sorry...

First thought: where IS everyone?

Second thought: If there were only three people coming, and one was ten-fifteen minutes late, that makes a big difference. <striking a last-frame-of-qwantz.com pose> Oops!

Third thought: Maybe they went to whatever-it-was on campus that was using lights brighter than the surface of the sun.

Fourth thought: You know those bugs that are attracted to light? Is there some brightness that's just too much? Some point at which they say, "No steenking way, man! That hurts. No pleasure there, just pain"?

Fifth thought: I wonder why they don't burn their little eyes right out of their little heads? If I repeatedly banged my face up against the lens of a floodlight, wouldn't I tend to lose sight after fifteen minutes or so? Do these bugs have some sort of ultra-robust vision system, or are they blind now and moving toward the warmth? (Talk about bad instincts.)

Sixth thought: along the topic of losing-sight, if I were to view a nuclear explosion (the flash), or gaze at the sun, or stare at a welding arc, it would burn my retina. Upon further consideration, I guess I don't fully understand this phenomena. Is that because of unseen infrared wavelengths (that's heat) overheating the lens of the eye, or is it ultraviolet wavelengths (that's a tan) sunburning the eye, or is it the vast quantity of visible-wavelength photons doing something, or is it not a physical meltdown but a burned-out control system? To understand this last alternative, consider stepping from a dark room into the sunlight. Your eyes adjust, so that what initially seems bright does not after a minute or two. Technically, this might happen at the retina before the light is converted to pulses sent to the brain, at the synapses along the way as the pulses travel, and at other points in the brain as everybody gets tired of hearing how bright the sun is today. But maybe for a sight-ending flash, this reaction adjusts light response so low that no future vision is possible? It wouldn't be hard to test the various theories, if you could find some volunteers. Easier to Google the answers.

Ah, well, back to work. It's going to be a late night, and stopping to think these thoughts didn't help matters.