Like a lot of people my very first contact with E2 occured through slashdot. This must have happened 6-8 years ago and I lost sight of this site for a while after that. What I loved at the time were the humorous and quirky write-ups that could be found here.
My all-time favourite node is Slide, thud, whoosh, crunch, or: Catholic Rally Stage 1 Fights Back and some of it's companions from the Highway Tales. Along with one of my other long-time bookmarks these embody everything that is good to me about everything2.
This other bookmark is Uberman's Sleep Schedule. I've read this years ago, and it sparked something in me. It led me to read a lot about polyphasic sleep and I seriously considered trying it myself for a while.
What these nodes have in common is that they're both well written; they're slightly humorous and they carry you along while being mildly informative. To me this is a great combination, I like to be entertained while I'm being educated. A skill my college teachers have seldomly mastered, unfortunately, but some of E2's greatest writers do possess this talent.
From the Highway tales I have developed my absolute favourite E2 pastime. I'm not really here for the writing, I consider myself merely a decent writer, and don't want to bother other people with my ramblings too much. I'm here for other peoples writings, I love to read, and random node surfing is a great way to be entertained and informed while not having to keep your concentration for more than ten minutes.
"random node surfing"
This is the reading/surfing habit I've developed over the years: I find one or more starting nodes from the new wu's or recently cooled on the frontpage. I read these nodes and then check the top 2 or 3 rows of softlinks. These practically always contain several interesting links to other nodes, and I open them in new tabs (yay, firefox!). Each read tab is closed, automatically bringing me to the next tab in line. There's a reasonable chance that this tab is about something totally unrelated to the previous node, keeping me fresh and interested, while also allowing me to take a grander view of the world's connectedness.
I hope this may inspire you to enjoy some hours getting entertained and slightly educated on E2.