Snippets #4: on photons...

it's occurred to me over the last few months that my flatmates seem to be allergic to the dark. it's a character trait i've noticed here and there - i'll walk into the house and half the lights are on. they leave their bedroom light on despite the light switch being right on the door. hell, they'll even turn on the hall light even though the door to their room and the door to the living room are about a metre apart. maybe it just doesn't occur to them to turn them off? i don't know.

i'm in the opposite habit - i'm forever turning lights off around this place because... well, why have them on? the light i have in my room is a desk lamp with a CFL in it which is pointed directly at the wall. i read my book at night by the diffused light bouncing off the red feature wall and this serves me quite nicely. i rarely want for more than that. on the weekend i spent most of an evening in here with my young lass with just the LEDs in my laptop strobing along to the music playing in Winamp and this was more than we needed. if i need to visit the kitchen in the night there's usually a more than adequate amount of illumination from the LEDs on the various game consoles, or computers or just the moonlight coming in the back door.

i'm thinking that there's generally plenty of light around to get by if you know where to look. i know where everything is in the house and while i occasionally bump my knee into an errant chair, this is pretty rare. it's similarly rare that you'll find yourself in a place where there's no ambient light whatsoever but it seems that people have this need to banish the darkness. me, i think i prefer for it not to be so bright, and enjoy the ambiguity that the darkness brings and the interplay of light and shadow in my world. the idea of learning braille just so that i can read without having to turn on the light actually holds an odd fascination now i think about it...

i guess you could look at this as an allegory of some kind, but i'll leave those connections up to somebody else...