Note to self: If you’re going to be a total creep, you need to start wearing more muted colours.

Maybe try to blend in more. Maybe do your best to be as forgettable as possible. Because you don’t want to stick out in someone’s mind enough for them to remember you and turn your awkward encounter into a hilarious tale. If you’re rocking the neutral look – and I’m not talking about beige explicitly, but more a beige vibe – then you might be easily forgotten in the avalanche of other people they met that day.

This is a strategy I wish I had thought up before I went to get books signed at a writers festival.

Because I was foolish enough to think that, because I’m a seasoned journo who has met important people before, I wouldn’t turn into a giant creep when meeting an author.

So it didn’t occur to me that I would be a creep, and therefore didn’t compensate for that by wearing smart casual jeans, rocking a white top and sporting a normal haircut.

It’s only now, sitting in the safety of my lounge room, that I remembered my seasoned journalism career has only spanned five salty years. I also recall now that most of my encounters with important people were peppered with more cringe moments than my avo toast is peppered with literal pepper (and that’s a shitload of pepper, mind you).

So of course this things got weird this morning.

And I wore an over-sized statement yellow jacket with a bold pattern that features the confusing repetition of the number 83. Which is not exactly blending in. If the somewhat repulsive mustardy yellow shade didn’t stick out in anyone’s mind, the riddle as to why I deemed 83 such a significant number that I needed to pay homage to it through fashion surely would.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I kind of pounced on an author whose book I impulse bought after her signing session finished. I saw her walking around afterwards and ran at her with what I can only imagine was the intensity of that guy in the ad for Get Out (I don’t know his name or back story because I’m too much of a chicken to watch horror movies). I can’t recall the exact details of the now blurred conversation, but I reckon I could clock the physically cringing I did afterwards as an ab workout, so it’s fair to say it was so bad my subconscious did me a solid and immediately repressed it so I would never have to think of it again.

In fact, the whole signing line up thing is very uncomfortable. I thought I would need to have seven redheaded children before I would identify with Mrs Weasley, but it turns out all it took was for me to be confronted with the author of Looking for Albrandi (not that I’m saying Melina Marchetta is like Gildory Lockheart in anyway).

Yeah good.

Despite having an actual fucking communications degree, it turns out that I’m pretty rubbish at it. I mean, I read the literal textbook for interpersonal communication. From memory, I even received fairly decent grades for that course. I should not be this bad at it.

Sometimes I think my desire to be “quirky” or need to create uncomfortable moments to turn into humorous anecdotes for column material subconsciously forces me to stumble through social interactions. Then other times I’m certain I’m just a blabbering idiot who doesn’t know how to do the talking properly. Either option asserts the assumption that I am simply just not normal.

But what even is normal anyway?

Normal isn’t really a finite thing. It’s a concept. A mathematical one. It would be more apt to use the words “average” or “mode” instead of normal, I reckon. Because when we’re saying normal, we’re more describing something that is most common.

It’s simple statistics.

Say you’ve got a group of six people. Four of them have blue eyes, one has green and another has brown. Three of these people have brown hair, one is blonde and two are redheads. Five of these people have dogs, one has a cat. Three are really good at maths, two are average at maths and one failed maths. Four love milk, while two hate milk. Five of them are Linkin Park fans, one is not. Four are girls, two are boys. There are endless other factors I could write out, but I don’t have the brain power on this Sunday afternoon (hence why “loves milk” and Linkin Park were included as traits in this example).

If you were to describe the “normal” (AKA average) person from this group, they would be a blue-eyed, brown-haired, dog owning, maths class nailing, milk-loving, Linkin Park fangirl.

That would be a true representation of this group, based on the data. If you’re a member of this group, it would be “normal” for you to love Linkin Park. According to the statistics, it would be unusual for you not to like this pop fusion of rap and hardcore music.

But while this is statistically correct, in actual fact, not one person in this group falls into the majority for every single category. They may have brown hair and blue eyes, but they also hate milk and are shit at maths. They may love milk and be a whiz with numbers, but they’re a green-eyed ranga. They may tick all the boxes except the box about having a box (because they are a boy).

So while the representation of the group may be statistically true, there is no actual blue-eyed, brown-haired, dog owning, maths class nailing, milk-loving, Linkin Park fangirl.

The “normal” person for this group doesn’t actually exist.

And when you upscale this example and apply it to the world’s population and factor in the millions of other traits about people that can exist (whether they’re a Seventh Heaven fan, whether they’re nail polish wearers, whether they knew their grandfather, whether they like capers, whether they have irritable bowel syndrome, whether they have vomited on a bus… the list is pretty much endless), you’d probably again find a “normal” person doesn’t exist.

You could look at each of these specific these traits and definitively state which were the most common, but there are so many millions of different combinations of these traits that it would be bloody hard to find one person who ticked every last box of the statistical average human. You know?

Like even if you found five people who all happened to have each individual factors line up with the representational average, there are how ever many billions of other people on earth who aren’t like these people.

Therefore, it’s unusual to be the average. It’s not normal to be normal.

This is all a very pretentious, long-winded way of assaying “normal” isn’t actually a thing.

It’s a myth.

So I feel that I don’t need to worry about being normal.

But maybe I should tone down the retina-burning colours and ironic op shop buys, just in case.