When I was offered an internship at the Smithsonian this summer, I was ecstatic.

This is a dream job for me. Eight-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week, I'm planning a party.

The Institution turns 150 years old in August, and we're celebrating. Six hundred thousand people are expected to attend the weekend-long Birthday Party on the Mall.

Whether it's my friend Jennifer's wedding, a New Year's Eve get-together or The Crimson's inaugural dinner, there's nothing I like quite as much as planning a party.

And it's even turning out to be educational. I'm involved in planning a museum exhibition (of birthday cakes) and a demonstration of World Wide Web pages.

My grandmother, too, was ecstatic when I accepted the Smithsonian internship.

She hoped I would live with her for the summer.

She lives in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle. I lived with her two years ago while interning at a local paper--learning I don't want to be a journalist.

This time, though, I decided to live in the city. Although the D.C. suburbs extend out far enough that people make the daily commute from my grandmother's town to Washington by car, subway, or MARC (the Maryland commuter train), I couldn't bear to add the extra two hours to my day.

So I'm living in an apartment in Dupont Circle--the place to be, I'm told.

My commute is only 15 minutes by Metro--packed like a sardine each morning and evening with the thousands of other federal government workers.

My day is filled with back-to-back meetings, broken up only by the hot and humid walks between my office at L'Enfant Plaza and the National Mall and with a half-hour lunch, usually spent writing memos to participants in the Birthday Party.

On the days I don't have meetings on the Mall, I can go 10 hours without going outside. My office building is connected to a Metro station. So from the time I set foot on the Dupont Circle Metro escalator in the morning until I step off the escalator in the evening I don't see the sky.

And at night I fall asleep in my overpriced urban apartment to the sound of car alarms and fire engines.

I wouldn't trade it for the world. I like my job enough to be considering graduate school in museum studies. And I've decided that I'm destined to live in a city--though probably a California one on the ocean. San Francisco and San Diego are appealing.