itself should be distrusted.
I early learned that there were two natures in me. This caused me a great deal of trouble, till I worked out a philosophy of life and struck a compromise between the flesh and the spirit. Too great an ascendancy of either was to be abnormal, and since normality is almost a fetish of mine, I finally succeeded in balancing both natures. Ordinarily they are at equilibrium; yet as frequently as one is permitted to run rampant, so is the other. I have small regard for an utter brute or for an utter saint.
