I wanted to wear white after Labor Day just to be a fashion rogue. Yes, it was a little pathetic. I had no other mission than to stick it to Miss Manners, but I did start another Labor Day tradition with a more respectable purpose.
I should say Labor Night tradition, though, because I spent most of my Labor Day laboring (and I did not want that to become an end-of-vacation tradition). After spending the summer writing for journalism programs and volunteering and after an entire day of preparing for school and regretting not finding better ways to spend my last day of summer, I was ready to fall back on a sofa and turn on my old friends Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien.
When Carson Daly turned on, I grabbed the remote and turned off the TV (Daly is not funny). I was a little tired, so I reached for my Sansa MP3 player, turned on some music, and moved around a little until I felt comfortable.
And then started my Labor Day tradition: spending that last precious night of summer not sleeping but looking back at everything I had done this summer to the playlist of all the music I had discovered.
So it made sense to start with Cao Fang's "In Summer," otherwise known as the song in the GE commercial with the Chinese village and the chickens. It's a minute, but it's short and sweet. So it made sense I thought of all the sweet love I found this summer, which was null. But I did think about the girl I was infatuated with all year, her eyes, her problems, and how much I looked forward to seeing her all summer and how much I longed to see her when I went back to school (it's probably the only thing I was looking forward to). All of that good stuff in one minute, in one neat little song. Plenty of downtime to just think about the people I cared about.
Other than the first song, I had shuffled the playlist. The next song was Arcade Fire's "Keep the Car Running." And, of course, it got me thinking about high gas prices and the fate of our economy in an age of global interdependence. No. Really, it got me thinking about all the trips I had made. All the new and exciting places I went to, like Canada. Yes, I found Canada interesting. From the snobs in Montreal who would casually switch between English and French in mid-conversation to the snobs in Toronto who bragged about having the tallest man-made structure in the world, Canada was interesting. And we just kept the car running. We rode six hours up to Montreal, made our way to Toronto, stopping at Ottawa and Brockville in the middle, and ended at Niagara Falls, where we, rather easily, hopped the border back to good old not-as-sissy New York.
Then came on The Killers's "All These Things That I've Done," and by instinct, I thought about...well...all the things that I had done this summer. There was all the journalism programs I did, all the stories I had written, all the new things and new places I discovered, all the interesting people I met, all the dragon boat practices, all the bike rides I had taken, all the hours I spent watching the Olympics (coincidentally, the song was in one of the Nike commercials). I remembered the story of the senior center, the awkward moment I met George Stephanopoulos, the new and quirky fiends I made, and the tears when Liu Xiang exited the stadium. And when the chorus came, the rhythmic "I got soul but I'm not a soldier," I remembered losing the dragon boat competition but coming out strong. And as the chorus died, I remembered the bike rides I took down the West Side past Stuyvesant.
And then I realized something. Good god, school would start tomorrow. And I was up at 2 a.m.
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