Unexpected Perks

The news of my engagement to Paul has gradually been making its rounds about the campus. Leroy however, our New Zealand SM, must've decided that the news was not getting spread quickly enough. He decided to make a special announcement at student assembly last night, and had me stand from my chair to receive the thudnerous applause and whoops of approval. Allegedly, I turned an impressive shade of beet red. But it turns out that the proclamation at assembly was only a preliminary introduction to a wild evening. I decided to forego Thursday night's usual volleyball practice and compose instead a Spanish version of my engagement announcement for my friends in Argentina. I had had a busy day, and was looking forward to some peace and tranquility in my own room. Imagine my annoyance when I was rudely interupted by boistrous banging on my door. With rumblings of distemperment I told the offenders to open and enter. A wave of excited faces rushed into my room, lifted me from my chair, yanked a pair of patches over my shocked eyes, and proceeded to haul me down the stairs and out the door into the rainy and windy black night! They encouraged my vocalized fears that I would be dumped in the fjord by spinning me around in various directions (until I was disoriented), and splashing my face with water. Tiring at last of this passtime, they dumped me on a couch in the girl's dorm livingroom and began covering me with a plentitude of little heart stickers. With a snatch of my hand I removed the patches from my eyes. There before me were the victorious faces of Krystle, Jenny, Maria, Rita, Krystle's friend Loraine who is visiting from Australia, and of course, the infamous dean Pia. Birgitte, the other dean on duty, joined us several minutes later. My awesome fellow SMs had prepared an entire engagement celebration! Loraine and Krystle had taken great pains to buy several cartons of fresh berries and make a whole stack of vegan pancakes for our enjoyment. It was of no matter that we ironically ate them with scoops of real danish ice cream. We chatted merrily, made toasts to Paul and myself with glasses of sparkling cider, and designed wedding dresses out of toilet paper (the model that Rita and I made looked like something from a Bible charade about Lazarus). They even gave me a couple of gifts: a big bar of dark chocolate and The Emperor's New Groove in danish. With so much sugar pumped into our systems, we had to do some tumbling gymnastics and Romanian dances before we could settle down and close the evening with the new cartoon I'd just received. Friends are so awesome. I never knew that a little announcement about being engaged would produce such a stunning response. Maybe I should get engaged more often...