I'll leave the light on for you.

I hung Christmas lights outside my apartment this weekend. Elmer Fudd showed me two large tubs of lights (big and little, colored and clear) in the storage room under the stairs, back from before they contracted out the annual decoration of the official campus Christmas tree. Elmer said I could make my apartment look like the Griswold house.

I settled on less than that: a simple string of C9, colored bulbs along the edge of the porch. (Some people call it "less is more" or "keep it simple, stupid"; I prefer to say, "More is not always better.")

Okay, there was another reason. I think decorating my apartment would be like using makeup to conceal a pimple. The place would be much more unpleasantly noticeable than normal.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. Instead of looking like a upper-lower class house on the fringe of a questionable neighborhood (which it is), the Christmas lights make it look more like a cheap motel. Plus, Pinocchio told me yesterday that he had been having a bad day but seeing the lights cheered him up when he got home.