It wasn’t until I was talking to my friend that I realized a small 30-persons company is just as clique-y as a small colonial-sized company.  When you’re working in a 1500-people company it’s impossible to know everyone and it’s inevitable that you’d only hang out and become good friends with your teammates.  But even in a smaller company where you know everyone by name, you pick and choose your friends, and be picked and chosen by.  Usually you hang out with the people you sit close to, but it only works out if your personalities, age and background are close enough.  It’s unfortunate if you don’t happen to sit close to people you could mesh well with because you’re destined to be a loner in the office.  There isn’t really any other opportunity to make friends unless you bump into people in the kitchen and start having an awesomely deep conversation with them… and even then you couldn’t really sustain it unless you continue the connection in some other way, such as asking them to lunch, which is difficult to do naturally if you don’t sit near one another.  So what I’ve gathered is, there will always be cliques, sometimes even with as few as 3 or 4 people, and the geographical location is one of the primary determinants even though it’s one of those that should matter least.

My contribution for the 12th day of Christmas gluttony.

Whole Wheat Ginger Snaps

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter or margarine
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup molasses
• 4 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 tablespoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground allspice
• 1 cup white sugar for decoration

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and 1 1/2 cups of sugar until smooth. Mix in the eggs, and then the molasses. Combine the whole wheat flour, baking soda, baking powder, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, heaping the measures if you like a lot of spice. Stir the dry ingredients into the molasses mixture just until blended.
3. Roll the dough into small balls, and dip the top of each ball into the remaining white sugar. Place the cookies about 2 inches apart on the cookie sheets.
4. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes in the preheated oven, until the tops are cracked. Bake longer for crispy cookies, less time for chewy cookies. Cool on wire racks.

(From allrecipes.com)

Saying “what the heck” is really more severe than saying “what the hell”, contrary to popular belief, but still less severe than “what the fuck”.  Because “heck” is a combination of “hell” and “fuck”.

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Whenever you ask a question and the other person replies “That’s a good question,” they don’t really mean it’s a good question.  It just means they don’t know the answer to it.  I suppose they probably think it’s a good question because they have never thought of that question.  But it’s just as likely that they have never thought of it because it is a stupid question and the fact that their mind has never come across it causes the delusion that it’s a good question.

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Coffee is now a synonym for sex or dating.  You ask someone if they want to “come in for a coffee” or whether they want to “go out for a coffee”.  Coffee isn’t really supposed to be an aphrodisiac but it does quicken your heart and dilate your pupils.  So it probably does help.  You can’t lose with coffee either because you could always throw it in their face if all isn’t going well.

Working downtown again means I’m back to walking in streets with more than a couple people on them at a time, which means there are occasionally people who would be walking in the opposite direction, right on my path.  You know, one of those situations where two people are heading right towards on another and one of them has to make a sidestep to avoid a human collision. A man-a-man collision.  After various occurrences of this I’ve realized that you could easily avoid having to make a first move by directing your eyes toward the left or the right.  Chances are the other person would be looking at your eyes as they head towards you, see that you are looking in a certain direction (meaning that you’re probably planning to walk in that direction), and they would instinctively sidestep in the opposite direction.  This vastly diminishes the awkwardness of both of you moving in the same direction, be blocked, and both of you moving in the other direction, be blocked again, and so on so forth… until one of you decides to just do a half-sidestep or simply stop so to let the other go.  It’s also great if you’re lazy like me and don’t want to go through the whole process of deciding which way to go and initiating the sidestep.  Even though my laziness doesn’t stop me from going out on these walks during my break.