I never thought I'd like the library. Not for its intended purpose. In grade school, it was a relief from a boring, post-lunch, drowsy classroom. No, really: I actually hated not doing anything in class. Not those days where you turned your desk around and played cards with your fellow scholars, but the days where you would just sit there, done with the assignment, no talking, until the mercilessly upredictable bell would ring. At times the English teachers would let you excuse yourself to go to the library for the virtue of picking out another book to read (on top of the assigned reading, of course).
Once, in the spring of my senior year of high school, I was part of a prank pulled on a substitute teacher. It was the AP/honors/IB/BBQ/SAT/NASA/dual credit senior English class. (Really.) You see, the designated lunch times were set with bells that divided the fourth period class into three parts, for the three lunch periods. For each switch, there were two bells, one to call certain groups to switch, and the second was the tardy bell. All of us in the classroom had just returned from the first lunch, and have always had two bells, four minutes apart, dividing the first and second halves of the class. The idea of the prank was to get up and leave with one of the bells. The first bell rang; no one moved. One of the ring leaders grinned sheepishly among everyone's silent sinckering, and discreetly held up two fingers for everyone else to see. Ok, we'll go on the second bell.

Ringgg.

We went to the library. We pretended to look at college information and almost got off scot-free. The sub was, in the meantime, relishing the thought of having a 30-minute-long break, all the way to the office where she asked the secretary about the teachers' lounge. Oh, that lovely, endeared secretary, who always called me by my sister's name and won the favor of many a student through being an absentee slip Nazi. Needless to say the secretary burst the dream bubble of the unsuspecting sub and before they could get back to the classroom, we all ran and took our seats in the desks, pretending to read.

The yearbook teacher came and took our (our being those of us in the English class, among which was most of the top 10 students in the class) picture in the in-school-suspension building, where the highlight of our day was marching silently to the cafeteria in a single-file line after the second set of lunch bells rang.

So yeah, anyway, I never thought I'd like libraries for their intended purpose. I do like reading, but only to fill my head with more and more information. Books are painfully inferior to lightning-fast knowledge databases such as Wikipedia, which I can spend hours reading article after article, and clicking link after link, until I forget which article I started with. You know that eerie feeling when you 'X' out of pages at 3 o'clock in the morning and find the last window to be RIAA album certification (gold, platinum, diamond, etc), but the first you clicked out of was an article on Napoleon Bonaparte. I say "eerie feeling" because the only way to have connected the two would be a rip in the fabric of the time-space continuum. (I just checked out two books on cosmological physics.)

I wish I knew Morse code. That would be cool, unless I went to war.