9/100: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
This article looks at Day 9 in a series of 100 visits detailing what happens at my local library
Stop & Shop Lady is back. She must have been the first one through the doors this morning, because I arrived only ten minutes after opening and she had already finished setting up the fortress.
She uses seven bags in total, all of the brown paper variety that, when fully expanded, each measure about the size of a large shoe box. The uniform creases in them reveal the methodical folding and unfolding that these bags undergo with each visit. Four block her from a head-on view, while the others shield her profile from the left side. She sits at the corner of the study table by the wall, so there’s no need for a buffer to the right.
The barricade is effective; it’s impossible to know what she does behind her encirclement of bags. Because I’m nosy, I walk by her on the pretense of going to the bathroom, and peek in. She’s reading a book. There’s an open laptop and a half-eaten granola bar on the table.
As the library fills up, someone eventually sits down in one of the other twelve chairs at the table she’s stationed herself at. She peers over the top of her makeshift fence. In a voice much more audible than a whisper:
Well look who found me! Sit there if you want, but don’t bother me. You stay on your side, and leave me alone. Keep your eyeballs off me, don’t bother me, that’s all I’m saying. This is a library.
I mean, she’s not wrong, but also, maybe she is? Why go to a public space if you want guaranteed and total privacy?
The answer is, like the rest of us, she wants to both share the space and make it her own.
It’s the age-old question of how much importance we ought to grant our individual preferences versus those of the collective. The Stop & Shop Lady — who, by the way, is now leaving, performing her ritual of carefully collapsing each bag at its base, folding into a perfectly flat rectangle before sliding it into a clear plastic folder with the others — has a vision of what the library should be. It of course relies on the comportment of the people around her, and by laying down her terms this way, she’s simply doing what she can to render her vision into reality.
I’ve been reading about the laws of nature this morning, and more specifically, how a computational biologist with Asperger’s syndrome named Dr. Camilla Pang uses them to better understand humans. In a discussion of the laws of thermodynamics, the second law seems pertinent to what’s happened this morning:
Law #2: through naturally occurring processes, the energy in a system will always move over time to a less ordered, less productive state.
I glean from this that we do our best to control our experiences in environments that inevitably present variables beyond our influence, and we get frustrated when unexpected changes occur. In this sense we are all Stop & Shop Lady; we all have ideas of how we want things to be, and when they don’t play out the way they did in our fantasies, we get upset. Universally, it’s the pre-conceived notions that yield the greatest disappointments. When you expect something to go a certain way, and that something involves some entity besides you, it’s bound — scientifically so — to eventually come undone. But this isn’t to say we have to lower our expectations, only that we must redistribute them — constantly.
Case in point: not long after Stop & Shop Lady left, someone wearing way too much AXE body spray filled her seat. It’s given me a headache and it’s all I can think about. But rather than resent AXE for interrupting what was certain to be a philosophical breakthrough for the ages, I’m grateful to him for offering me a natural (actually synthetic) stop to today’s musings.
Thanks for reading to the end! If you’re enjoying this series, you might also like
10/100: The Elusive Perfect Anecdote
4/100: Blue Lipstick and Communities
