Illuminating, isn't it?

I've had green, pink, blue, purple, and the traditional yellow. Lots of the traditional yellow. I have "1-800-Collect" and "Project CHEERS," undoubtedly an acronym long-since forgotten like the designated driver they acknowledged now sitting alone in the corner of the bar, his drunken friends wandering off with women of questionable mores. It isn't that I didn't understand their purpose or even that I had not attempted to use them to fulfill their destiny. I knew what a highlighter was. I knew why one might wield said instrument. But knowing and truly highlighting are two very different things. I don't know what the Bible says about highlighting, but in seventeen years of school, after countless thousands of dollars, through more highlighters than digits, highlighting still remained a mystery to me. Once in college, during an experimental phase, I had marked a passage of The Golden Ass in orange, but without my highlighter decoder ring, without my powers of deduction a la Sherlock Holmes, or my gritty crime-fighting wit like so many Hardy Boys, and even without that super-sleuthing boyish prowess of the one and only, the legend, Encyclopedia Brown, I was just coloring. I lacked understanding. I lacked clarity. I was inside the lines, juvenile. If I highlighted a passage in the forest and no one ever reread the passage, did it make a sound? I was a war protest on the White House lawn.

Then one night, not unlike last Thursday night, I had a revelation. Fluorescent inspiration hailed me like a taxi cab. Highlighting, the art form, is a two part process. I knew that, somewhere deep inside of me, but a quesadilla awakened that knowledge, and I perceived that not unlike the strata of said quesadilla, there are also multiple layers in highlighting. The first involves applying color to a page, of course. This part is not done willy-nilly. No, no. Selection of a passage is crucial. The highlighted must capture meaning, symbolism perhaps, or a theme, or just a quote that might later be doled out like Halloween candy to greedy little ghost-impersonators. The second step is perhaps more crucial than the first. The second step is the Aboriginal step. It's the boomerang, the return to the first step. A rebirth, if I may. This rebirth, though not as painful as the first time through, should still recall some of that early awe as meaning springs to life yet again beneath the colored lines of my handiwork.

The tingling sensation that I feel; it lets me know that my highlighting and my shampoo are working.