Why I Read on the Ramp Instead of the Break Room

The break room has real chairs, decent light, a coffee maker that mostly works, and I still take my lunch outside on the ramp whenever the weather lets me, propped against a support post with a paperback and whatever’s left of a sandwich. Deacon thinks this is one of my odder habits, and to be fair he might be right, there’s a specific kind of person who chooses concrete and jet fuel smell over an actual chair, and apparently I’m that person.

Part of it is just noise, honestly, the break room’s got a TV that’s always on something, and conversation happening whether I want to be part of it or not, and I’ve never been able to read with a conversation happening near me even when I’m not technically part of it. But the bigger part, the part I only really figured out after doing this for a few years, is that reading outside on the ramp puts me in a kind of in-between headspace that the break room never manages. I’m still at work, technically, still close enough to hear if something needs me, but I’m also somewhere I don’t associate with any specific task, no bench, no toolbox, nothing telling my hands what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s apparently exactly the condition I need to actually sink into a book instead of just holding one.

I got through most of Anathem this way, actually, thirty minutes at a stretch, five days a week, over what turned out to be almost three weeks given how dense that back half gets. There’s something fitting about reading a book that’s largely about monks deliberately isolating themselves to think clearly while I was doing my own much smaller, much less monastic version of the same thing on a strip of concrete between two hangars. I didn’t plan that parallel, I noticed it about two-thirds of the way through and then couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the book.

Renata asked me once if I ever get lonely out there, eating by myself when I could be inside with everyone else, and I don’t, not really, or at least not in a way that outweighs what I get from the quiet. I like the people I work with fine. I just like the specific, unclaimed nowhere-space of the ramp during lunch more, the one thirty-minute stretch of my whole shift that doesn’t belong to anything but whatever I’m reading. Deacon can keep making fun of me for it. I’ve got through more books sitting on that concrete than I ever did in a chair with better lighting, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.