averageness.

Like many other people I know, and many many others that I don't know, I love MLIA.  For those of you not familiar with the acronym, MLIA stands for My Life Is Average.  If you were to go on the MLIA website and check out the very first pages, you would see that it was all about average things, such as "today, I ate a banana", or "yesterday, my car broke down, so I had to take the bus to work".  As you explore farther, however, the posts get progressively wackier.  I am a self-confessed MLIA addict, and whenever I come across a particularly good one, I save it to a document I have for just this purpose.

For example.

"The other day in chemistry, my teacher was doing an experiment with alcohol, showing us how it expands faster than water.  He did this with a blowtorch.  My teacher is now missing his eyebrows, there are burn marks on the ceiling, and we're never allowed to do the experiment again.  It was still totally worth it.  MLIA."

As the site has progressed, MLIA seems to me to have become less "average" and more "awesome".  Not that I complain, far from it.  I commend all these random acts of awesomeness.  I don't have thumb wars with Megatron and Optimus Prime bandaids, but I have managed to get lost in 9 countries to date.  9 countries, and in Thailand I think I averaged out at getting lost about four times a day.

In the city I lived in.

For a year.

I don't have "that's what she said" moments, but I dance randomly and I've been known to sing, loudly and badly, in the shower.  I encourage difference, I commend randomness, I applaud the obscure.

Life isn't average, people.  Life isn't using the map that somebody hands you.  Life is throwing the map aside, closing your eyes, and spinning in a circle to choose which way you'll go next.  Life isn't a schedule that you keep to, with this one day and that the next.  No, life is making no plans at all and just going with it.

I see averageness as an insult to human nature.  People aren't average, they just do average things, and I can't think of a whole lot that's worse than feeling content with averageness.  I always feel this need to BE so much more than average, I always feel the need to be somebody so much more than just normal.

No, my life is not "average".  It's so much more.