I also did other things that were absolutely contrived to make myself interesting.  Fully planned and thought out to impress people.  Well, at least they started that way.  One was a computer that I had bought from a friend of mine in high school.  I had seen him in the summer after my sophomore year in college, and he offered to sell me his old computer.  I decided that I would buy it, I figured that it would be good to have a computer, it seemed very collegeish.  I bought the thing and soon found out that it was ancient.  The printer didn't work, it was too slow for the Internet, and it didn't have enough memory or me enough money to play any games on.  One would think that a computer like that is entirely useless.  That computer, however, has lead to countless epiphanies for me, sitting alone for hours in front of it, usually drunk and depressed (what other reason would I have for being alone), typing some poem or story about my life.  When I first started writing some I realized that this could also be one of the things that makes me unique.  If I were that guy that someone knows that writes, not for a class, not for a book or recognition, just types for himself, I would get positive feedback.  I quickly found that this game was not that easy, no one would know that I was typing unless they saw me, I would have to bring it up myself.  This limited it to only those people whom I was comfortable with to actually bring it up, in some subtle manner.  But it did have good results.
There were also a lot of less significant thing that I did while out in public.  Once I saw one of those odd events where you are watching someone just casually and they do something way out of the ordinary, not overly weird but just enough to make you question whether they actually did do it.  I questioned myself as to whether I thought they actually did it consciously, or if it was an unconscious action that I was just not used to seeing.  I thought it most certainly was unconscious, there were definitely not people running around doing weird things for no recognition just to maybe give a random person a smile or make them do a double take.  Well, if there wasn't before, there definitely was after I thought of it.  I mean, how many times did those moments actually stick in your head, how many conversations between good friends started with, "So earlier I saw this guy pick up precisely two leaves off the ground and deposit them on two car hoods."  Probably not that many, but if they happened they were most likely well received.  So I did little things.  When I was waiting outside a class I would just turn a circle, or while at a bar take extra care to set my drink precisely in front of me.  I would twirl my cigarettes around my thumb, consciously, to set myself apart.  A common thing were various odd walks that I had, they weren't outlandish, but subtly perceptible.  One might think me odd for all these things, I believe I was performing a necessary social function, one that made the world just a tad more interesting.
I understand that at this point, one might get a strong inclination that much of my thought went to how people perceived me, who I was to them.  If that is what you gather from me so far, you are definitely on the right track.  Most people would be ashamed to admit that, but not me.  In one of my personal breakthroughs alone writing on my broken computer, I saw it for myself.  I saw all the little things in my life that I did, the things that I told myself were for me, to make me better and make me successful.  I saw that I had misjudged my reasoning.  From my pursuit of knowledge and my desire to know a lot about music, they were not for me.  I did all these things to impress people, a form of basal bragging.  I was too modest (although modesty was one of the things that somewhere I along the line I designed into my personality to win the hearts of others) to outright brag about things in my life.  It would not be as useful to me if had to outright say that I went to Jamaica and bring up that conversation out of the blue.  It was much more suave if they brought it up, much more useful if someone had to ask me what I was doing.  Then I could just say was down stairs writing.  A paper?  Oh, no, just writing down some thought I just had.  It went much smother than this in real life.  A lot of people told me I was being to analytical about it.  That everyone did these things, they just didn't think about them.  I didn't think that they all understood me fully.  What I did was so weak, it clearly showed me that I lived my life for other people (and I still do).  It showed me the ultimate reason why I did nearly everything, going to school to land a job to be successful to impress people to get the best wife.  It didn't even have to be that difficult.  Basically it all boiled down to impressing women, maybe it is some biological artifact left over in my animal body.  I make no implications that this is the way everyone is, I have no idea at all.  I know that this is the way I am designed, and I decided to take full advantage of it.
You might also be thinking at this point that I have already contradicted myself.  I say that in Lincoln I did nothing, I stagnated, yet I go on with a description of how meticulously I carried out little schemes to be different.  I can only answer to that by saying that my notion of doing something was something worthwhile and lasting.  Something that was a life occupation.  Anything that would have labeled me, set me in a group.  But there was very little like that.  I was not overly active in my school, I did well and learned lots of things but never concentrated on one.  I had no hobbies to speak of.  Most of my energy was spent on what I considered frivolous socializing.  I think that I must have been living a contradiction, for if I spent that much time on it and still considered it frivolous it would be a sad thing.  But that is an overview of why I considered myself interesting while living in Lincoln.  But as I have repeatedly stated, I recently moved to Hong Kong.