Post-tenure Partying

Last night I attended a collective birthday party for my many colleagues who have birthdays in January. Throughout the evening, the hostess kept saying "this is the kind of party you can have once you get tenure." Allow me to explain.

The hostess (who was also a birthday girl) is an expert in literatures of the Southwest - she studies cowboys, landscapes, intersections of Latino/Native American/White Folks culture, etc. Naturally, the party featured a piñata, which was shaped like a unicorn. At a certain point in the evening, her husband called everyone outside, where he had suspended the unicorn from the tree in the front yard. Another guest jumped in his pickup truck, and re-positioned it so the festivities would be illuminated by his headlights. Guests took turns being blindfolded, spun around, and handed a big stick with which to smash the piñata. The first couple of blows decapitated the unicorn, and its head got stuck in the tree. It looked quite amazing in silhouette against the full moon (sorry, too dark for a photo). While this drama was unfolding, an enterprising Girl Scout circulated through the crowd, taking orders for cookies. I signed up for two boxes - thin mints and peanut butter. Finally it was my turn. A fellow faculty member spun me around, and I let fly at whatever was in front of me. I am satisfied to say that I dealt the death blow, and the piñata's contents exploded across the yard.

This is where the post-tenure part comes in: the contents were entirely "adult-oriented", i.e. tiny bottles of booze, condoms, silk baggies containing racy underwear, and buttons featuring rude words and dirty jokes. I picked up one that read "Slut", explaining to everyone that the word's original meaning was "bad housekeeper." Indeed, my house is not so tidy right now, on account of my constantly writing lectures and conference papers.

Later that evening, as I was putting on my coat, the hostess' son, a boy of eight or so, approached and showed me his toy gun. He demonstrated how it made cool noises and could convert from a gun to a bowie knife. We discussed its potential uses in different tactical situations, and then he said "You know what's cool? You hit that piñata really hard."

All in all, a successful party - I made away with a bottle of coconut rum and reputation as a badass (at least among Lubbock's eight-year-olds).