The party went well. Too well. I’ve got a major pounder but I am so happy to have done it that I don’t care. Drinking water. Quiet voices. I have to go to my Saturday class in an hour. Please kill me.

I rented five- and six-foot tiki gods, fake palm trees, and a balloon arch for the dean’s band to play under. Everyone seemed to be having a fantastic time.

So I got that job for this summer back (the “we will buy a new computer instead” one), only now I’m paying them as an independent study. I am paying both places I work this summer for experience. Again, I think the throwing money away while slapping myself with a flyswatter metaphor applies here. I was talking to one of my classmates about it, since she is on the project team, and her final comment, made with a nervous laugh was, “Don’t upstage me.”

Later, as she and I were popping the balloon arch with tiny cocktail umbrellas, she stabbed me with one and it lodged in the skin between my thumb and first finger, on my right hand. My right hand is my evil writing hand, and I turn out many evil information science propagandistic screeds with it, so recovery will be a bitch. I think I may be reading too much into the stabbing, however. (Foreshadowing.)

Most people laughed at my “free Martha” shirt, but I don’t think that anyone appreciated the fact that I was serious, as I was planning a party for 200. One woman who is a total pill said, “I didn’t think she was in jail yet.” Talk about not getting it.

Oh, well. I showed them. I jumped into this fountain when we were all finished:

It is five feet deep, so only my head and shoulders stuck out. It was very cold. Some nice people in my program pulled me out and it sobered me up a little. I was so jealous of these frat boys I saw in it at five-thirty when I went on a beer cup run, I just had to try it.