Wednesday in May.

I wore jeans today, on Wednesday, because I'm tired of dressing up. The office is hot, the lunchroom on the 4th floor is pizzeria-kitchen hot. The sun beats in like it's the lightbulb and we're the oven. I need to move more. In May, I'm not a teacher, I'm a babysitter. But today we reviewed for tomorrow's Othello test, and I'm always excited when they nail the practice questions. I want to say: can you believe it! You're quoting Shakespeare, and three weeks ago you were groaning about it. Ha ha, I taught you. Ha ha, you learned. Suckers.

I just finished my big essay dump of the year, 90 essays. Tonight I don't have any, and tomorrow night I don't have any, and on Friday I collect 30 more. But I have 2 days of freedom. Well, I mean, I have some tests to grade and some homework to grade, but fuck that.

The turd-eater fell asleep in class today, yesterday, and the 20 days before that. When I called his mom two weeks ago, she cried into the phone, and she said all the teachers had called that week. We had to. It was the "probable senior failure" phone call. The turd-eater is called the turd-eater because on the first day of class he fell asleep with a chew in his mouth, and when he woke up, the chew dripped down his chin and into a pool of brown on the desk. It looked like he'd been chewing on a turd. Or, as I told my friends in an email, he was a robot and his mouth was leaking oil.

Lenny and I walk 2.5 miles a day, now, down to Wayzata beach and along the bookstore and coffee shop and ice cream shop and BMWs in the street and trees that flower white lilac-smelling flowers. Everytime we walk under the tree, I think of Hutchinson. It was around this time last year, when I was complaining of the vagina-smelling tree in my front yard, how every time I stepped outside, it stunk of vaginas.