Last Saturday I spent 5 hours at the public library. I’ve been needing to translate my sophomore thesis into Spanish since the start of the summer. It just never worked out because, well, who has 5 hours to spend at a library? I couldn’t translate it at home because I can’t even hear myself think here.   Lack of being able to concentrate at home is one thing I won’t be missing in Tucson.

Leah, who is ADHD, talks as fast as she can, and as loud as she can, from 6:40am until 10:40pm. She is so loud that we had her tested for a hearing disorder. You know how those kids who can’t hear very well yell to be able to hear themselves, even though everyone else can hear them if they talk normally? That’s what we thought was the problem. Turns out she’s just plain loud.

So I went to the library and locked myself in a study room. Perfect. The only distraction was a 5″x3′ window on the door. That is a reasonable distraction, I thought. I just turned my chair so that the window was facing my back.

Now, at the Central Arizona College library there is a librarian who always tries to catch me in the act of eating granola bars. I’m a granola bar fiend. That librarian is a crinkly wrapper catcher fiend. I bet she keeps a tally chart somewhere of how many students she’s caught eating granola bars. She never catches me though.

So after hour 3 I was pretty hungry. I pulled out a granola bar, and literally the second after I pull it out someone started banging on the door. Rats, it’s that mean librarian with the dreadlocks. She’s always mean to me. She’s mean to everyone. You would think that she should like people more since she works at a public library.

“Come in?”  I figured it would be nice to invite her in, because she was about to knock the glass out of the door with all the pounding she was doing.

“EATING IN THE LIBRARY IS NOT ALLOWED!!”

I looked around in amazement.  How did she see that granola bar the very second after I pulled it out?  Maybe those dreadlocks hold a super granola bar sensory powers.

“Alright.  Sorry.”

I considered saying that I’m diabetic and need to keep my blood sugar up.  I might be diabetic…. some day.  And I really do need to keep my blood sugar up all the time.  I take food with me wherever I go because it’s hard for me to focus and sometimes even walk if I don’t eat something every couple hours.  And if that librarian had told me that I need to eat outside, I would have made her help me pack up all of my books and papers and my computer, because they would be stolen if I left them there, and I was obviously too weak to pack those things myself.  And then I would have needed her to help me walk up the stairs to go outside, because my blood sugar was low and I could barely walk.  She doesn’t like helping people, so she probably would have let me eat my two-bite bar inside.  But that was all just a day dream.  Besides, I only lie sometimes.