“It’s okay! We can just glue it back in.” Lisa, my mom, pauses to stare in bewilderment, rolls her eyes, and heaves a sigh of utter. exasperation. This is what we call a “Lisa-ism” in my house.

After having broken his tooth, my dad Mark, is going to have to go to the dentist.

Sorry Dad, I think you would have been fine if you just glued it back together. But this time we’re going to have go the conventional route.

Welcome to a (not so) perfect example of how my family chooses (or wants to choose) to take the unconventional, though maybe-not-all-that-smart-at-times, route in life. Most of the time.

Let me paint you a picture. A mental picture.

My older, older brother Charlie likes to do strange things with his facial hair (e.g. handlebar moustache, muttonchops) to the amusement (horror) of his girlfriend. My older brother Cedric likes to live on mountains. For months at a time. With no contact to the outside world besides a letter-carrying donkey that visits every Tuesday.

My mom, whom you previously met, not-so-secretly reigns over the Hierarchy of Strange that is my family. And my dad, well, as you can tell, is a weirdo.

And then there is me. The one with the hair. There was Sabbath black, fire truck red (don’t forget the candy-apple red), huckleberry blue, a “skunky” Mohawk, and the ever-so-awesome liberty (confused unicorn) spikes.

Sometimes the buildup of bizarre is just so much that we can’t help but laugh about it.

In a sense, I guess I’m a culmination of my family’s weirdness, with an extra dash of my personal brand of oddity. This oddity manifests itself most clearly through my hair, but has been a running theme through my life thus far.

When I was in seventh grade, I broke my ankle, which led to a decision. This decision is a place where my familial lack of conventionality prevailed. Instead of going through with surgery to fix the tissue around the broken bone, I decided to try acupuncture.

And it helped.

But four  years after the fact, I am still dealing with the repercussions of my broken ankle, which led to my study in the art of yoga. More precisely, yoga in a room heated to 105 degrees. It’s called Bikram yoga.

While the safety, and helpfulness, of yoga under extreme heat have been debated, the sheer amounts of personal testimonies of recovery from some injury or another are staggering.

Sorry science, you lost this time in my book.  

The moral of my strange story: The lessons that I’ve learned in living through all of the weird is one of open-mindedness. I have learned to appreciate the fact that I have choices and options open to me. I know now that sometimes the less traveled road is the better road.

These unusual traits that I have grown up with allow me to be open-minded. Made me recognize that there are all kinds of experiences beyond the norm. There are always more ways than the conventional way. I have come to recognize that sometimes being conventional means being limited.

And sometimes, you just have to take the unconventional route.