I just came back from Tequila Rain on Landsdowne Street. There was a five dollar cover, but no matter where I go, I always end up spending precisely thirty dollars. Tonight was no exception. So things were okay. Whenever there are only bad beers on tap, I opt for a Maker’s Mark and giner ale. The Ryan’s were there to celebrate. And Myers got me a Bud Light. I bought Nick one, so things evened out. Ryan owed Nick. I payed Nick. I owed Ryan. All is right in the world.

Lindsey and Rita and Jacqui — I no longer call her Qui — where there. Qui and Nick recently took the LSATs together. While I enjoy knowing that Joe is sitting next to the man in the fedora and is not the hit man, I still can’t imagine going to law school. Nick couldn’t give me a good reason for applying, but he works at a law firm. Maybe he has a reasonable idea. It’s hard to say.

I’ve signed up for another Persian birthday party. This time it is Anahita’s birthday. Last time we celebrated Adelle’s [please excuse the spelling]. Before her birthday dinner and cake, Verena and I are slated to play squash. Halvar and David are invited once again. I can only hope they join us, and I can only hope I wake up in time.

Verena explained how Cambridge is a catch-all, at least for Harvard folk. At MIT we ran into Tse-tse, who is not a fly but a recent graduate from Eliot House now in an MArch of PhD program in course four, architecture for you lay-men. No one seems to go too far. At least most people don’t. Boston and New York are only fifteen dollars away, and email is free no matter where you are. Growing up here makes the world all that much smaller. And Nick and Kershner promised tonight to travel as far as Durham to see me. England is about as far. If only I could make some headway on my thesis. Complete Banach spaces with respect to horrible hypersurface Dirac operator-like norms, here I come.

By the way, I’ve included a picture of that horrible, famous man, Mandelbrot. He mentioned that some have called the Mandelbrot set the most complicated structure in mathematics. I wrote an elementary paper for my complex analysis class showing that it is, in some sense, no more complicated than a circle. [For those in the know, it is a routine fact that the Mandelbrot set is simply connnected; it is, as McMullen showed, also universal. It’s quadratic, after all. So are you really surprised?]