semperfiona | Friendship, from the altfriday5

From the altfriday5:
1. Who was the last new friend that you made?

ona_tangent, pretty much concurrently.
We met Ona briefly first, but the next time we saw her she brought Scott
along.

2. How often do you make new friends?
Not as often as I'd like. I'm a recovering shy person. I call myself a
shy extrovert: generally, I enjoy and thrive on the company of people,
but I'm not into large groups or crowds, and it takes me a while to get
comfortable with a person or group of people. There are occasions,
though, when the connection is very quick indeed.

3. How do you usually meet new friends?
Usually through other friends, or via

ohari and

lavendargrrl who both seem to be more approachable--and more
forward--than I am in such things.

Another source of a lot of my friends has been Ambercons.

4. How easy you find it to make new friends? How easy did you find it
to make new friends as a child?

Pretty easy, at a casual level. Intense friendship connections are
rarer.

As a child I was terminally shy and also (possibly "therefore") picked
on by almost all my peers, so I found it very difficult to make friends.
I have worked for a long time on defeating the shyness, and even by high
school I found it easier to make friends.

5. Have you ever made a new friend online? If yes, tell us about a
memorable instance.

Several. Let's see. There was the time I was chatting through VAXPhone
with my friend Lore, who invited her boyfriend Kirk to join the
conversation. We talked for a little while and then in glancing around
the computer lab I noticed that the person sitting next to me was
running VAXPhone as well--and in the same conversation. So that was a
simultaneous meeting online and IRL.

After that I didn't meet anybody online for years, because I did not
have a computer. In 1997 or so, I was in need of a pseudonym for online
use (I wanted to post to usenet without my legal name being traceable).
I became "fionamber@aol.com". And before very long at all, I started
being IM'd by and getting email from other people interested in Amber.
One of the most memorable messages said "You're my mommy!" It was

devilmuse, and we're still friends.