Continuing in a sort of warm-weather-and-free-food vein, I suppose, the Strawberry Festival was held again today at NYU. NYU events tend to be focused around free food - they are, after all, intended for college kids - plus occasionally free condoms (or dental dams) and whatnot. The point of the Strawberry Festival seems to be to eat things which are strawberry-related, like strawberry smoothies, bowls of strawberries, and strawberry shortcake, and things which are not strawberry-related like popcorn and cotton candy. And also to listen to a mediocre college DJ and play Twister on an alarmingly huge inflatable mat. But it wasn’t a bad way to spend the half hour I have between classes and work on Wednesdays.

Classes, incidentally, are pretty much over - Monday’s the last day, then a week of exams. Then I just have work, and maybe I’ll start sleeping again. We can only hope.

With the temperature in NYC reaching a balmy, blessedly un-humid 80 degrees this afternoon, Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day couldn’t have had better timing. Stop by any B&J scoop shop and (after waiting in a surprisingly short line) get a free ice cream cone. There’s no catch, although donation buckets are set up for the Breast Cancer Fund. I just hit the 3rd Ave and 9th Street location, where the woman in front of me told me how her daughter had called her at work to tell her to go get free ice cream on her lunch break. She recently moved to NYC from Maharashtra and said this would be her very first cone ever. I got a scoop of ever-reliable coffee, but she went for Cherry Garcia.

1. I’m not dead. Yet. I am, however, less sure that whatever it is that I’ve got is allergies, because it seems to be going through that horrible mucus-filled progression that colds and bacterial things go through. Although I’m not all that experienced in the ways of the mighty allergen, maybe this is normal. Either way, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to function in a class- or work-environment when you’re doped to the eyeballs on DayQuil and still coughing.

2. I think I’ll be selling more shirts very soon. Like, maybe this week. Keep an eye out.

3. I have the song from that VW commercial stuck in my head. It has been stuck in my head since I watched the Quicktime version at that URL a couple of days ago, and it’s never going away at all ever.

Grant at World New York (from whence that Metrocard fare analysis I mentioned a while back) pointed out a likely cause for my apparent illness: an allergic reaction because of all the Tiny Crap-Chunks (that’s the technical term) floating around in the air. Which I think is pretty plausible. I never had allergies when I lived in Massachusetts, but I started getting smacked with them a couple years ago, and each spring has been worse than the last. I’m not entirely sure this isn’t a cold or the tonsils being obnoxious again, though, so I’m sucking down the Dayquil like you wouldn’t believe.

In a weird coincidence, the very evening after I decided I’d like to see Office Space again, it turned out to be showing on cable. I watched it with the ever-fetching Crispy, right after we caught an edited-for-tv version of Pitch Black. You’d think printer antics wouldn’t go so well with flocks of ravenous sharkbat aliens, but they so do.

Thinking about Office Space the other day led me to recalling other great Job Moments and the movies containing them. The boss bits from Fight Club are great, of course, and Scott reminded me about the low ceiling office in Being John Malkovich, and there’s the quitting scene in American Beauty. Also, while not a movie, that one VW commercial is great too. None of this, incidentally, is meant to imply that I want to burn down my office building or blackmail my boss or buy a Volkswagen.

1. When I started my last job, I had a corner of a room shared with Accounting - we didn’t really have cubes or anything, and almost nobody had a separate office, but there were miscellaneous cube-esque walls chopping up the space every now and again. By the time I got laid off, I had moved up to an almost-office - a three-and-a-half-walled corner that nobody had to walk through to get anywhere else. Here, though, it’s cubes galore. I wasn’t kidding the other day about getting lost between my desk and the bathroom - I work in a giant building with several floors laid out in exactly the same way, and I couldn’t remember which row my cube was in until, like, yesterday. It’s a pretty nice cube, as far as cubes go, but it’s definitely an alien environment still. I am not used to being a little worker bee in the big IT honeycomb.

2. The fact that I am spending eight hours a day in a cube for really the first time ever - previous cube-jobs have always been part time - plus the fact that this is really quite a monstrously big company, with all the red tape and assorted hilarity that entails, has left me dying to watch Office Space again. That might have to be one of my study breaks this weekend.

3. I thought I was getting my money’s worth with the corn muffins from the coffee cart guys scattered around the Village, until I discovered that when you’re this close to the Financial District, they give you toasted corn muffins.

4. On a similarly snack-related note - since I’m often working nights until school is out, the coffee maker in the kitchen does not usually have any fresh office coffee to keep me going because nobody but me really drinks coffee at 10pm. So I’ve been making do with moderately-caffeinated iced tea from one of the vending machines, and I’ve concluded that they must be putting something highly addictive in this stuff because it’s easily the best iced tea ever. And it’s vending machine iced tea! Cracktea!

5. Just a couple of weeks ago I was musing that I haven’t gotten sick since Christmas, which is quite a long time since we’re talking about my fucked-up immune system here. But then this morning I woke up with that horrible burny sore throat and swollen tonsils and my sinuses are full of crap, so I’m a little uncomfortable on the whole. I don’t know if it’s the lack of sleep catching up with me already or what, but I think either way I’ll be sleeping in tomorrow morning.

I mentioned a few weeks ago some scary-ass playhouses built (at astronomical expense) to resemble miniature mansions. This is at the other end of the spectrum - a dad built a MechWarrior treehouse for his kids, inspired by some old shipping crates. I think that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, although when I was little I had a babysitter who had in her backyard an Imperial Walker, bought when her son was a youngun. It wasn’t nearly that big - maybe like eight or nine feet - although it seemed enormous at the time.

I’m way behind in my mail again, which was probably inevitable. I could promise to catch up this weekend, but with two weeks of classes left and the new job just getting started, I spend very little time both at home and awake. I haven’t forgotten about you, I promise.

What I’d really like to do tomorrow is go out and get roaringly drunk, like the college student I am, and then sleep all day Friday before tackling a nine page paper on Hume this weekend. But what I’ll really do is go and have one drink or maybe two before I start looking at my watch and thinking that gosh darn, I’d really better get to bed - I have to be at the office at nine! That’s not to say I don’t like the new job, though. I am and will be learning tons and the working environment is about as good as they get, now that I’ve stopped getting lost between my cube and the bathroom. And my desk - seriously, I think this desk is bigger than my entire apartment, and it’s like a standard cube desk there. I could easily, easily fit four of the giant monitors I’m currently using one of, with room to spare for the gigantic box of office supplies I was given on my first day. I’m still figuring out that weird Post-It pop-up thing, though.

So okay: last summer, during a glorious spell of freelance-funded nocturnalism, I managed to wean myself from a pretty hefty caffeine dependency I picked up in high school. (Specifically, in my junior year of high school, when I had some crazy-ass early morning Spanish literature class that necessitated getting up at something like 5:30am. In high school, mind you!) I didn’t stop drinking coffee altogether, but I no longer had to before I could function on any given morning, even once classes started again in the fall. I even made an effort to get an approximately full night of sleep when I had early classes the next day so that I would end up drinking less coffee. I was really smug about this: neener neener, I no longer have to keep a case of Jolt in the house to fend off early morning pre-coffee caffeine headaches. Take that, Wet Planet Beverages!

Except the thing about that is now I’m working full time again and still finishing up the last few weeks of classes, so I’m doing like sixteen hour days - not counting time spent studying when I get home. I can’t really get to bed before ass o’clock (pm), but I still have to get up well before ass o’clock (am). So I’m missing a lot of sleep, and I’m drinking a lot of coffee, and I just know those Saturday morning headaches are right around the corner. But I suppose that’s why they sell Jolt by the case.

I’d wondered about those signs, too, but I have to admit the actual explanation is a little disappointing. If it’s supposed to be commuter-empathetic art, it’s kind of goofy, uninteresting commuter-empathetic art. But maybe I’m just jaded from reading too much art theory this semester - I used to think Warhol was kind of fun, but if I ever see another Brillo box, I can’t be held responsible for my actions.

Shades of early 2000: I haven’t done the work-full-time thing while also doing the take-classes-full-time thing in years. Forty hours are harder to squeeze in around a week of classes than you might think, when you remember that very little college-related stuff actually takes place during classes: there are papers to write, books to read, exams to study for. However, after a day full of ID cards to be printed and paperwork to be filled out and passwords to be set, I have an official designated function consisting of Programming And/Or Scripting, and am so ready for my seven hours of sleep. It is, after all, a school night.