Beer And Self-Loathing In San Jose

While I was down in San Jose, M, S and I drove around for several hours on Sunday morning looking for a post-bender breakfast. After what seemed an unreasonable amount of time, M realised that there was an IHOP nearby. For those of you who don't know, IHOP is the International House Of Pancakes. It's a big breakfast restaurant chain in the US. You frequently see them at highway rest stops and things.

It was remarkable that we'd been driving around looking for breakfast because whenever S is around anything more than about 15 minutes without food is met with some serious objection. We were coming up on, like, 1 hour since getting up at this point. Turned out that S was powerful hungover. He ordered a big old omelette and didn't eat a single bite. We were starting to wonder if maybe he'd died and just didn't know to lay down yet.

The thing I found funny about IHOP, as I sat there surrounded by mainly overweight people, was the back of their menu, entitled "IHOP For Me." It was all their healthy selections. We used S's camera phone to take this shot of it. As you can see, the "healthy" section includes a picture of 4 eggs, 3 strips of ham and 2 strips of bacon. Oh, good, that certainly sounds healthy to me.
I could also, if I was watching my weight, order 4 eggs and steak. Yikes. That's peoples' idea of watching their weight? No wonder we have a problem.

The other funny thing about the IHOP was our waiter. When S ordered the omlette I said, "you come to the International House of Pancackes and don't even order a pancake?"

The waiter came rushing to S's defence, "lots of people order other things than pancakes. And do you know, I've worked here for 15 years and maybe had only 2 or 3 pancackes."
"What?" I asked, incredulously.
"No," he said, "I don't even really like pancackes."
"You don't like pancakes and you've worked at IHOP for 15 years?" I shot back. "You must be Catholic."