Someone says you’re “quirky”–should you consider it a compliment, a badge of honor, or have you been insulted, patronized? I’ve bounced the word and its significance around from various perspectives, from Webster to literature to pop culture to personal experience. In the process it became an essay, “Quirky: Strange but Cool” (as defined by the Urban Dictionary).
Read it here, just published in the eclectic (quirky?) new online Open: Journal of Arts & Letters.
Alice Lowe -- still writing 
Very much enjoyed your quixotic quips on the quintessence of quirky!
(Was the Sarah Ruhl comment from her “100 Essays I Don’t Have TIme to Write”?)
Yes, that’s the source of the Ruhl – in the same essay she takes on “whimsy”: “A male artist following his whims is daring, many, and original. A woman artist following her whims is womanly, capricious, and trivial; her eyelids flutter, her heart palpitates, her eyes wander, and her hands rise and fall in her lap.”