Heat makes for grumpy research assistants

We've just had something of a heat wave here in the Bay Area, and I'm not a fan of heat. It turned out to be a day spent in the library as well, and I'm none too fond of libraries, either. I have trouble concentrating in libraries... I'm one of those people who needs a certain quantity of ambient background noise in order to stay focused. (Well, to stay awake would probably be a fairer description of it.) I like studying in cafe's.

However, my job for the day included poring through the Omnibus Revision History of the 1976 Copyright Act, and the 17-volume series of bound transcripts, drafts, and comments has non-circulatory status here at the law school. Not being able to take out out of the law school, I just had to sit there and read it in the library's main reading room, which, like most of Boalt Hall, doesn't seem to have working air conditioning.

So I'm just sitting there, as happy as a mollusk at a clambake, perusing the Register's Report of 1961 (which is actually quite an amusing read at times. They do joke around a little, despite the seriousness of the business - they're human after all) and in some parts, it's like watching some of those old Cold War newsreels. There's a certain preoccupation with "commies" in general and "the Russians" in particular and how copyright law was stifling our scientific progress, etc. etc.

I'm making progress, despite a certain lack of comfort, when I hear the following addressed to me in an irritated monotone: " Could you keep the racket down, please?"

I look down. Well, well, looks like I've been turning pages. The acoustics in the reading room are less than ideal for a room in a library. There's a terrible echo in there, and you can literally hear someone turning pages a hundred feet away. If someone closes a book, coughs, pops the tab on a soda can, or clicks a pen, you're going to hear it, whether he tries to muffle it or not.

I look back up. I have no idea who the guy is, but he doesn't look like a law professor, or a lawyer for that matter. He might be a very old student with lots of body hair. Fact is, we get some strange characters in the law school with alarming frequency... but then, this is Berkeley after all, and oddballs come with the territory. As long as they're not surfing for porn on the library computers, we pretty much tolerate them.

I'm fairly irritated with this one, though, because he of all people has no cause to complain about my innocent page-turning. He had already released two rather sonorous farts in the past 15 minutes, which I did my best to ignore despite the room's reverberation and the stifling heat (which if anything, amplifies the effects of just about every kind of pollution, I'm sure). Look, dude, if you can hear me, I can most definitely hear you.

I shoot him that weapon-eye look (You know, the aforementioned "I'm going to go through you, and the guy behind you, and the guy behind him"), and go back to my reading, shoving the annoyance bubbling over in my psyche into a quieter corner of my mind. I was tempted to shell out 20 bucks and an hour of time just to photocopy the entire section I needed to read and run off to a cafe where I can read about the 1960's preoccupation with commies and copyrights over a tall, frosty glass of iced orange juice.

I ended the day with a cold shower, which felt absolutely wonderful. You know it's a hot day when a cold shower feels this good... in fact, it's still toasty in here, and I might take another one just to keep cool...