say no to rickets.

talking to kim and listening to her alaskan adventures in eternal sunsine of the demented kind, i try to wrap my brain around what it actually feels like to live under constant sunlight. i wondered when people went to bars, went to clubs, how the faux-pas of getting drunk at noon differed when getting drunk at midnight looked no different outdoors. it seems a wonder already that people could actually tell the difference between noon and midnight. i wondered when animals went to sleep, when bees stopped buzzing, and despite a lenthy debate and investigation with mel over whether or not birds actually do chirp during the dead of night, i still wondered when most birds stopped chirping. the dead biology major in me wondered when plants knew to take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, while the sociology major in me wondered if the endless day made people more or less hostile towards one another. on the plus side i thought, at least people probably didn't develop rickets very often.

i like the night - the pastel colors at dusk and the tops of trees in silver moonlight. i like being able to actually say i am an evening person versus a morning person. i like seeing the firey-orange tips of other people's cigarettes illuminate their faces with each inhale, and i like seeing those same faces slowly receed back into shadow. standing outside my front door and smoking a dunhill in near-darkness, were it not for the street lamps, i look up and down the deserted road before me, now cloaked in a thick veil of fog. an occasional car beams a small triangular path of white through the haze with its headlights, while small orange halos form around the street lights which stand as silent sentinels all along the sidewalk. telephone wires, usually serving as bird-crapping-perches in the day, now harbor heavy glistening dewdrops instead, falling to the ground or onto cars with similar plops and pops. drenched with fog, the tops of electrical poles, looking more like shadowy strung-up crucifixes in this mist, sizzle and crackle, offering me a curious yet dangerous-sounding display of light and blue sparkle, while somewhere in the distance, deep bellows from foghorns warn ships not to venture too close. this is what i like about the night - the way nothing but a change in brightness can turn the familiarly pedestrian into a fantasic wonderland of mystère and intrigue.

mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form,
can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
: wilde.