distracted in the library

Working in the reading room of the New York Public Library gives me a chance to view some kind of cross-section of people who live here. Judging by the range different kinds of faces and styles, it certainly seems to be more widely “public” than many of the other places I spend time which seem to be less diverse in age and ethnicity especially. The library gets all types. Today, for instance, I’m watching a funny little person moving around the reading room with increasing speed, pulling piles of books off the shelf probably at random but with the appearance of precision. She’s wearing drag queen eye make-up, a surgical mask (I think as an accessory) and an oversized tie. Having piled all the books on a table and placed bits of paper into each also at random, she’s now taken them all somewhere else. I like that I can’t dismiss this as not a serious use of the library – it seems very serious to her – and just because most of us are working on laptops and quietly reading, there are various ways to make use of the library space and its books.

Last year, I used to see a woman who appeared to be one of us “serious library users”, reading and working on her laptop, but every now and then she would exclaim something loud and angry to no one in particular. Most times I saw her, she would place a little basket of plastic flowers on the desk next to her computer, which was totally mismatched with her scary butch dyke appearance (shaved head, clunky glasses, sometimes overalls but one time a sun dress and boots). Most of the other people who stand out do so because they’re annoying and making some kind of noise or movement to distract me from my easily lost focus. Last week, there was a man near me on his computer who would harumph and throw his hands in the air all the time in frustration, after arriving in a noisy flap of unpacking and setting up cables and headphones. Given how frantically he was mousing, I decided he might have been playing a computer game (this was also a heinous and stereotypical assumption based on his nerdy appearance). No wonder my career is going nowhere when I waste so much time staring at people instead of writing.