I spent most of my day at home, reading, grading, and organizing. I finally peeled myself off the couch and on to the bike to head to the office and put this semester to bed. The streets were mostly empty, and campus was a ghost town, so I took my bike inside and spent a lonely couple hours making sure all my ducks were in a row before hitting enter on those final grades (and no, students, I don’t round up). There’s a bittersweet feeling at the end of the term when you are just done, at least for me, as my students and I are all on to the next one, on to the next one–and I won’t be at Tulane in the fall–that’s starting to actually hit me. I took my sad sack self and my bike to the pizza place for a couple slices and a soda and then got a couple cookies for a treat from the grocery. I pedaled through the just-cool-enough air home, stopping to take this picture of a stop sign on Coliseum and Robert. The pedestrian graffiti turns it into a STOP WAR sign–not the cleverest, but a sentiment I can get behind. It is eerily easy for lots of us to forget that we are at war right now. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight–oh, wait, that was what they said about the Confederacy during the Civil War, not any of our current wars. I’ve been thinking about wars a lot lately, and summer means I have a lot more time to think about what I want to think about. I will now raise this glass of wine and toast the start of summer, which promises many sweaty bike rides and the time to think about what to do with yourself when you can’t un-know that we are at war and you are quite sure we should STOP WAR and you also know that we largely don’t see the enemy in our battles anymore, and that’s dangerous. Shots are fired in Florida that kill in Afghanistan–that’s not a war, it’s a video game. We best figure out how to stay connected to the inhumanity of war, or we just might keep starting them. Yay summer vacation!