Maybe I live in Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood?

I was a teenager when I went along with my family to visit with my father's cousin and her husband.  A relatively newly wed couple they were at that time. Their home was in a part of Madras, as Chennai was known then, that seemed like a mosquito factory from where the terrible creatures were unleashed on to the world. 

 Anyway, as one who has always had a nearly obsessive compulsive disorder to check out the title of any book that I come across--and to quickly scan through if possible and even pretend to know about the book--my eyes stopped roving when I came across two books there. 

The first was Dale Carnegie's How to win friends and influence people. The other book was the one that made my heart skip a beat or two. The title blew the mind of the teenager: The joy of sex.

I did not talk about either book with my aunt nor her husband.  I pretended that I never saw their bookshelf.  Life is sometimes easier when we don't recognize reality ;) 

This post it is about my greatest failure in life. No, it is not about sex. But, please, read on ;) 

The post is about my inability to make friends.  I suppose I should have read Carnegie, instead of ... 

The introverted me had a tough time making friends right from a young age.

Of course, as it happens with anyone, the older I got the more difficult it became to make new friends. Meanwhile, plenty of old friendships withered away.  Whoever said no man is an island never knew me!

And then there is Facebook, which has completely distorted the meaning of "friend."

I used to be on Facebook.  Throughout the years that I used Facebook, I had a difficult love-hate relationship with that medium.  Not only because I was worried about the technology snooping into our lives and making money out of it, but also because I couldn't relate to the artificial "friendship" there with "friends" commenting about every damn thing, even though I knew very little about them in the real world.  Almost all of them were not really anywhere close to being my "friend."  Barely an acquaintance, if that!

Studies suggest that most people have about five intimate friends.  In addition, we might have about 15 close friends, 50 general friends. and 150 acquaintances. 

Of course, I don't care for formal academic research when common sense would suffice.  I have often commented, as a joke but always meant the joke, that intimate friends are easy to identify.  They are the ones that we might be completely at ease with to ask for money, should we need, and they too would lend it without hesitation.  Money is not something easy to part with, but commenting on Facebook status is a piece of cake ;) 

Oh well, such are the ramblings of a middle-aged-bald-man who doesn't have many friends.   Maybe I should tell you about the Joy of Sex book then ;)  Wait, I already blogged about it a while ago!