Amis.

493. The Super Sized Group Lunch.

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------    ------------------

 | [Browser] [Postdoc] [Baby #1] [Princess Peach] [Rainbow] [Mario] ||  [Ambrosio]  |

 |                                                                                                   ||                    |

 | [Damien]    [Daisy]  [Baby #2]      [Rosalina]          [Me]      [Anna] ||      [FL]        | 

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------    ------------------

"Do you think we can get a group discount?" 
...
"Which class do we come from?" 
...
"Are those two guys eating with us, or they are just following? I mean, do we know them?" -- referring to Baby #1 and Baby #2, one new and one potentially new PhD students. 
...
"That's his punishment, for being an ass."
...
"I'm still not finished with the book yet, so don't tell me anything." 
"Where are you up to?" 
"Just after the part about the girl." 
"Which girl?"
*a pause* 
"You mean THERE IS MORE THAN ONE GIRL?"

494. Late afternoon. As I am returning to my office, one door down the corridor Giraffe is unlocking his. Hearing foot steps, Giraffe looks up. 
"Are you dunamberassingmargin?"  he wants to know.
"Mmm?" I am equally articulate. 
Having gotten his PhD in the States, Giraffe speaks English fluently. Nevertheless, I do not have a clue what he has just said. Am I done what?
"Are you done embarrassing margin?"
As the repeated words untangle themselves, an image flashes back: Rainbow, Zoe and myself, gathering in FL's office, making fun of him for acting all precious about being invited to a girls-only drinks.
"Never," comes a loud answer from Rainbow's office.
Giraffe smiles.

Maybe we should invite him to our next girls-only drinks. 

495. "Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who."" -- Richard Russo, Straight Man. 

Chào, early evening. Having successfully corrupted Zoe by convincing her to skip swimming, I am now studying the restaurant menu, trying to make up my mind between the traditional Vietnamese beef noodle soup and the spicy Vietnamese beef noodle soup. It might look like I just wrote the same thing twice except that one is with and one is without chili, but the two dishes are really not the same. Had I written them in Vietnamese, pho and bun bo, you would have immediately seen that they are totally different. Yet, they are equally delicious, which makes my decision process extremely difficult. 

As I am going back and forth in my mind (I'll go for pho! No, bun bo! Wait, pho! No, I'll choose bun bo!), Zoe scans through her copy of the restaurant menu. "So what are you going to eat, now that you can't eat meat?" 

Poster.

343. 4 am. 
"This is actually a nice place to sit..."
"I know."

344. Wednesday. "Come see Lion," Bowser said, motioning me to come closer to his gigantic Mac screen. Had it not been for the department email sent out earlier this afternoon about the new Mac OS, I would have easily thought that Bowser was referring to an animal. "I don't want to see your Lion." "Come see Lion," Bowser had a remarkable ability to filter out things he preferred not to hear. "No Lion," I shortened my response, in case it would help make my point less ambiguous, then wrote on his whiteboard, "NO LION!!", underlined. I did, in the end, look at the fancy Mail application in Lion. Bowser was happy.

Friday. Returning to work after the national holiday, Rosalina announced, brightly, "We have updated to Lion," we being, presumably, Professor E. Gadd and herself. Because she was my office-mate, and because she was smiling so sweetly, I couldn't tell her that I did not want to see her Lion. Plus, the Mail application had seemed really neat. I came over to her desk, and Cassandra quickly summarized all cool things that came with Lion. "Mmmmmm," I nodded appreciatively, wondering whether I should admit to her that I read a review about Lion the previous night, and out of all great technical features listed, I could only remember Mission Control. The name sounded awesome.

Saturday. Arsenal tram station. Running into each other by coincidence, of all things, I asked FL, "have you installed Lion?" He said he was thinking about it, and I told him I was kind of interested too. Who wouldn't be interested in Mission Control? Ambrosio, FL's office-mate, had apparently suggested the plan of getting Lion to share among five computers, because you could get five legal licenses per copy. Sure, why not, I told Ambrosio at the end of Zoe's birthday party, when he asked if I wanted to be part of the plan. 

Sunday morning. I got Lion. 

Wonder if Bowser would want to come see it.

345. Except for a 999-piece jigsaw puzzle (Ascending and Descending by M.C.Escher) and a San Francisco calendar, my bedroom walls are completely bare. It has always been my plan to find a poster or photos to decorate the white space, but the right thing has never come along. 

Until now.

(http://pinterest.com/pin/52521203/)

Ice-cream.

283. A conversation between researchers. Coming back to the offices after a Coke break, I discover that my door was locked. "You could come to my office and see the red pants if you like," Princess Peach offers some entertainment while I wait for Cassandra to come back. "Mmmm," I am mentally weighing up my alternatives. "Or you could just stand against the door," Princess Peach points out that I don't have any. Five seconds later, we are in her office. "See, it's red," Princess Peach holds up the folded pair of orange pants. "Looks orange to me..." "No, it's red," Princess Peach replies, because this is how debates work: Each team repeats its own opinion, preferably verbatim, until one team is bored and gives up. Everyone learns this from kindergarten. "No, it's orange..." 
Before the debate gets the chance to be further repetitive, my office-neighbour walks in. "There is a trap!" he announces, "the chair is broken!" If Princess Peach and I are concerned for the chair that isn't even his, we do not show it. "Which colour do you think this is?" "Bright orange," I helpfully give him a clue. "Come on it's red!" Princess Peach has her own clue. "Well, it can be many things but it's definitely not bright orange..."

Somehow, real work still gets done in our corridor.

284. "There is no ice-cream left??" asks Bowser, entering the coffee room. 
Earlier, an unusually large group of us have gone to La Bastoche for an usually long lunch, as the cafeteria (our normal spot) this week is crowded with over a thousand of participants of an international conference. When the collective payment tallied significantly over the bill and no one wanted to claim the difference, Daisy suggested that we would use the money to buy ice-cream. As a result, less than two hours later, we have taken yet another long break from work for afternoon snack, not that anyone really needs it after all the pasta and fries. Wanting to finish some work, Bowser has been the last to arrive, and now appears disappointed by the lack of ice-cream on the table, except for the little bits inside used plastic cups. After finding out the (obvious) hidden location of the remaining ice-cream, Bowser takes half a cup of the tiramisu-flavoured, then passes the container over to Princess Peach. 
"Here, have some more!" Princess Peach heaps a gigantic spoon onto Bowser's cup. 
"No, no, I have a body, I have a reputation-," Bowswer protests. 
Daisy, Bower's officemate, interrupts, "You had a Twix and two Cokes before lunch..."

285. Late evening. Living room. "So, a state is said to be sticky if...," I gesture wildly at the laptop screen, naively hoping that somehow my hand movements would aid the understanding of a quantum physicist and a public servant as they listen to my applied probability talk. Sitting, the quantum physicist scribbles something down; standing, the public servant frowns, seemingly unable to decide whether to fall asleep on the spot or to laugh. 

Neither had volunteered to be in this situation: the quantum physicist had asked if I wanted to go for an evening walk, citing packing and preparation for presentation, I had said no but offered strawberries and baileys in exchange for his motivating me to actually prepare my talk; the public servant, coming home after a weekly evening theatre class, had begun to listen to the rehearsal out of curiosity, then out of politeness. There is only so much politeness one can have. Slowly, the public servant walks backward, trying to escape unnoticed and failing, because performers usually notice when the number of audience is reduced by half. Caught in the act, "I should, uhm, sleep, but, err, thank you! For the talk...," the public servant stammers. "I feel much more intelligent, now that I know what sticky states are, and when they, uhm, err, travel..," he bravely continues, then mutters to the quantum physicist, "Good luck!" Reaching the doorway, the public servant remembers something and turns around, "Il y a de la bière dans le frigo, si tu veux..."