Green Library

From there, all you connoisseurs of that tangled and irreverent personality that is Jonathan Lipps should be able to surmise the progression. The just-noted, and highly irrelevant, difference between myself and those around me turned into a matter of equally irrelevant pride. And, since this is the only kind of pride I can really have in the circles I run in, without getting a lecturing-to, I relished it until it grew and took form of its own accord, becoming the odd fact it is (or was, I should say) today.

You see, it made me so damn interesting. Someone I knew (or didn’t know: picture a first conversation with a pretty Stanford girl, perhaps) would be talking about how she “has to go the library to study,” or might be asking me a question about Green, Stanford’s main library. “Do you know where Special Collections is?” let’s say. And I could throw back, in a delightfully offhanded tone, “Oh, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there.” To which there would be the usual shrieks (“Shit! You’re a senior!”), proving that I, the quintessential I’m-not-a-part-of-this-stupid-culture-er, am truly not a part of this stupid culture.

I imagine that this strategy has in some ways backfired, forestalling all the intimate “study” dates I might have had at the library. But I like to think that the newfound respect I accrue after conversations like the above is worth something more in the long run.

Anyway, it’s hard to keep up a tribute of my not-going-to-the-library-ness after I’ve just given up on it (or given in, as it were), but I thought, by way of eulogy, that it behooved me to report it before it grew dim, hidden in the reaches of time. So, here’s goodbye, unimportant habit #2,058!