I think most of you know that I’m doing a clinical trial for an alopecia treatment. It’s a year-long trial and I’m 3 1/2 months in, and just yesterday I noticed the first signs of regrowth! It’s just a little patch of some baby hairs, but it was very exciting to see. All the research suggests that with my kind of alopecia, hair regrowth is a near impossibility.

Would you still be with your boyfriend if your getting a residency visa wasn’t party dependent on being his girlfriend? I suspect the answer is no, and jumping to another guy you don’t know isn’t the answer here.

And good luck with the lump, Ktfran. Hopefully nothing serious, but keep us posted.

You didn’t invite her to your party, so does that mean you don’t like her? No, it means you don’t consider her among you five closest friends, and you’re the type of person who prefers smaller parties. Her party isn’t going to be small. It will be bigger than perhaps you might feel comfortable with. What you’re experiencing is feeling left out and unliked and as an introvert or someone who’s not very social, this is probably a feeling you will contend with again, and so it’s time to practice acceptance. And if you can’t accept it – if you can’t accept that the price of keeping your inner circle small and not extending yourself very much beyond your inner circle means being left out of some social events – you’ll have to decide whether it’s worth it to you to be more social than you’re comfortable being. To me, it almost sounds like a win-win to not be invited to a big party when you aren’t very social. You don’t have to worry about offending someone by not accepting an invitation and you don’t have to stress about going to a party you don’t want to go to.

The people you like the best showed up for you when you invited them and wanted them to. keep strengthening those bonds and if you feel like it’s not enough friendship in your life, you can work on making more friends. But you can also work on accepting that you aren’t a very social person and that’s going to mean being left out of social events sometimes.

I know that Veritek is married and has a toddler, and Addie Pray is busy lawyering and being what looks like an excellent single mom to her 7-year-old. Not sure about the others. And even though I banned BGM from the site (over a year ago), we’re still friendly on social media and he seems to be healthy and doing well.

So, this thread turns eight years old two months from today. It’s on page 938 of comments. I wonder, if we work really hard here, can we hit 1000 pages on the 8th anniversary? We will have to average about seven pages a week every week for the next two months, which is about a page a day, which is about 12 new comments every day. I think we can do it!