I had to intervene with an aggressive tram passenger last Saturday night. He was threatening to punch another passenger. I told him not to. It ended about as well as I could have hoped: no one got hurt, and the aggressor got off the tram.

Afterwards I did some reading about bystander intervention and de-escalation techniques. I was even thinking about writing a blog post about it. Library patrons can sometimes act up and be violent. I still remember seeing a patron at the State Library of Victoria swear, throw a chair across the public access computer desks, then sit down as if nothing had happened.

So intervening and de-escalation are good skills for librarians to have.

But… I just don’t have the heart in me to write about it now. The confrontation on Saturday left me sad and annoyed. I posted a big long rant about it on Facebook, and now I just want to not think about it for a while.

Maybe I’ll come back to it later. Or maybe I’ll get caught up in uni assignments and forget all about it.

In the meantime, have something utterly charming: a 20 minute documentary about the Reykjavík downtown library:

It’s made by by Jiaqian Chen, a Chinese national who vlogs about living in Iceland.

That library looks utterly gorgeous.

Also, it seems like every second person in Iceland is some sort of musician. One of my favourite bands in the world is Icelandic: Kaelan Mikla make excellent gothy synth-punk.

I guess I need to add Reykjavík to my list of cities I need to visit when international travel resumes.