I can’t believe how great it is that the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority has finally gotten with the program and is starting to allow people with University of Michigan IDs to ride the bus without paying. (There were one or two free routes before this, but citywide is a godsend.) I’m saving easily $8-10 a week.

I’m no paragon of the spoken word, as anyone who knows me can verify, but it always amuses me when I hear students — not just undergrads, grads and everyone in between — using filler words in their speech.

“Like” I can understand; it’s an unconscious filler word, like “um,” “uh,” and all the rest. But today I listened to a couple of poli sci grad students chattering away over coffee about lesson plans, peppering their conversation with words like “ordinal” and “constituencies,” and one of them kept very studiously and carefully interweaving into the dialogue California beach bum expressions like “SWEET!” and “Okay, so … that’s cool.”

There was also the woman from Toronto I overheard larding her conversation with liberal doses of “Fer shure!” (Moon Unit Zappa, you’re wanted on the white courtesy phone.)

I blame California for all of the above.

This afternoon while I was waiting for the bus, I saw a couple of undergrad-looking guys, one toting what looked like a box containing a router and the other some other kind of electronic doohickey in a Toshiba box, and knew beyond a doubt that the influx has officially gotten into high gear. The students have been traipsing around campus all week, actually. There are more every day. No longer does the campus even have the pretense of feeling deserted, dead, or de-populated; it actually never felt that way all “summer,” regardless of the urban myths I’d heard about such a utopian state. I guess it’s almost time for the insanity to resume, alas.