This will most likely be expanded when I have the time. You know, when it's not only a short time until class starts.

Friending people. There are many different ways of doing it. Some people friend based on shared interests, some friend because they like a post someone made, and some friend because they know the person in real life.

Me, I tend to have to know a person before I friend them. Either through real life or through roleplaying. It's not a hard and fast rule, though, so far, I only friend people I don't know well if they friend me first. Why? Because if I friended someone, and they didn't friend me back, that would be rejection. I don't handle rejection well, as people reading my more recent entries may have guessed. Even the people who say in the user info thing like: "Feel free to friend me. Don't worry if I don't friend you back, I hardly ever post locked entries," or "I don't see my friends list as an actual list of friend, I see it as a reading list, so if I don't friend you back it doesn't mean I don't like you." My response is (internally): Yes it does! The fact that I can feel rejected just by the user info of a person I've never met says something about me, and I don't think I like it.

So, as you may be able to tell, I consider my friends list as list of, if not exactly friends, then people I like, and whose lives I care about.

This creates tricky situations. For instance, what do I do if there's someone I think is really cool, and I want to get to know, but I have no guarantee that I'll be friended back? I can try getting getting to know them through communities, but there's no guarantee they'll respond to my posts, and no guarantee that they'll make posts that I can respond to. I can try and comment in their journal, but I have to have a good reason to. I wouldn't feel right commenting just to add my two cence about some random topic. So I pretty much just sit and get anxious and worried.

Another problem: As I've said, I consider my friends list as a list of friend/sort-of-friends. Is it then right to add someone just because I want to read their locked entries that sound interesting. It's not like I'd ignore them otherwise, but friending people I don't really know anything about feels callous. Not that it would be callous for anyone else to do, I just think it would be that way for me given my normal friending policy.

Sigh, what to do, what to do?

I also seem to use the word "guarantee" a lot.