The students are definitely back. About the only thing that hasn’t happened yet is the start of classes, so the mad throngs of students filing across central campus haven’t materialized yet, but otherwise the “quiet” of summer is pretty much over with. The traffic on State is back to snail’s pace levels. A couple of undergrads were lazily sashaying across the intersection at State and South University last night when a cop car came roaring up State with its siren blaring. The students pretended it wasn’t there until the cop almost ran them over to get through the intersection. One of them covered her mouth and giggled as she bopped the rest of the way across the crosswalk, as though she’d just done something very amusing. It’s hard to believe they’re so self-absorbed, although the truth that I have to keep reminding myself is that we were all that way when we were teenagers, that I had more than my share of irresponsible, thoughtless, idiotic moments when I thought that every word that poured from my mouth and every sentence I set down on paper was the mark of genius and that any adults who tried to point out that I was only 17 or 18 or 19 or 20 and had a lot to learn were clueless dolts. I was paging through a Cole Porter biography recently and saw a 1912 photo of Porter in a Yale glee club. Of course, that was a very different time, but some of the cockier guys in that glee club had expressions on their faces that weren’t all that different from those on the faces of the strutting undegrads on campus now.