Is it Friday already?

1. Would you say that you’re good at keeping in touch with people? No, not really. I try. I send birthday cards or e-mails, but usually I find myself writing something along the lines of, “I know I haven’t written in awhile, but…”

2. Which communication method do you usually prefer/use: e-mail, telephone, snail mail, blog comments, or meeting in person? Why? I guess I use e-mail and blog comments most often, since they let me keep in touch with people I’ve never met, may never get a chance to meet, or people who I no longer see in person as often as I’d like. I use the telephone mainly to talk to my parents and hang up on telemarketers, and I can’t remember the last time I penned an honest-to-goodness hand-written letter. Even my e-mails are relatively short. Meeting in person is nice with people I know, with friends, but I am terrible at meeting new people and making new friends. I am just not the most outgoing of people.

3. Do you have an instant messenger program? How many? Why/why not? How often do you use it? I have ICQ, but I haven’t used it in almost a year. I reached a point where the only people in my contact list were either never online or busy with something else. I’m starting to get to that point with AIM, I think, although I still use it pretty regularly.

4. Do most of your close friends live nearby or far away? About half and half. I have friends here and friends who have graduated and moved on — to Texas, Alabama, other parts of Pennsylvania.

5. Are you an “out of sight, out of mind” person, or do you believe that “distance makes the heart grow fonder”? Both.

This morning, I received twenty-two e-mail messages. Of those, fourteen were spam with subject headers like “secrets about your credit” and “meet singles in your area” and, strangely enough, “garden ornaments”. Of the eight remaining, three were University-wide or departmental mailings that did not pertain to me, three were links to this Italian coffin maker (of which I was already well aware thanks to Neil Gaiman and the folks at Invisible City), one contained the results of a poll on whether or not a fellow capper should attend a Janeane Garofalo show (90% said yes), and one was a mass e-mail from Warren Ellis’ mailing list Bad Signal, which gets sent out two or three times a day.

Man, real e-mail would be nice.