Using the word crazy about someone, is certainly a double-edge sword. I don’t know of any other word that could equally be both offensive and flattering. On the one hand ‘crazy’ is indicative of certain behavioral and social abnormalities. On the other hand, if you’re crazy the question that comes up is: who defines those behavioral and social norms. Unpredictability draws attention and poses questions. Lack of continuity in social behaviors portrays mysteriousness, entertains, and makes one fascinating. These notions are crazy, because conformists passionately find the dynamic nature of such attributes against the security of consensus.

The other day after lunch and an Irish goodbye, she walked away looking pensive. I sat in the car and looked back and it seemed she was walking indecisively -as if she wasn’t sure where she was headed. Then, she pulled a cigarette out of her loud black bag and started smoking. She was looking up every now and then while smoking. She then turned left at the intersection without looking back or sideways. She was only looking up or down. Her steps were telling something that I couldn’t quite put into words. I sat there for a few minutes thinking … I couldn’t even guess what she was thinking, or if she was thinking about anything.

Pearl is a person I know for such long time. I don’t even know what it means to not have her around. She’s one of a few friends who can sit down and talk in length about things like the symbolic character in Oblomov. She claims to read books and articles very quickly by scanning the key words in each page and then making a logical connection between each page and segment of the write-up. We’ve had ups and downs in our friendship mainly because we talk directly and say it the way it is. If there was ever a third person who was listening to our conversation, s/he could conclude that we’re both rude or brash. But that’s not how we feel. To the contrary, we think our straight forward approach to our conversations makes our friendship unique and never-ending.

I should confess that I find crazy people to be fun and interesting. If you’re a normal person, that’s my weakness I guess. My friendship with Pearl entails no dull moment because she is never distracted by quotidian concerns. Every second of her life is laser-focused on something, or another. Yes, she disappears for months and then comes back and drops a bomb on me, but also she continually talks to me about me in the most explicit way.

Crazy friends change your life into a sort of lurid technicolor format. You get good attention and you get bad attention, but you get attention. It’s like you’re in a theatre and the lights go down making you wait for the beginning of the show. I prefer to be in a theatre as oppose to watching a lame black-and-white movie on the couch.