I’m reading this great book called, “Rules of Thumb”. It contains 73 short pieces from successful writers on habits they’ve developed that help them write. At the end of each piece there is some blurb about the author. When I read that one grew up in a town called Normal, Illinois, I closed the book and stared into the middle distance, pondering a life living in Normal.

Does everybody leaving Normal to move elsewhere have to endure endless hilarious jokes on their lack of normalness? It does make you wonder why a group of people, back in the eighteen hundreds, would have saddled themselves and their future generations with such a name.

But would it be any better to grow up in a town called Unique? Oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about.