Most of the people in my life fall into one of ten categories as follows:

1. Friends I see on a fairly regular basis*

2. Friends I email on a fairly regular basis but hardly ever see in flesh and blood (what a morbid saying, maybe I should reprase it as bread and wine…yes, much better)*

3. Friends of friends (I typically don’t think that these people like me because otherwise they would want to be my friends too…it’s one of those weird Jaime things I can’t explain)

* in both 1 and 2 above take ‘fairly regular basis’ to mean anything from a few times a week to once a month

4. Colleagues I like

5. Colleagues I neither like nor dislike

(4 and 5 can also be distinguished as those I go to lunch with (4) versus those I only go to lunch with if they’re paying (5))

6. Close family (ie. the ones you don’t get to choose)

7. Family who I would recognize if I saw them but only communicate with through Christmas cards (odly enough, this category of family also happens to be the category which reveals the most about their medical health - as if I really need to know about my great uncle’s wobbly bowels)

8. People I recognize on the street but don’t really want to invite into my home

9. People I avoid on the street because they’ve invited me into their home (thereby crossing an invisible boundary of stranger interactions)

10. People I don’t know and will likely never meet but for whom I have a whole speech planned in my mind if ever an unlikely meeting should occur (this includes people like George W. Bush, Pat Robertson, Anne Coulter and other such nut jobs)