(no subject)

I was thinking about networking (the social kind, this time) and my seeming inability to do it effectively. A friend actually lent me a book on the subject (which, tangentially, is moderately interesting but reads like a giant sales pitch that can be boiled down to "pay attention to people") which asks how many people you can borrow a lot of money from in the middle of the night. Not perhaps the best definition of a close friend, but I get the same set with most other yardsticks, including "friends help you move. real friends help you move bodies."

The cardinality of that set is two. Maybe I shouldn't worry, since most people probably can't summon too many abettors in such dire circumstances, but I had thought that I had quite a few friends. I like spending time with people, and I get along with almost everyone, so it's puzzling to realize that I really don't have a close-knit core group of friends. My guess would be that I am too much a breadth-first social navigator, so I've got a host of casual acquaintances and a moratorium of people who care. That's a singularly depressing thought, and I'm going to pretend it's only cynicism.