Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, on campus on a rainy night, rainy night.

This is a good tune to sing in your head when you’re swimming. Or walking. Or dancing in the rain.

Or when you nearly get hit by a car. Yeah, when you get hit by a car. That’s not what you usually think when you’re stepping outside of your dorm for a quick jaunt to TAP or LaIR, but it’s what happens on rainy nights here.

Be careful. The white paint on the crosswalks are slipperier than the lie you told last summer to avoid sending your sibling to summer camp. They’re a surefire way to crack your head, and — you guessed it — get run over by a car.

Not that there’s something inherently wrong with cars. It’s just that when it gets dark, people tend to resemble dark blobs of moving plant matter  more than homo sapiens who deserve rights to the pedestrian lane. Remember: When it gets dark and rainy, the normal rules that guide automobile and people interaction get tossed out faster than window litter.

Don’t you roll your eyes at me. I’d also recommend not taking the bike.

Why?

I know you think that you feel cool when you’re zipping through the night, unperceived by passerby. Do we really have to go over why this isn’t a great idea? Instead of being a blob of plant of matter, you’ve become a potentially new species of radioactive plant matter. I wouldn’t recommend it.

And while it’s awful to walk around with a wet pants seat, covering your bike seat in a plastic bag isn’t the perfect solution. It’s quite easy to slip off the seat, which is rather hilarious when you’re watching someone else do it but not when it happens to yourself.

Schadenfreude. What fun.  

Moreover, you’ll probably, more likely than not, splash down with enough force to send sprays of water all over your pant legs and into your mouth, if you bent down at a particularly inopportune moment. Quite disgusting, yes?

I’d recommend you just stay out of the night when it’s raining. Especially if you’ve got a yellow raincoat on and you’re playing with something near the sewers.

Yep. They exist. And their victims are currently counseling the recently dead on how to teach others to avoid the dang sewers at night.

I wouldn’t peek into them in the daylight, really. Some of those clowns have really built up a fantastic tolerance to the light, and they don’t hesitate to snarf college students down. It’s something about the fitness, I think. Who knew they were going keto?

Well, I wish you a safe trip. And I hope I don’t find you at the bottom of the sewer.

See you lat—

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I told you not to use the bike. Come along; there’re always a couple of others like you. Let’s go join them.

 

Contact Angela Zhao at angezhao ‘at’ stanford.edu.