Last night I worked at "The Buzz," which is this "welcome back to school, have a sober party"-type event. You may remember that I worked this thing last year, doing henna. FOUR HOURS OF HELL DOING HENNA.

I did not want to work this event again this year. Did. Not. Want. To. But I knew damn well I'd end up working it again anyway. I had no justifiable excuse not to. "I don't wanna" is not a justifiable excuse, especially if all I'd be doing instead is sitting around watching DVD's when they were desperate and begging me for assistance.

They did, however, offer non-henna alternatives. This year they had bag decorating, random crap decorating, buttonmaking, play with clay, and bracelet making.

Eventually I caved and said, "Fine. I will work it. I JUST WON'T DO HENNA." So I asked for the jewelry table.

I didn't actually think us having a craft booth doing stuff that everyone had pretty much stopped doing since grade school wasn't going to be all that popular. I did figured it'd be a "sit around and yak and make bracelets for myself" kind of deal.

Well, surprise, surprise for EVERYONE, because our tent was obscenely popular. Packed to the gills all night. Hell, the "decorate stuff" and bags and buttonmaking ran out halfway through the night.

As for my booth, OMFG. Who knew so many people would be into making memory wire bracelets? (Dudes included.) Most of them (but not all) were pre-cut, but we had to add loops onto the ends to hold the beads on, and trying to keep up with the demand, well... my coworker kept making sweatshop comments, and any bracelet making of our own got crammed into like 30 seconds of scrambling before a plate of wires were all gone. I turned around to talk to someone for a few seconds and poof, a plate got cleared.

The wire wasn't the easist thing to work with, and the tools we had weren't the greatest for pain-free labor (the clippers in particular). I ended up with bleeding fingers so much during the night from being stabbed by the wire that at one point I went over to the first aid tent and asked for half a box of Band-Aids. And they gave them to me. I couldn't get the blood off the tools too well either. How sad is that? I don't do henna this year and still get injured up the wazoo. My left hand is covered in Band-Aids, my left thumbnail got gouged a lot, and the hand that was using the NOT-easy-to-cut-with clippers is way sore. I probably shouldn't be typing this, or doing anything besides sitting catatonically for the rest of the weekend. Ouch. (So much for leaving this event pain-free...)

We started to run out of beads maybe two hours into the whole thing, and people were down to the dregs. And yet, they still kept coming and working, even when the selection stunk and people were down to making plain wooden beaded bracelets that a 5-year-old might make. And when someone dug up more plastic kiddie beads, people still kept coming. There were some uber-cheesy plastic tugboat beads and even THOSE got all used up. People just really liked doing the work on a bracelet even if it wasn't exactly quality. Who would have figured this with non-craft people, much less 18-22-year-olds? Go figure.

If the CC ever does any other fundraiser-type-thing, they have got to do bracelets again. If we'd even been charging a buck per bracelet we would have made bank.

At one point I got begged to do henna again. HELL NO! Those people were still going by the time I left at 11! Course, the funny thing is I'm still in as much pain as I was last year...

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