While I continue to enjoy doing research in the middle of a museum exhibit, I am sometimes inclined to post a sign next to my computer which would read something to the effect of “Not Part of the Exhibit.” That only one museumgoer has actually asked about my work after having stared at me perplexedly compounds the minor and wholly unjustified annoyance on my part. I figured out who the famous professor who every day gets accosted by graduate students who tell her they “love her book” or somesuch is. You can bet I’m very satisfied with myself.

The other apparent tradeoff is that, with one or two exceptions, my fellow researchers seem inclined to compensate for whatever dynamic engagement between librarygoer and library community the Schomburg fosters by having very little to say to each other. This is disappointing, because I am sure that many of the three to ten other researchers in here on any given day (sometimes I’m the only researcher here, which is a little odd) are doing very interesting work, and I’m either nosy or enough interested in other people’s lives and work that I’d like to know what they are doing and who they are. Also, maybe they know things that I don’t or HC doesn’t about the research I’m doing, and could help me find sources or material I wouldn’t otherwise know about. Instead, I’ll continue to wade through a veritable mountain of manuscripts, drafts, letters, brochures, index cards, surveys, tables, articles, and fragments and hope I’m being productive.

I just got back from my mom’s 60th birthday (she looks like she’s 40 and acts like she’s twenty) Motown dance party, which was a lot of fun – friends of the family I hadn’t seen in many years (some not since leaving Philadelphia going on 16 years ago,) friends of the family I saw last month but don’t see enough, family, and my incredibly cool 88 year old former truck drivin’ dance teacher grandmother, with whom I danced, of course. I haven‘t seen my mom, who got to get on stage and sing with the Motown band my dad hired for three songs, be this happy and have this much fun in a long time, maybe ever, so that made me really happy by the transitive property of being happy. And i'm actually lloking forward to the rest of the family stuff that has me pretty solidly booked through sunday.