Friday Five

[mrph]

From imago

1. Would you say that you're good at keeping in touch with people?

No. If I don't reply to e-mails immediately then I usually forget to reply at all, I don't check the answering machine as often as I should, and there aren't many people I feel comfortable phoning out of the blue (about ten, maybe, excluding family - and probably not the ten you'd expect, either). If people are local I'm quite good at keeping in touch, but otherwise...

2. Which communication method do you usually prefer/use: e-mail, telephone, snail mail, blog comments, or meeting in person? Why?

In order, favourite first: Meeting in person, then phone, then email, then blog comments. I just don't do snail mail these days, and I was never much good at it. I just find face-to-face communication easier, or failing that voice-to-voice - text is all well and good, but reading for tone is always a problem. Blog comments tend to be single-issue scribblings, so they're bottom of the list.

3. Do you have an instant messenger program? How many? Why/why not? How often do you use it?

No, because my dear old PC won't run them reliably. I have an irrational dislike of IM anyway.

4. Do most of your close friends live nearby or far away?

It's a mix. There's the Coventry mob, who are mostly walking distance from my house (even if it'd be a fairly long walk in some cases), and then there's cat_and_loki who's in Bristol, as is imago. gothslut's in Cambridge, claycarnac's in Edinburgh, dmh's in P'boro, Marc's in Southampton... and so on... you get the idea.

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

That's an awkward one to answer. I'm not "distance makes the heart grow fonder" (mopier, maybe, but that's different...), but I'm not quite oos,oom - there are people I see a couple of times a year, if that, who are still great friends (once the "how's life" updates are over with, it's back to business as usual).</ul