Who Are Your Friends?

NYT Headline: "Do Your Friends Actually Like You?"

Well, that depends on what you mean by "friends." If you mean the people I deal with socially and professionally, some of them do, and a lot of them are just being polite. That seems to be what they mean: "THINK of all the people with whom you interact during the course of a day, week, month and year."

OK, I guess. I imagine a lot of them really don't like me, but aren't ready to tell me so.

But I know some guys I don't see every year, that I don't even talk to every year, but we were together 18 hours a day in Iraq. I'm pretty sure I could go look any of them up tomorrow and we'd start back right where we left off. Certainly it's been that way every time I have ever been able to run into any of them.

Got close friends too, and family. Don't see them every day. I know who I can count on, though, and there's a few of them. Maybe one fewer, soon. That's the other side of this kind of thing. If it's just people you happen to run into every so often, well, they come and they go. The ones who count are people you miss.