Of all the sites, the majority - 90 per cent - of close friends have been met face to face. "Face to face contact is a requirement for intimate friendships."

Don't those two sentences conflict? Unless there's a subtle difference between close and intimate or, purely to annoy me, requirement doesn't actually mean requirement.

Of course, I disagree with the statement anyway.

I'm having chicken walnut salad for lunch.

Thinking about it makes my mouth water.

I started to laugh at the "only five intimate friends" comment, and then realized that my first tier of "friends I met through the internet" has five people.

But yeah, it all depends how you define things. The list of "people I've met through the internet who'd be allowed to sleep in my house" is much bigger.

I actually declined to friend someone who was probably a first cousin once removed, but I totally couldn't place them. I mean seriously, I have 42 first cousins and they've probably bred three times that number. I certainly haven't met them, so do I have to friend them because they're a blood relation? (I'm not even that close with any of my first cousins.)

The article confused me as well.

I think they need to define friends, what is close, what is intimate for me to get it.

Seriously, I see Monique maybe once a year, and she's an intimate friend I've only seen a half dozen times who knows...entirely too much about me.

Is intimate someone who will come haul your ass to the ER? I think lots of people here absolutely would, no question. The reason they don't is a geography issue, not a friendship issue.

This is sad - it makes me think of Giles being unable to read...

How to write when you can't read

Of all the ways to learn that your brain has suffered an "insult," as medical professionals like to call the effects of strokes, one of the oddest is to get up in the morning and discover your Toronto newspaper seemingly printed in a mix of Serbo-Croatian and Korean. When 70-year-old Howard Engel came back inside with his Globe and Mail that hot July day in 2001 and found he couldn't read his own books either, the bestselling mystery novelist headed for the hospital. Tests confirmed Engel's own assumption: stroke, left side, rear. His memory was shot -- still is, for that matter, especially for names -- and he had lost a quarter of his vision, on the upper right side. But the essence of the diagnosis was a rare and almost incomprehensible condition: alexia sine agraphia. The elegant combination of Greek and Latin words meant that while Engel could still write, he could no longer read.

It's an understatement to call this a body blow to a man who writes for a living. But worse than the professional injury, as Engel's graceful little memoir The Man Who Forgot How to Read (HarperCollins) makes clear, was the insult to his very identity. Howard Engel didn't just read to work; he virtually lived to read. The son of a woman who read voraciously everything from mysteries to Proust and a father who would spin tall tales about "darkest Africa" at a moment's notice, from childhood on Engel always had a book -- or two or three -- on the go. In conversation at a neighbourhood café patio, he calls himself "hard-wired for reading."

...

What had truly sparked Sacks's admiration was the fact -- the neuroscientist calls it "astonishing" -- that while struggling to bring his reading up to Grade 3 level, Engel had actually written an entire Cooperman novel. The author is more modest; he had simply followed the age-old advice, "Write what you know," and subjected his character to the same brain insult. (Not exactly the same: "Detectives don't have strokes," Engel says dryly, "someone bashed him on the head.") Cooperman undergoes the same therapies as Engel, intermingles with the same medical professionals and fellow patients, and, without ever leaving his ward, solves the mystery of who put him in the hospital and why. Benny has since appeared in another novel, flourishing as perhaps the only brain-damaged detective going. "Benny's no more recovered than I am," says Engel. "He can still give you four reasons for the Persian Wars, but he'll have forgotten who he's talking to."

::switches tabs::

I have 81 friends (includes relatives, natch). The only ones I haven't met are buffistas. I have an outstanding request from a krav student, and finally accepted another one when he introduced himself to me at the centre. That's totally odd. And I can't place the other one--she just told me she was a student in the request.

I'm definitely close with more than 5, though. But I'm sure that number wasn't meant to count relatives. There's family, there are Montreal friends, there are krav friends, there are Buffistas forming the bulk of my list. Friends of theirs I've met form the rest.

How bittersweet. And courageous of Engel to not simply fold inward and give up the spark that fueled his writing. Bless him.

When my book-loving, television never-watching great aunt began her process toward death, the very first thing to go was her vision. That seemed such an insult.

I think people who study this sort of thing give waaaaaaaaaay more weight to the "friend" label on Facebook/LJ/MySpace than it deserves. It's used to make the social networking software seem more personal, but I've got plenty of people on my LJ friendslist who aren't technically my friends - some of them aren't even people.

I have 4 (out of 45) Facebook friends I haven't met F2F. 3 are Buffistas and 1 is someone who friended me through a mutual college friend.

For lunch I had a giant vat of potato leek soup. It was good. Of course, I now recall that I was going to defrost some chicken for dinner. Didn't take the chicken out of the freezer. Dinner will probably be more potato leek soup, then.