17 more days

Summer has officially arrived in my mind. No matter that I still have papers and projects and classes...I'm done. I've set aside Supercapitalism and In Search of the Indo-Europeans for Last Days of Summer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I spend my evenings watching The Sandlot on YouTube (it's all there, in 10 parts) and feeling guilty for not doing schoolwork. The problem with going home three weeks before classes are over is that your brain tastes freedom and it likes it. "Wow, this is really good," it says. "I think I'll stay here." Meanwhile I'm still sitting in my dorm room with a stack of books about the history of the alphabet and a stack of "to-dos" that will never get "to-done." If I stopped doing anything for the rest of the semester, I wonder how much my grades would be affected? (Insert maniacal twirl of mustache and raise of eyebrow with black stovepipe hat and girl tied up on railroad tracks here.)

Don't you think it's a little presumptuous for signs to thank you for doing or feeling things before you've even fully digested what the sign is restricting you to do in the first place? For example, five hours and a bottle of water after I started driving back to Kentucky from Wisconsin two weekends ago, I had to loosen the seatbelt so it wouldn't press too firmly on my overly ripe abdomen. Pulling over at a rest stop, I walked into the building to see a sign on the bathroom door that said, "Temporarily closed for cleaning. Thank you for your patience." Temporarily closed for cleaning?? My de-seeded watermelon of a bladder will burst at any moment and you're thanking me for being patient? It would have been more accurate if it had read, "Temporarily closed for cleaning. Please put your knife away and step away from the janitor."

I want very much to be done with classes for the summer, and the 75-degree blue skies and sunshine is not helping me sit in the library with my nose in my laptop. I'm almost done, and I cannot wait to be home eating Mom's banana bread and baking until my fingers turn to powder that I accidentally sift into the flour. I don't even care that I'll probably be working at a cheese factory from 12 a.m. to 8 a.m. and sleeping all day until dinner, then going back to work again, leaving no time to read anything but the nutrition labels I'm watching a machine slap on slabs of cheese. Wisconsin's state motto: "Smell our dairy-air."

"Always go to other peoples' funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours." ~ Yogi Berra