Building In.

Gray. We're mainly gray. Cloud cover accumulating. There's a heat to it, though, an underlying humid promise of all that rain down in Georgia and Alabama working its way here. ANYLF official estimate: half an inch between now and tomorrow morning. Good tomato rain. Good radish rain. And then the sun's supposed to break back out again tomorrow afternoon and give us a day in the mid-to-high seventies, a little breeze, the kind of day we'll all be hoping we'll get dealt in 27244 next Saturday for graduation. All that sitting in all those robes for all that time while they call all the names of all those kids. It'll never be 78. It'll be mid-eighties and getting hotter and it'll be dead still and I will wish I'd never learned to read or write. Then the vice-president of Wendy's or someone like that will get up behind the podium and tell everybody to Strive, strive, and talk maybe about how This is just the beginning of a journey. Oh, graduation. Around here all the kids get an oak sapling. They get an acorn when they're freshmen. Get it?

US News & World Report has us ranked #4 in the southeast for halfassed symbolic gestures. We're #2 in classrooms containing things that blink and whir.

Today I am having a wee little bit of trouble loving being awake. I'm tired, tired, tired. I'm ready to open up the rings on my looseleaf binder and let every, every page blow out the window of the school bus. I'm ready to be done with all this for a while.