New Haven to New Orleans

"Oh my god."  Sarah had to catch her breath from laughing.  "This place is awesome!  Are they really playing Edge of Seventeen on the tuba?  At 3 in the morning?"  She collapsed into one of the metal chairs.  The server at the edge of the cafe shook his head.  "I fucking love this place!"

"You mean they don't have that in New Haven?  You're so weird."  Felicia responded sarcastically, eying the street band.  "Two coffees and a plate of beignets," she told the server.

"Trust me, there's a lot of things New Haven doesn't have.  Like me!  New Haven doesn't have me anymore!  I'm here, not in that hellhole!  They'll never find me!"  She burst out laughing again.

Felicia wiped away some of her runny eye makeup.  "You're a whole different person with a few drinks in you.  And you have to go back sometime.  Here."  She handed Sarah one of the cafe au laits.  "Drink this.  It might help you sober up."

"Oh, you have no idea!"  Sarah had never been drunk before.  She had been to a few cocktail parties, and she and Chris had gotten a bottle of champagne to celebrate their engagement--not that she wanted to think about being engaged at the moment, or about Chris for that matter--but she had always just had one drink.  She was pretty good at making some of them last the whole night.  This time was different.  Actually, the whole experience was sort of surreal.  One day, she was an responsible and rational engaged woman who worked as a communications assistant at Yale University.  Another day she had thrown her engagement ring into the Mississippi River and gone out dancing and drinking with someone she had just met the day before.  Time to carpe the fucking diem, she figured.  Let someone else be the responsible and respectable one for a change.

Oh my god

Oh my god.

It's here.

Breathe, Alex, breathe!

The thesis has been defended successfully!


The last class has been completed (waaaah....I really like that class).

One of my papers will be put in the archives and on the research initiative's website, so I really did literally go down in history.

Oh my god.

Now all I need to do is make the necessary revisions to the thesis that my committee asked for...

Pick up my cap and funny-looking gown (what's up with those weird sleeves?)...

And then GRADUATE!

I want to both sing and cry at the same time...this is three years of hard work paying off!