Eccentricity pays off!

Hooray for results! And this time my affinity for eccentric behavior did not land me in pizza or in a light pole!

Anyway. I was walking back to the dorm, taking a shortcut between two buildings. The shortcut constituted a paved walkway, with a kind of strip of grass to the right and raised about a foot from the pavement. Because I feel like illustrating this with my amazing ASCII skills:

          _ ,,,,,,,
         | |#######    [cross section]
_________| |#######

# = dirt
, = grass

_
| | = concrete curb thing
| |

_ = pavement

Right. Now I can get on with my story.

So because I am, as we all know, cultivating a wide range of eccentricities in order to provide for a robust and varied future, I decided to hop up on the curb thing separating pavement from grass and walk on that (I assume all of my readers have experienced this at some point). The eccentricity was turned up to a maximum in that I also wore my most severe thoughtful countenance, going for the classic “absentminded professor who somehow conveys himself across campus by navigating a series of cerebellum-taunting obstacles, despite the fact that he is paying no attention to where he is going” type of look that has been popularized in a wide variety of cartoons, etc.

That was a lot of important-sounding words! Wow. XD

IN ANY CASE. While I was doing this, I noticed somebody walking toward me. She was one of those old ladies that everyone wishes their grandma was like…something about the way she carried herself suggested that she had seen it all, done it all, learned the requisite life lessons, and had now retired to baking cookies and telling her grandchildren stories of her grand adventures.

I think I’m in a poetic mood today. Odd.

RIGHT. When I glanced at her as she passed she was looking at me with…something between amusement and delight, which caught me off guard because I would have expected something like “You hooligans and your PCPs…making you do crazy things…like…zzz…” but instead this random person who I had never seen before saw STRAIGHT THROUGH ME and was thoroughly amused by my antics. I made her day, and that made my day, and then I went on to making my mom’s day by telling her I’d be coming home for the weekend. Yay!

I get the feeling that she was having a “that reminds me of me” moment, because after all it takes an absentminded eccentric to know an absentminded eccentric from a creepy sociopath.

I was also amused to think of a scenario in which I could have instead disturbed and offended her (and pretty much anyone else who happened to look that way >.>): rather than just imagining me walking on the curb, dear readers, picture this:

You are walking along to your car from the most recent lecture you gave (because you are a professor. Stay with me.) when, from the direction of the parking lot, you hear what could only be interpreted as a war cry. Assuming that this is just a college student being…a college student, you continue on your way.

Suddenly from around the corner jumps a student, late teens, glasses askew, medium-length brown hair managing to stand in defiance of all laws of gravity, wearing pants on his head, a cape, and a kilt. And swinging a kitten around by the tail.

That is what we in the eccentricity business call “dangerously unstable” and we try to distance ourselves from that particular path as much as is possible without actually being normal. In case the implications weren’t clear, this was told from the perspective of the lady who passed me and the crazy student was, in fact, me (no I do not own, nor do I plan on owning, a kilt).

At the risk of sounding pretentious, eccentricity really is somewhat of an art form – trying to get as close to kitten-swinging loony as possible without actually causing harm to a kitten is something we strive for.

Righto…I’m going to find something to do before lab. Forthward!

PS – today’s advice for a more eccentric life: use the term “kitten-swinging loony” in casual conversation. I dare you.