what i learned in high school

in high school a bunch of us decided to start a DIY opinion journal for our senior year, a kind of free-form rambling venue to bitch about, assess and poke fun at the world in simultaneously self-assured and searching voices only seventeen-year-olds can truly capture.  Now that we are having our 10-year reunion, the journal's editor proposed that we write a reunion issue and shared some gems from the pages ten years ago...

imagine my surprise when I read my own piece on none other than midnight in different cities, in which i wrote: 

"It is exactly midnight. I often wonder about this hour, a time with which I have become well-acquainted during the past four years at Lick. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, this hour is a nuisance, at least in San Francisco. The energy ebbs into an eerie calm throughout the city, its flourescent signs fading in the Tenderloin, the stoplights changing to blinkers at Fell and Oak streets, the wind whipping cleanly down the corridors of the avenues. Midnight in San Francisco is about deceiving the eye into believing it is time to rest, time to seek solace amongst the buildings that were never too imposing in the first place.

In other cities, midnight grows and shrinks in epic proportions. In new york, where the bars don't close till 4am, it seems a deep breath before the night bursts and expunges its insides to the streets. Drunks yell a bit louder, tourists teeter near the abyss of whether to journey back to their respective hotels, the lights pick up a notch before they flicker and shut off for the night."

on that tip, ten years later, i've been jamming to this while i write my PhD qualifying paper on nightlife: