The Isle of Marm

Bibliotecadventures #17:  AXE House Library

In the Summer of 2001, I lived on a porch of a fraternity house.  It was a side-porch, so it was low traffic, and the walls were high enough that it was pretty private for what was, technically, outside.  And it was covered, so it was seldom too hot.  I didn’t pay rent, though I was (and still am) a brother (it was a co-ed chemistry fraternity).   I showered at the gym, and I worked 70some hours a week. 

Every once in a while I will have moments of worry that I have not lived a sufficiently lived life, what with my being fairly button-down, strait-laced, and disinclined to the usual shenanigans.  I mean, there has been a lot of school.  And then, usually pretty quickly, I’ll remember: “oh wait, you lived on a porch.”  (Or “oh wait, you arbitrarily undertook 128 days of freetarianism because you thought ‘how often can you do something for 2^7 days?’.” or “oh wait, …[*anecdotal evidence of a penchant for madcap adventures*]” or “oh wait, don’t you remember that “school” for you was not at all bad and you would have Buster Bluth’ed out if there weren’t age limits to early career awards?”)  The pleasure calculus likely works out in my favor.  Even if there’s been a lot of maybe unnecessary stress, too.

I probably would have considered staying in the library, which had, not my favorite chair in the house (the backseat of a van that was in the basement), but probably…a top 3 chair, plus books, plus a computer (this was in my pre-laptop days), plus…a door.  However, the guy I would make my first mix tape for was actually squatting in there that summer.  

I thought about this tape yesterday because I had tried to get the insight of that other ChemE on how well it worked.  I listened to parts of THAT audio-draft this morning and it was TERRIBLE.  And not TERRIBLE like the way I self-check in an attempt to battle with (or at least obscure) my utter narcissism.  TERRIBLE-terrible.  I know what I was thinking, (because it came from a completely logical place,) but AC/DC’s “Big Balls” does not say “hey, I’d really like it if we were making out.“  I mean, it could, but…not in a way that would’ve been unambiguously non-friendly and/or clear to a maybe-23 year old dude.  The tape that actually was tendered wasn’t much better (and only played out of the left-speakers of his van!), but I genuinely thought we wouldn’t see each other ever again.  And I’m bad at that.  And then, a couple years later and a couple thousand miles away, he moved into my house, with me and 2 other chemists—so again not in an unambiguously non-friendly way—which was at times a little terrible, but still pretty awesome.  I’d link to a picture of him wearing 52 items of our 3rd housemate’s clothes (taken by me, who was wearing 42 different items of same), but… nope, no but: 

Bad housemates!  No one else was home.  We folded them all and put them back while listening to Fleetwood Mac.  It took…all of Rumours and then we panicked because we didn’t remember which drawer the socks were supposed to go in.  Oh the panic!  3rdHousemate would have been angrier than he was, years later, when his wife explained to him the deal with my +1 to his wedding, Langdon Alger.  We called her, as she was at that point both my friend and 3’s girlfriend, but she didn’t know.  There are more details, but they are irrelevant to libraries. 3 had a good music library, though.

Mr.MixTape had a good personal library too.  Books!  The focal point is books!
There is a phone book in that picture.  The focus has never been books.
Books are in the picture.  The focus is…life.  Life is weird.

Bibliotecadventures #15: CU: Olin Library

Here’s a thing:
# of libraries important to me mostly because of associated dudes: 
ALL of them.  No, wait, ALL of them but the Kroch Library.  (N.B., I appreciate exactly how ironic and sad that is.  It’s also kind of true, even if it has not been explicitly borne out by this.) 

Because of the imaginary and internal rules about what makes for a legitimate vs. illegitimate library story, some libraries have been pushed to the end.  And it isn’t that I didn’t spend a lot of time in Olin, but it’s weird how the kind of things that would be illegitimate connections can just fog up the works.  I almost married a guy I met one day in the foyer there.  3 hours of unexpected conversation with a stranger and then we went to North Campus.  While the books watched.  Unacceptable.  Although, that incident probably led to an assortment of weird pleasant associations.  A set of conditioned responses to lots of books gathered together.

I can do better than that.  Upstairs in Olin were probably the best stacks of all the stacks at Cornell.  And in the deepest depths of Olin was the aforementioned Kroch library, with its exhibits of Twain-stuffs and winestuff and all sorts of rare books and manuscripts.  Fine.  Established.  But, if you were willing to maybe veer off the beaten path a little in the middle-underground (i.e., underground, but not super deep, which is the kind of distinction that someone who has lots of underground history might make, but is not super necessary), and maybe you went through a couple doors that might’ve borne signage they were for staff only, you could walk to Uris library.  A totally different building.  A separate building.

Here is a truth:  despite all the awkward discomforts that come along with unexpected familiality, there have been few moments that have betrayed how much I want to connect all the dots than that moment of weird ecstatic joy in finding out that there was a tunnel connecting two buildings whose doors were first opened nearly 70 years apart.  Irrational and human.  It was like Clue.   It’s not an obvious thing.  It’s a piece of trivia that came from a little adventure one day.  But it is part of a family of the most pleasant ties.  Like Michael J. Fox.  (The “J” is an homage/affectation! Who knew?!)

Here is another truth:  I’ve spent no fewer than 3 birthdays exploring storm-drains.  It’s not all bookishness and impromptu marathons.  But I recognize my own irrational extremes.  Eventually.  Those connect lots of unexpected things too, sometimes.