Adopting an Eccentricity

One of today’s questions on the Ask MetaFilter site is:

In my quest to become more distinctive, I’m looking for suggestions of harmless eccentricities to adopt. Who better than the MeFi hive mind to provide them? Anecdotes of eccentric folk you’ve known in the past welcome.

One of the responses mentioned that I always carry my accordion. I think “always” isn’t quite true; “often” is probably more accurate. I was also going to ask what was so eccentric about that when I scrolled down to see another response, which read:

You can’t adopt eccentricities though. The people who have them don’t know they have them and certainly don’t think of them as eccentric. False proposition entirely. Better – ask people what you currently do they think is eccentric and do it more often (though even that somewhat violates the principle).

Scrolling farther down, I found this response:

I know some eccentrics, and they don’t seem to have chosen eccentricity. The interesting ones are people who have gotten passionate about something, like playing the accordion, building wooden canoes, Chaucer, the history of our city and state, etc. Take a few of your interests, and become an expert. Do not share your expertise immediately. No one thinks of me as mysterious, but when they learn some of my past exploits (interesting, but not world- shaking) they are generally more interested/impressed than if I’d started out by announcing them.

I know some other ecentrics who are eccentric on purpose, and get pretty boring. Eccentricity without a foundation in authenticity will be crass, but if it’s based in an authentic passion, it will be intriguing.

It’s an interesting discussion — go check it out!

(If you’re wondering how I got into the accordion thing in the first place, check out the entry Why Accordion?)