Sanity or Insane

What is Sanity?

By Janeal Mulaney


I have asked this question many times over my lifetime, I still do not know the answer. I would tell my children they were driving me crazy. My oldest son would explain that was their job, and if I was not insane by the time they turned eighteen they hadn’t done a good job. The day he turned eighteen, I asked him whether he had done a good job or not. He said not, but then again how can you drive someone crazy when they had reached that destination a decade before he born.

I agreed with him, to everyone out there who has gone through life, avoiding the norm, you maybe considered insane by countless people.

I was one of those people if it was the normal thing to do I did the opposite, while girls were primping to look their best and fit in, I was primping to look totally different. One of my best friends told me I looked like a two-cent hooker, one day. I told her when she stopped raiding my grandmother’s closet I would worry about what she thought. In high school a two-cent hooker would not have been caught dead in the clothes I wore. For I never dressed up, nor did I own a dress. I did however own a pair of waffle stompers or as they are called now (hiking boots), if I had to borrow a dress to wear those were on my feet. My blue jeans were full of holes with patches on some, while others were left to spread open even farther.

My jeans were skin tight, and as I look back I’m sure my style of dress was copied to bring forth for this generation. Teens now pay seventy or eighty bucks for the clothes I wore in the seventies. My patches turned into decals and my embroidery turned into machine stitching. No one actually wears their jeans long enough to make true holes in them on their own, so the factories now make the holes for them. I started putting the names on the butt of my own jeans long before it was considered juicy to wear words across someone’s pants. I would embroidery my name or the name of my latest boyfriend in a heart on one of the pockets of my jeans or just above the seam of my Dittos. For those of you who do not remember or know what Dittos were, they were the name of the first pocket less jeans, they were sold through J. C. Penny’s and they had a moon shaped seam across the butt that ran down both legs of the jeans. My name had six letters in it so I would embroidery the first three up and around one hip and the other three letters going back down the other side.

So was this insanity, or just not old enough to know what a patent was? I cut off tee shirts and wore short jackets before they were popular. My friends thought I was crazy or worse. I smiled all the time, laughed over everything. Did outlandish pranks and said ridicules things that made my friends die from laughing. I never took a second of life seriously. To this day my high school friends and I stay on the phone and I always come up with some story or say something that starts us both cracking up with laughter. Insanity, is a matter of opinion what is insane to some, others call fun. Why be normal when you can be unique?