I have friends ...?

Cynthia, from school, had a dinner party this weekend. She was one of the first people I got to know when I started my classes last quarter. We sat through two classes together, and ended up spending quite a lot of time together, reading, working on projects and preparing for exams. And fooling around, when we found the time. And complaining about TAs and homework and stupid classes and competency requirements and grad school in general and annoying intimidating undergrad overachievers and grades and ...

And then the quarter was suddenly over, and we had survived it, and we both got straight As in all our classes that we had imagined we would fail (or in the best case not attain the f***ing B+ requirement).

We are still sitting in a class together, but don't see half as much of each other though, because she is busy with her robots now, and computer vision, and natural language processing, while I am busy with my bioinformatics seminars and sequencing algorithms and dynamic programming. But she's quite unique. Not so much because she's got pink hair and face piercings and tattoos and collects "Hello Kitty" stuff and walks around knitting socks (although all that definitely helped make her stand out to me), but rather because I find her very smart and genuine and committed and she's got a great cynical sense of humour that falls well with me.

C is vegetarian, and so was all the delicious food that she (somewhat to my surprise) had prepared us, including the yummiest chocolate-pecan pie I've ever had ...

The party was attended mostly by other nerds from the computer science department, and one thing I'm beginning to realize is that computer nerds are actually no less nerds than math nerds are. If anything, quite on the contrary. And I now actually sort of miss the philosophical slant of my math friends. I guess it proves that I haven't really made "the conversion" yet, that I still find more charm in debating "whether real numbers actually exist" than in talking about "water coolers for CPUs" or "security rings" in some obscure OS ...

Not to say that computer science students are boors. The ones I have met sofar have on the contrary usually been extremely knowledgeable, well-read and highly competitive.

And I left the party thinking I better read some Jack London ...