--Nora Ephron

Before moving on to today's rerun, I suppose I ought to catch you up on my life. So, my grades for the semester are in, and they are as follows:

Philosophy 101: Intro to Philosophy: Withdrawn

Okay, you guys knew that.

I think you knew that, also, but it's nice to get the official word on it. I'm still a bit surprised about this, but happy.

Well, it's better than I'd feared it might be. My 4.0 in my major has now officially bitten the dust, but, on the whole, I can live with this.

Damn.

Which is not to say that it isn't more than I deserve. It's the fact that I really didn't deserve more that upsets me...

The main problem with this essay is that it's really two different essays, which never quite come together as a unified whole. But it still has some halfway interesting stuff in it, which I figured y'all might find of interest. (Except for the very few of you who have already seen all of this stuff, and are doubtless waiting for me to write something new already. Sorry about that.)

As an aside, I wrote a few other, really good, essays for this class, which I have no intention of posting here, for various reasons. But if you want copies, just ask.

I think most writers are at least vaguely aware of this. To an extent, it's enabled me to revel in my eccentricities, despite the well-meaning criticisms of occasional outsiders. This fact is also acknowledged by those who employ writers. My father, a computer programmer, used to work for Chase Manhattan Bank, in the Corporate Communications department. I saw his office once, just after I graduated high school. It was very interesting. On the door was a sign reading "If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, this office must be a superhighway!" More signs hung all over the walls, along with a dart board. A few humorous coffee mugs and other miscellaneous doo-dads completed the picture. He told me that in just about any other area of the building, he'd never be able to get away with decorating his room like that. On every other floor, there were official rules about what could and couldn't adorn an office. But his floor had all the writers. And the bank knew that writers are crazy. If you don't let them manipulate their environment their way, their writing will suffer.

Another friend explained it like this (after an incident in which a study partner of mine ripped me apart for not being "dignified" enough): The more creative a person is, the more different his thinking is going to be from that of a "normal" person. (Indeed, creativity itself may be nothing other than a different way of thinking, enabling one to come up with ideas that others haven't had. If everyone were creative thinkers, and only a handful were "normal" thinkers, the normal ones might well be considered creative... but that's a side-point, and one which I'm not certain of.) If someone's thought processes are different, it's absurd to expect him to act like everybody else, as the way one acts is a direct outgrowth of the way one thinks.

However... there is a difference between somebody who is creative, and somebody who is downright insane. There may be a fine line between the two, but it's an important one. I found out about this firsthand about two years ago, when I was studying in Israel, and my roommate turned out to be paranoid-delusional.

Well, actually, that's not true. People just kept taking advantage of my poor roommate, and it's really sad. Would you believe, I was stealing his life-force, his ambition, and his mental abilities? That I caused his feet to hurt (by wearing worn-out shoes), his head to become numb (by getting a hair cut), and his back to freeze up (God only knows how)? That I caused him urinary problems, by keeping a bottle of water near my bed? That, when I entered the room, he could see spirits hovering over my shoulders?

Actually, I couldn't believe it either. But that's a partial listing of what he claimed I was doing. Furthermore, I wasn't the first one to take advantage of him in such a manner; it seemed as if everywhere he went, somebody did this to him. Perhaps we were all conspiring against him; I don't really know. To make a long story short, he threatened to attack me physically if I didn't cease and desist, I moved out, then the landlord evicted him, and I moved back in. He then tracked me down and shadowed me for a bit, but that's another story.

What was interesting was that during the final showdown, as he was explaining that, no, he didn't know what I could do to stop my actions against him, but, as I was the one doing it, obviously, I'd know how to cut it out, one thought was uppermost in my mind. Wow, it went, this is going to be great source material when I write my novel! (Granted, immediately below that thought, I was concerned with keeping an eye on my escape route, and on the bread knife a few inches from my hand... just in case.)

The fact is, up until a few days before the final confrontation, I really wasn't certain whether this guy was crazy, or just very eccentric. And I certainly wasn't going to cast the first stone, not exactly being normal myself. But I couldn't figure him out. Most of the time, he seemed reserved, a bit "out of it," and not incredibly bright... but he occasionally showed flashes of outright brilliance in manipulating the language, taking common phrases and tweaking them here and there in a way which seemed too skilled to be completely consistent with whatever else I knew about him, even if I could never quite tell what he was getting at. I occasionally wondered whether the rest of his personality was a facade, and he was trying to drive me crazy... It turns out that he was in a universe of his own. I still find it interesting that it seemed to have helped his language ability. That, once again, suggests that the ability to play with the language is related to madness... although we writers are able to keep it under control.

There's an epilogue to this story. All of this took place at the beginning of the month-long spring break between semesters, during which time most of my friends went back to America for Passover. When they returned, I told one of them, Daniel, about what had happened. He pointed out that, out of hundreds of American students he knew of, I was the only one he was aware of who'd ended up with a roommate like this. "You know why this happened to you?" he said.

"No, why?" I replied.

"Because you're a writer. Crazy things always happen to writers!" He went on to talk about some other friends of his, also writers, who attracted crazy situations like a freshly-washed car attracts pigeon poop.

I've wondered about this ever since. Do writers really attract crazy situations -- or, to turn it inside out, are writers really attracted to crazy situations -- or do crazy situations occur to everybody in roughly equal measure, but we're just the only ones who tell other people about them? I suspect it's a mixture of both, but it's hard to be sure. Either way, one thing is certain... writers and artists may not be crazy, but we're not completely in the "real world" either.