It's 4:31am on Tuesday, and I am wide awake. Welcome to the Sunday-Monday-Tuesday pattern of my life, holding steady since January. Here's how it works: On Sunday night, I don't sleep. (I wonder why that is?) Well, maybe I sleep, but usually for something like 2 hours. Or, as in this past Monday morning, I don't know whether I slept. I know I was awake at 3, and I know I was staring at my alarm clock in the minutes before it sounded at 6:30, but I don't know if I slept in the interim or whether I was just waiting for time to pass. Time, in the middle of a sleepless night, is a slippery bastard.

So through Monday, I drink a lot of coffee and listen to the Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! podcast and try not to do any work. (Today, I edited Karuna's law school final!) And Monday night, I get to bed early, around 9 or 10, expecting to sleep like the dead for the next 10 hours. Because I'm tired. But instead my body wakes me after 5 hours, and from 3am I am awake in my bed, which makes no sense. And then eventually I fall back to sleep, which usually happens around 45 minutes before my alarm goes off.

I NEED TO GET OUT OF MY LIFE.

Today at the office, I was informed that my going-away celebration will take the form of -- of course -- a group lunch out. I have previously posted about office lunches, on which days I seriously consider being out sick. This last lunch will be a joint celebration, because there are three birthdays in May in addition to my peace-ing out. So I was instructed to coordinate a time and place with the others. I sent an email, because talking to my coworkers is too much of a drain on a post-insomnia Monday. And so we corresponded through email despite all of us being within a six-foot radius (and no distance whatever in voice-mileage). Now, because I was involved, we won't be going to Applebees, and I recognize that as a blessing. We will instead go to the nice restaurant in the Student Union, which was my archnemesis's idea, and it was actually a good one. Adele's is not too expensive, it has a fair number of vegetarian options, and we don't have to drive there, so I don't have to play musical cars in order to keep from being in an enclosed space with any of the people who swim in a vat of White Diamonds each morning.

The kicker: The title of the luncheon, on the office calendar, is "Mayhem Birthday Luncheon." Which is an offense to language.

Another office anecdote involving food: Last week, one of the office supervisors bought ice cream as a goodbye to the student employees. Of which one was there. And she refused to eat the ice cream because she didn't want either of the flavors. In addition to being impolite, it was awkward, which is saying something when applied to my office. Eventually, after a heavy application of guilt-tripping, she did eat some of the vanilla with cookie crumblings. (Later, another student showed up, and she dug straight in, and I knew why I'd always liked that one.)

Also during the worst ice cream party I've ever had the misfortune to be involved with, the last remaining member of Donor Relations wandered over with a research question to find a paaar-taaaay in process. When I came on in August, Donor Relations was a team of three, but one woman was promoted and the other followed her military-husband to the UK. So this lady, who is actually pretty full of pep, was joking that she needed to be adopted by another group, and was trying to decide between Research and Business Applications, which is located down the hall. Research was in the lead because of the ice cream, but also, she said -- I swear to God -- "You guys are much more fun." And my head almost exploded because I tried, for a long, shocked moment to imagine (a) what her definition of "fun" was, (2) how barren her landscape of life experiences could be, (c) how anything, even something as blandly-titled as Business Applications, could make my office fun by comparison. I couldn't keep my face from contorting, but I think I recovered before anyone noticed.

And onto a point not involving work: In mixed-but-mostly-good news, I got an email Monday afternoon offering me a dorm room in the Hall of Graduate Studies (yay!). It's mixed news because I had my toes crossed for a standard-with-private-bath, of which there are scant few, and which was not offered me. But I'm taking the standard rooom, of course, and I'll call the housing office to make sure that they know that if a miracle makes a standard-with-private-bath available, I will not only take it, I will write the housing coordinator a poem in thanks. Or maybe that is not the best idea. I am not a good poet.