Friday's birthday party

On Friday I had a birthday party at my place. It was extremely well-attended---in fact, one of my best-attended events ever in terms of percentage (2 of the 3 people who couldn't make it knew well in advance that they would be out of the country). The friends I invited consisted of a union of applied math, complex systems/physics, and Somerville people, which exhausts the three basic mechanisms I have here to meet people.

I bought lots of chocolate and toffee for the event, and I have way too much of it left. (There is a really good chocolatier nearby.) One pair of friends brought a cake, and others brought some gifts (such as a new stuffed animal for my local menagerie and a book about how to be an alien in England [to help me adapt to local ways]), although the most important thing they brought by far was themselves. In such a short time, I've managed to meet some very special people here and I haven't had the experience of making so many new friends so quickly since I was a frosh at Caltech. It is a testament, I think, to how good a fit Oxford is for me socially. (I suppose one might not think a priori that that would be the case, but Caltech and Oxford have a ton more similarities than differences, at least according to the basis vectors that I use. They are bother isolated from the outside world via bubbles, are filled with intellectuals and people are are genuinely both nice and interesting, lots of cool stuff is in walking distance, I get to be regularly coddled, and so on. It's true that the dress is typically fancier here, but that is a detail rather than a fundamental truth of how the place works and the things that make this place a good fit for me and me a good fit for this place are the big picture items.) I've started to get closer to a couple of people, which is also very good as that as one of my usual extreme difficulties with new people. A couple of them have taken to picking on me, which somehow always seems to happen when people becomes friends with me. Very strange. I've never seen the bullseye that other people seem to notice. The other thing that is extremely important is that because I've been getting closer to a couple of people, I finally feel like I've mostly recovered from last summer's emotional ordeal. I'm a little surprised that 6-7 months was about all I needed to be mostly recovered, and the major turning point has definitely been finding and getting to know special new people in a new environment---though in general I suspect it hasn't been so obvious to people around me that I actually needed very badly to recover from something. :)

By the way, today I turned 10000 in base 2, 20 in hexadecimal (which means that I am young but legal!), 32 in base 10, and 40 in base 8 (which is just like base 10... if you're missing two fingers). The party was on Friday because I had already purchased theatre tickets for yesterday in December and concert tickets for tonight in October. (The concert I am attending is Alison Moyet! I've been looking forward to it for months! Hopefully, she'll play some of the stuff from Yaz in addition to her solo stuff.)