Well, Stanton (I guess nearly a year and a half after her join date, I may as well give New Girl a name) is going to have another baby and I’ve got my eye set on having a hiply dreary babyshower for her. I say hiply dreary, because any function attended by government employees is by definition dreary, but it’s going to be hiply dreary by our wry self-referential recognition of the industry-rejectness of our status. I might even put up a congratulations banner made out of printer sheets or something. I think for the occasion we might all dress in grey and festoon ourselves with grey party hats. I’ll bake grey cupcakes and the whole event will be a meta-commentary-both on the eclectic despondence of workers in the federal sector, as well as our status as the Fed’s greybiest agency (in ref. to the greyby boom). Each grey cupcake will have a maraschino cherry in the middle-to show that out of the hoariest of husks springs the hope of new life and latent fecundity.  

Standish seemed taken quite taken aback by my enthusiasm for throwing her The Worst Babyshower Ever (and expressed some emotion at the word “hoary” which I was throwing about quite liberally), but agreed that the event held promise, as a piece of subtle performance art as well as the source of an Amazon gift certificate.

Standish is quite early on in the pregnancy, which leads me to wonder. In which quadmester is it most appropriate to throw someone an Awful Babyshower? Please advise.