Matt Stone and Trey Parker are human.

I was watching South Park last night on SouthParkStudios (full episodes, HQ!) and, not knowing what episode I really felt like watching, since I've seen pretty much all of them, I hit the Random Episode button. Fortunately, the little Buddy Holly airplane, The SPS, in which I was flying crash-landed on one of the older episodes, episode 4 of season 3, "Tweek vs. Craig." Also fortunately, it's one of my more favored episodes (the newer seasons are way too hit-or-miss).

As with any South Park episode, Stone and Parker throw in some sort of preachy, didactic lesson at the end of the episode in which the boys learn some important life lesson as they go through adolescence and ultimately A) accept their lessons or B) decide that the aforementioned lesson is retarded (or secret answer C) Cartman makes fun of them anyways). But one quote that came from this episode was "Saying goodbye doesn't mean anything. It's the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it."

It's cheesy and stupid, but as soon as I heard those words spoken, I thought about how many farewell lunches and dinners I've attended for people in both of the labs for which I work.

Four. Four farewell meals thus far, and I will attend another one this Friday intended for Christine and...um...myself. (It's a bit like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral, isn't it?) And here's the free side of fries for playing along: three of them were buffets.

I've been here since the Twenty-Third of May in Two Thousand Eight The Year of Our Lord and two of those farewell meals were within the first two weeks of my arrival. The turnover rate here is just too damn fast.

But that is neither here nor there. My ultimate point is this: I wish more people would leave the lab so that I can have more excuses to eat at buffets.