It's A Good Thing I'm Not A Profiler...

The lady slid into the seat in front of us and stared intently at where the speaker would come from.  She looked to be in her mid 40's and had on a rather nice white suit jacket, a pair of those jean/capri things with the wide cuff and those slipper shoes everyone's wearing these day.  She had an olive-ish complexion and a straight, mid-length brown hair.

Well, almost straight.  There was a fist-sized shock of it standing straight up out of the back.  If you were looking down from the top, and her nose was 12 o'clock, it would have been at around 7 o'clock.  And absolutely perpendicular to the rest of her head/hair.

And it made her look crazy.  Not metaphorically crazy.  But not mass murder crazy either.  Just that hint of too-many-cats, government-conspiracy, voices-that-don't-say-to-kill-him-,-maybe-just-trip-him kind of crazy. 

And I couldn't get over it.  She was well-dressed, apparently clean, and for all I know, she just couldn't see the big clump in the mirror.  But something in my mind had her chalked up as absolutely nutty.  When she turned our way, there was a pre-judged whack of "crazy" that I could see in her eyes.

So I scanned the crowd.  What other characteristics make a person look unstable?  And my eyes settled on the guy with the perma-grin.  What the hell *was* he smiling at?  Didn't he realize that the problems of an adult life should be prominent enough that random grinning was not allowed?  I regret that unjustified happiness should count as a sign of skewed perceptions, but frankly, it does.

So.  So far, bed-head and smiley-faces are quick visual cues pointing towards mental instability.

Aw, hell.  My kids must look nuts.