a partial list of everything I have received over the last three days:

1. Parking permit
2. ID card with halfway decent photo
3. Tiny stapler
4. Office keys
5. Invitation to read with a bunch of other faculty
6. Shiny folders
7. Lots and lots and lots of handouts
8. HEALTH INSURANCE
9. Chocolate
10. Little blue reusable grocery sacks
11. Dynamite Mexican food
12. Reassurance
13. Cherry tomatoes from sailorsausage's garden
14. Invitations to the dog park
15. A student writing consultant, who apparently is at my disposal during my days in the computer labs
16. Many cans of diet Coke
17. An oath, to be sworn to the state of Michigan
18. Invitation to go out tonight

Yes, please. To all of them.

*

I'm still not acclimated to this whole thing. Wednesday and Thursday we were fed, repeatedly, by University Food Services. It was strange to sit next to the Provost while the student caterers served us soup and a terrible chicken salad. I kept watching them and trying to pick out which one was college-me, which one was brunette and slightly hungover and the fastest napkin folder and secretly gobbling leftover steak and cookies in the room where the sternos are kept.

I thought back to all the days and nights I catered as a student, the white shirts that I never kept clean and the little black apron I stole and still use. The weddings that we catered up at the lodge, the fourteen-hour days that we spent setting up tables and polishing silverware and serving and clearing and waiting for the wedding to be over so that we could--finally, at 1 or 2 or, once, 3 am--break down all the tables and pack up all the silverware and roll the cambros back to the kitchen to do another two hours' worth of dishes.

The people who ran FSA and the vast number of cigarettes they could smoke. The seatbelt-less van that we bumped around town in, bracing ourselves against racks of fruit salad and deli trays and open gravy boats of ranch dressing. The time I catered solo a tiny lunch meeting at the president's house and overheard the VP of Student Affairs gushing about the movie he'd just seen. The leftover food that we brought back from dinners one night that would then show up, repurposed in salads and sandwiches, for sale in the dining hall over the next week. The summer nights we bartended and stole beers for when we got home, our legs and shoulders aching from the giant trays of half-empty stemware we'd carried. How I still identify so much more easily with servers and caterers than I do with faculty members and office workers.

Fortunately, my fellow visitors--being creative writers and adjuncts and playwrights--are also reformed bartenders and servers and caterers. And so we met eyes across the table more than a few times during the service, especially when the student caterers miscounted entrees and knocked our water glasses with their elbows and cleared from the wrong side, and our expressions said the same thing every time: Been there, kid.