thursday: seah street deli with kc, m____ and his girlfriend, bertz (tm bertz, previously g____), and the chilipadi, in loving commemoration of the time we went instead to ma maison and had $20 hamburger. my love for ssd waxes and wanes, the waning part because they don't do hash browns, which very much detracts from its verisimilitude. i still miss waffle house.

afterwards: paulaner, where the drinks are diluted and the band sings u2 and cake. there was a lot of tension around the table. science does not grant one immunity from office politics. it doesn't help that our lab is set up so that the two teams within seldom get to mix -- we work out of two different rooms and get lunch at different times. prime for inciting guys to talk behind others' backs. at least the hating is pure, and mostly involves independent pairs of people, none of these chains of colleagues despising each other like in [the place i was working in before this one].