Amis.

493. The Super Sized Group Lunch.

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

 |                                                                                                   ||                    |

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

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"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/)

Tattoo.

328. "sings, 'All my friends are gettin' ma-rried...", reads a Facebooker's status, which sums up perfectly the recent shift in the Facebook contents of your friends. One blink, and instead of posting "Last night was so wicked we should totally hit da club again!!" and "NO MORE VODKA!!", your friends are now uploading wedding photos and, in some cases, videos of their toddlers crawling on the floor, nose dripping, face smeared with baby food in a way that is completely hilarious to the parents but awfully gross to everyone else. After the first one or two videos, you learn to stop watching, and politely coo, "aww", when the parents ask if you have seen the videos, then, without waiting for your reply, describe to you something else, also completely hilarious, that their children did today.

And then, once in a while, a friend shows you a picture of her children -- or monsters, as she lovingly calls them -- and you find yourself asking her, sincerely, if you could steal one of her monsters. Reasonably enough, she turns you down, so you settle for staring dreamily at the photograph, wondering where you can kidnap monsters like hers.  

329. On the way back from lunch. "So what did your parents get you?" I ask the birthday girl. Without missing a beat, Zoe replies, "a tattoo", and both of us dissolve into laughter. "This would be such a great line, in many decades to come. Remember that year, when I turned thirty... " I paint the picture. "And I got so many tattoos," Zoe continues. "The one on the left arm is from my parents..." I point at an imaginary tattoo on my own left arm. "And the one on the right arm is from my friends..." Zoe smiles, and I am relieved at how well she has been reacting to the full-service Body & Piercing voucher, a birthday present that the collective twenty of her friends have lovingly chosen and prepared. 

In the two weeks since my initial email, fifty emails have accumulated (and this is only counting the ones that included myself) and numerous hours of debates in person have passed (admittedly almost a third of it was more or less along the same line of, "This will be an AWESOME present! Make sure you take photos!"), during which, among other remarkable things, the usually controversial Bowser demonstrated a hitherto hidden sweet side and the timid Pierre actively participated in the contribution of gift ideas. Earlier today, even the elusive FL came out of hibernation to join us at lunch. Unbeknown to me at the time, he also brought to work his fancy camera, which was left behind in the office due to miscommunication with me about when exactly the present would be given. As it was, we only had my toy-like Nikon during lunch, and the few photos that I took of the momentous moment when Zoe received her present speak more about the reactions of everyone else (trying, and failing, not to laugh) than of Zoe, who hid from my camera behind the birthday card. This probably says it all about the present selection, especially when five of us voters were at the dinner where Zoe, asked if she would ever get a tattoo and in an attempt of appearing brave and life-embracing, feebly suggested that she might one day.

In all likelihood, she probably will not, but I hope that this memory will stay with her like an indelible tattoo. And, just in case Zoe gets a personality transplant between now and the end of her life and decides that she wants a dragon tattoo after all, there will always be that 200-something-euro voucher that she received for her thirtieth birthday. Her parents are probably cursing themselves for not having thought of such a genius present.

330. By Professor E. Gadd and Rosalina.

Alternate reality

Everything started with Toadette trying to arrange «her Mario party», we happily embarked ourself in this adventure, but little did we know about the fact that it was going to be a "real" Mario party.

The astute Toadette asked Rosalina and me if we wanted to join Princess Peach to play Super Mario Party on Tuesday evening. The location was already set: the castle of Princess Peach, the invitees also: Rosalina and me, Toadette, Princess Peach and Yoshi, and of course Catherine. Toadette was so enthusiastic of having all these Super Mario characters under the same roof, that she immediately called Catherine to press her to borrow a copy of Mario Party from the local library for that evening.

Only later we discovered that it was a real party and that we were celebrating Princess Peach's birthday. Toadette cunningly sat us down in our predetermined seats, the play started, and we were all unwitting pawns in the hands of a concealed puppeteer, oblivious of the fact that we would never play Super Mario, at least not with the Wii-motes.

Mario was the most notable absentee, he was probably busy fighting against evil enemies, and Bowser had carte blanche to handily conquer Peach’s castle. When he arrived to the party, he quickly monopolised our attention stealing all the spotlight from the birthday girl. He knowingly lost a bet he could never win. Of course he did not put money on it. Instead he smartly managed to make TPC to beg him to remove his clothes. He never removed them, he just kept amusing himself with TPC asking for his furry torso the whole evening. He is such an old sea dog…

But the real objective of Bowser was to conquer the heart of Princess Peach, that’s the reason why he always kidnaps her in the game, isn’t it? [Moreover Yoshi was gone, and] all this continuous arguing between them has to be rooted somewhere...

He was trying to make her jealous by peeving Catherine, or by cooing with Toadette romantically enshrouded by the dim warm light behind the table. When he started to sing «On s'en fout, on n'y va pas, on n'a qu'à se cacher sous les draps…», Princess Peach glanced at him with a sly look, she joined him in the song and we all thought it was in the bag. But then something unexpected happened. After the song, he stood up, he walked offhand towards Toadette, he swiftly took her hand in his, with such nonchalance as it was completely normal, as it was the only very thing to do in that moment… Toadette couldn’t believe it, she was visibly thrilled, radiant with a smile no one before us ever witnessed; one hand in his, and the other adjusting the hairs behind her ear, in a typical female quirk that revealed all her delight.

In the end there was just an unanswered question, why did we not play with the Wii?

オヤ・マー博士

Conversations.

34. For most of last year, I had lunch with my research group everyday. It had started out with seven girls and my supervisor, the opposite version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Slowly, for one reason or another, the group got smaller; by the end of the year, more often than not it was just Geluck, my supervisor, and me. When he went on vacation sabbatical January this year, I started having lunch more frequently with the Super Mario group. After his return, I would invite Geluck to join us every now and then, but I always wondered whether he felt comfortable, as Geluck was often uncharacteristically quiet around us. It is not that he doesn't know them. Despite being a probabilist and not working with Super Marios, the optimizers, Geluck is familiar with them thanks to his various administrative duties. Today, he sees a new face. 

"So, what do you work on?"

"Graph theory. So, no probability," answers The New Face. 

"Not everyone is perfect," replies my supervisor.

I guess he is comfortable being around us after all.

35. We are leaving the cafeteria, hoping to beat the imminent rain. So, of course the minute we step out of the door, it starts hailing. Looking at FL's head, concerned, Zoe asks, "Does it hurt?"

FL no longer speaks to Zoe. 

36. Early evening. The sun is still shining brightly. Groups of people are sitting on grass, shooting the breeze and enjoying the beautiful weather. As we walk past them, I ask her, "Will you miss Brussels?" "Yes," Julia says, "but when you start to collect so many homes, you don't know which one to miss." 

Having moved around as many times as each other, we start to talk about the pros and cons of such a life. The good thing about being able to live in various countries, is that you are given the opportunities to grow and change, in ways that you never would, were you to stay at the same place for all your life. You get to accumulate very different, many wonderful, life experiences. "The bad thing is," I say, "that you don't get to accumulate people." To be sure, the number of people whose faces and (half of the time) names that you recognize, increases as you travel. But, the number of people whose couch you can crash on after a bad week, whom you can call at 11 pm just to talk, and to whom you can't wait to tell a joke you just heard because you know they will appreciate it, this number usually restarts at zero with each new place. 

Julia agrees with me, but what she says next catches me by surprise. "And, because you know that you are leaving, subconsciously, you try not to get attached to people." I wonder if it is true, the fact that a traveller's mind does this even on a subconscious level; and if it is, which is worse, conscious detachment or subconscious detachment? 

Red.

28. After twenty minutes of playing Set, in which we stare at cards of different colors and patterns to pick out specific combinations. 

The physicist: “I’m gonna fucking dream about this tonight.”

The computer scientist: “Yeah, I get that. Sometimes I dream about Tetris, rearranging all the blocks…”

The economist: “Me, I have these dreams after I play Mario. In my dream, I press all these buttons, and then I jump around, you know. And the music is playing in the background…”

29. The yummy but rather unfortunate-looking flan.

"It looks like brain," said Zoe. "Really? I hope this is not what my brain looks like," said Catherine. As she slightly pushed the plate around, the flan wavered back and forth. "So this is why I don't get any work done!" 

30. A rare sunny afternoon on a grassy lake bank at Place Flagey. We are testing out Zoe’s theory of sunglasses being categorized into three types: the ones that bring out the red element, the ones that bring out the green element, and the neutrals. Zoe’s oversized green-rimmed sunglasses apparently belong to the first.

As he passes me the sunglasses, FL: “Look at that guy in the red jacket.”

Turning around to see, me: “Which guy?”

Zoe: “I think it’s a woman.”

FL:  “I know he’s wearing a skirt, but…”

Me: “Is it a skirt?”

Zoe: “Yes, it is a skirt, and she is a woman.”

You be the judge.

While the gender of its owner might not be immediately clear, there’s no denying that the jacket is perfectly red, and so is my shoulder bag lying nearby. But, what is the best red item to test the sunglasses? 

FL’s head. 

(And not because of his flaming red hair.)