Alex Kaplan Ever since my middle school years at Latin, I’ve always noticed something peculiar about the lights at our school. It seems as if they are especially bright. I don’t mean beautiful-shiny-at-a-baseball-game bright or fashion-catwalk-photo-shoot bright. Instead, they are police-searchlight bright, strong enough to make you cower in their beams and freeze like a deer in the headlights of a Ferrari. I began noticing the strength of the lights when I would wash my hands in the bathroom during sixth grade. One morning, as I rinsed off the soap, I noticed a pimple or two that hadn’t been there when I’d looked in the mirror that morning. Peculiar, I thought, but not impossible. I paid it no mind until the same thing happened a few days later—except this time instead of just one or two unnoticed imperfections, there were five or six. I found this to be too hard to believe. Obviously I didn’t think I was looking into some sort of funhouse mirror—I’m not delusional—but something was a bit strange. More and more, the bathroom lighting at Latin seemed far brighter than the lighting in my own bathrooms. I would wake up seemingly clear-faced, and upon using the bathroom at school be convinced otherwise. It was very bizarre. This led me to my conclusion, now long-held, that the lighting in front of the mirror (in addition to being unflattering) is unusually bright. I have no idea if this is true or not, nor why anyone would intentionally buy brighter bulbs for the bathrooms. I also haven’t seen the lighting in the girl’s bathroom for obvious reasons, so I can’t speak to the radiance of the bulbs in there either. All I know is the boy’s middle and upper school bathrooms. In any regard, it’s the weird little things that make a place special. And so, as strange as it is, to me, powerful bathroom lighting is an important part of Latin. ]]>