About 150 miles south and a tad east of Normal, Illinois, sits the village of Oblong.

I know this because once upon a time, I wrote for a newspaper in Decatur, Illinois, which was a little closer to Normal than Oblong. One day, the society page of our newspaper carried this headline: “Normal man marries Oblong woman.”

For most of us, driving through that town in Central Illinois is the only time we could be accused of being anywhere near normal. We may be oblong, but we just aren’t normal.

When I was very young, normal was wearing a plain white T-shirt beneath one’s regular, button-down shirt.

By the time I hit my teens, underwear had become outerwear, and outerwear turned us into walking billboards, advertisements and campaign posters. This now is normal.

One T-shirt I read proclaims, “Someone just called me normal. I have never been so insulted in my life.”

All my knowledge used to come from the backs of cereal boxes at breakfast. This allowed me to sleep during school.

Doctors eventually made me stop eating Cap’n Crunch and Cocoa Puffs so that my medical test numbers would return to normal.

Now I read T-shirts. T-shirts have less effect on my health — unless I take too long reading one.

Staring at someone’s chest not only isn’t considered normal, it can be downright dangerous.

Another T-shirt I read, quickly, proclaimed, “I tried to act normal once. It was the worst five minutes of my life.”

A more paranoid T-shirt worried, “What’s this thing you call ‘normal’? Is it contagious? Don’t touch me! I might catch ‘normal.'”

Good question. What exactly is normal? Why do we chase it instead of the much more comfortable and common condition of abnormal?

“The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well,” Alfred Adler said.

But I believe that normal is just plain weird.

According to the great philosopher Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe, “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all so you can afford to live in it.”

Or as the great philosopher Whoopi Goldberg succinctly stated it, “Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine.”

Teachers encouraged me to excel: “Don’t settle for normal. Push the limits. Test the boundaries. Fly.”

Then they turned me loose in a society that demands conforming to the average.

At one of the newspapers where I served time — never mind which one — a co-worker coined our unofficial motto: “We strive for adequacy.”

The joke was that it isn’t normal for anyone to tell you that you did well. Which is why Tom said, “That’s a completely adequate job.”

It was a warning. Once you’ve achieved adequacy, it’ll be expected of you all the time. And nobody wants that, especially you.

Dad would sometimes shake his head at me, and ask Mom, “Why can’t that boy act like a normal human being?”

Not only is normal no fun, it takes too much work.

The great philosopher Albert Camus observed, “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

The great philosopher Jodie Foster claimed that “Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from.”

Or as fellow philosopher Johnny Depp put it, “I was always fascinated by people who are considered completely normal, because I find them the weirdest of all.”

Another T-shirt that I saw–or was it the back of a cereal box?–proclaims, “When I said I was normal, I may have exaggerated slightly.”

I wish you anything but adequate normality. It’s not normal.

Normally, you can reach Burt at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.