"You're fly paper for freaks."

My classmate Andrew said that to me after I told him about my latest encounter with a Tennessee resident. It has become a common occurrence for me to have incredibly weird interactions, with equally weird people. I will give you three examples:

1) Back in February, one of my roommates had a friend over who was perming her hair or something. I was in my room doing homework, but went to the kitchen to get some food. This lady was sitting on the couch talking on the phone. Once she got off the phone, she started talking to me. She seemed seminormal at first; until she found out I that am a psych major.... I even told her I/O psych and she was said, "Oh is that kinda like HR?" I said yes. I was surprised she actually knew what I/O psych was so I thought, good I won't have to explain that I am not clinical. Well apparently she disregarded this and proceeded to tell me all about her psychological problems and how she has to see shrinks, and how she doesn't like that all they do is give drugs. I agreed with her on this, I don't think that it is right just to drug people right off the bat without really counseling, but all this did was extend the conversation. My roommate came out about now and distracted her, so I was able to sneak off into my bedroom. Turns out, I'm not so sneaky. Five minutes later there was a knock at my door, and I said to myself "are you kidding me?" so I got up and went to the door and there she was ready to talk some more about her psychological personality disorders. She went on to tell me that she has been diagnosed with bipolar II, but she thinks she might be more of an antisocial or borderline.... and on and on. She described all her symptoms and things she has done in the past, which was WAY too much information to be telling a person she just met. Thankfully, I took an abnormal psych class so I did know what she was talking about and could respond to some of the things she was asking, but I tried to mention that I am not that kind of psychologist, but she didn't really get it or she didn’t care. She obviously just wanted to talk to someone, but did she really have to pick me? Well, after 15 minutes or so she decided she was done talking and said, “Well thanks for talking to me,” and left. It was weird.

2) The next one happened last week. It was Tuesday night and I was going to have to facilitate class discussion the next morning for my Job Analysis class. In order to do this I needed to read the chapter in the book really well and develop questions and such. I had a bunch of other things that I needed to get done before I could start working on this (mostly thesis stuff for the 2^nd and 3^rd topics which turned out not to work out anyway). So I finally started reading the book at about 2 in the morning. Well one of my roommates (a different one than the one in the previous weird person instance) had a friend over that was spending the night on our couch until they took off the next morning. I don’t really know what was all going on with that but I know he was staying the night and they were leaving in the morning. I met him earlier in the night, chit-chatted a bit about grad school and he learned that I don’t have much time to breathe. So anyway I was working on homework all night and I went to the kitchen at about 3 in the morning to get a snack to help me stay awake. He was sleeping on the couch in the living room, but he must have heard me because once I got back to my room it was 15 seconds before there was a knock at my door. He had come to my room earlier in the night looking to borrow a tweezers, so I figured it was something like that again, so I just said, “Come in.” Big mistake. He came in and was like, “Hey what’s going on?” I was like “Uhhhhh I’m doing homework…” Seriously, it had already come up earlier in the night all the stuff that I had to do, and why would I be up at 3 in the morning if I didn’t have to be, especially with class at 8 the next morning. Well he came on in my room and sat on the floor since my room is a sty and there would have been nowhere else for him to sit, but it’s not like I really wanted him to sit anywhere anyway. He tried to make conversation which I was not interested in, all I wanted to do was read the rest of my chapter and go to bed. At one point he saw the cross I have hanging on my wall that I got from Uncle Earl for college graduation and he said, “oh you’re a fan or Jesus?” I said “Yeah,” in a really annoyed voice, and he said, “oh that’s cool,” he said that as if he was ok with the fact that I had some weird disease or something. It seems he just wanted someone to talk to too, and talked for quite a while about his “career” as a kick boxer and how he thought he could be a model if the kick boxing thing didn’t work out… no he couldn’t. Needless to say, this kid made me really not happy and eventually he must have gotten the hint, because he finally left. And that’s when I got up and locked my bedroom door. Basically, what I learned from this experience was that I desperately need to grow a spine and tell people to get away from me!

3) This one happened this past Thursday night after a long day/night in the library. The library was closing and so I was on my way out, still with a list of things that I needed to get done. It was about 11:55 when I left my carrel. As I was going through the doors leaving the library, I heard this guy behind me say something like “It’s a beautiful night out tonight.” I looked and realized he was talking to me and I said, “Sure is.” I kept walking, but he kept talking and said “Yeah I ran 7 miles today.” This guy was in his 60s and overweight, so this kinda caught me off guard. But I just said, “Oh yeah, cool.” And kept walking. Well, he still wasn’t done talking, now he started walking towards me and started talking about how he is training for a half marathon. He asked me if I had ever ran a half marathon and I said no, and he was like, oh really you should. Really buddy you have no idea who I am, and somehow you know me well enough to tell me to run a marathon? Right. Well he went into this big thing about training and how he is some sports guy for MTSU. I honestly couldn’t tell you exactly what he was talking about. He was kinda hard to understand and he spoke a million miles a minute and couldn’t seem to focus on one topic (schizophrenic? maybe). He went on and on about how this one guy thinks weight lifting is pointless for runners and this guy has come up with some way to train without using weights, and the crazy guy talking to me totally disagreed and wanted me to tell this other guy that he is wrong. He told me about a million things that I should google, and one was that guys name, and I am supposed to email him or something to tell him that weight training is good. Oh and then I am supposed to call this crazy guy and tell him how it went (he gave me his number which I “saved” in my phone). So the situation is that I am standing outside the library, its well past midnight now, and this seriously crazy guy is talking to me. I kinda made a move to leave, but he kept following me. So I chose to stay there in the well lit area and not lead him to my car. So that’s why I didn’t just leave. And I didn’t have a chance to excuse myself because this guy seriously did not shut his mouth the second it opened. So I was stuck. Finally, he said, “I will leave you with this…” which he said about 4 or 5 times already, so I didn’t get too excited that I was going to get to leave. But after rambling about something or other for a while he said “Ok well you find (whatever the anti-weight lifting guys name was) and you let me know how it goes.” I said, “Ok.” And then I turned and got outta there. It was about 12:30 when I got to my car. This crazy guy talked to me nonstop for 30 minutes! I wish I could better depict this experience, but there aren’t words to describe it.

I don’t know what it is about me, but the crazy people can’t stay away.