My friend Joe called the other night. That's a phrase I use a lot, lately. Not the bit about someone calling. "My friend." That one. I hear myself say it all the time. I see myself type it in almost daily on the MOO or in my journal entries. My friend X, my friend Y, my best friend Z.
This strikes me as being ritualistic, but why on earth would I need to do such a thing? No one expects me to have friends or acquaintances that they'd worry about inviting into their homes. I'm not name-dropping at all. All I can figure is that it's some ancient need to establish a known quantity; not Other, not a wildcard. Does this makes me some kind of uber-hostess? Meet X, a fan of Babylon 5. This is Y, from Minneapolis. Here's Z, she likes chocolate and zydeco. No bizarre religious ax murderers here or anything, nosiree. Just my friends.
I am, in fact, very fond of introducing people by including some interesting facts about them. This sometimes bugs people ("I am not a number, I am a free man!"), but generally it gets the social wheels turning. It may be a bad habit I ought to break. After all, people will figure out what they have in common, won't they? Maybe. An awful lot of my friends are brilliant at what they do for a living, and crap at social skills. They don't even shake hands when they're introduced, which I find peculiarly graceless in both men and women. So I'm probably overcompensating for these louts by generally assuming everyone would like as much information as possible. But geez, somebody's got to do it.
Anyway, I have lots of friends. I like for my friends to meet my other friends. I think good manners are a neglected art. And deep inside, I just know strangers will feel more comfortable if they have at least one thing to start talking about. Even if that's how annoying it is of me to label them.