Unless you have embraced the hermit lifestyle, and let me say how much I envy you hermits out there (or should I say, in there?), you have no doubt noticed the tremendous activity swirling around our fair town. Between the presidential primary and UNC graduation, our streets have been filled with more anxious people than the sub-prime loan industry.

With all the people swarming the Greater Chapel Hill Metropolitan Area, I acted like I'd just heard the weatherman say "slight chance of snow" and bought as much milk and bread as I could carry. This was no time to be a hero. This was a time to lock the door and wait out the storm.

Two weeks ago, just before final exams at the university, every coffee shop, restaurant and place with a chair and free wi-fi was filled with students cramming for their tests and hurriedly writing papers they'd known about the whole semester. My boys thought this was the new way to eat at restaurants: They opened their library books like laptops and beat on the pages, saying, "No, no, no!"

As the week progressed, every place with a liquor license was filled with students celebrating the end of the semester or frantically scheming to keep their parents away from their grades. (To them, I say congratulations and make friends with your mail carrier, respectively.)

If exams weren't enough to crowd me off Franklin Street, we're also just days after the presidential primary. Like just about every Orange County resident, I was pretty excited about this election. OK, I bet John Edwards wasn't that excited, but he already had Iowa and New Hampshire to get worked up about.

It was exciting to be a part of a primary that was so meaningful (unlike our friends in Michigan and Florida ... children, the lesson here is no jumping in line). If our state picked Clinton, then we would have given her serious momentum as she headed toward the convention. By picking Obama, we essentially ended the race here.

Yet what made it so exciting is exactly what made it such a pain. Because the voice of North Carolina voters was so important this year, the big campaigns and the media and the pollsters swarmed upon us, poking and prodding and pandering for insight on how we planned to vote. A pre-recorded representative for Bill Clinton called to personally invite me to Hillsborough to meet the former president. I suggested he come meet me at Southern Village, since I had Rainbow Soccer practice and he was just shaking hands and talking. Sadly, we couldn't meet on common ground.

I received three calls asking whom I planned to support. For the first call, I tried to be cute and acted like I'd never heard of Obama. Being a wiseacre probably brought about the second call, from a more confident and focused individual, intent on teaching me about the candidates. Not being one for phone debates with strangers, I told her I was making lunch for my boys, which in retrospect was a bad lie since it was 4 p.m.

When the phone rang again, I looked down at my "What Would Rasheed Wallace Do?" bracelet and planned my attack. This pollster asked me whether I was supporting Obama or Clinton, and I said, "Both teams are great, I'm just going to go out there and give it 110 percent and take it one vote at a time." I didn't hear from anyone after that.

Speaking of this Democratic contest, if Clinton had won, it would have been status quo for comedians; they've been cracking jokes about the Clintons since 1988. Now that Obama could be on his way to becoming our new president, we are looking at real change in political comedy. Are you ready for real change?

Now that we've counted the last ballot, however, we still have to make it through today's graduation ceremony. Ah, graduation ... that magical time, when four years of hard work and dedication gets the same piece of paper as seven years of a 2.1 GPA and being on first-name basis with the entire staff of He's Not Here.

The streets will be teeming with people ... thousands wanting a photo by the Old Well, thousands celebrating the hard work of the graduates, and thousands whispering to each other that if N.C. A&T can get Bill Cosby and Furman University can get President George W. Bush, how is it that the University of North Carolina can only get an opera singer, and wouldn't Dean Smith be better than all three?