This is post #1200. The new Blogger interface tells me so. Getting to round numbers are fun. 1200 is a big number. And I've been doing this for not quite 2 years (a year and 10 months), so that's a little less than 2 posts a day on average, if my math is right.

Anyway.

Over at NeoTokyoTimes, which is one of just -- counting in my head, give me a second -- 5 law-or-law-student blogs I check fairly regularly (bonus points to anyone who wants to guess the rest of the list; I'm defining fairly regularly as close-to-daily), there's a comment I find thought-provoking:

More and more I'm beginning to believe that my tendency to play social butterfly has too often left me in the lurch when people who decide to do things invite only their "primary friends" of which I am not considered. People don't believe that I consider all of my friends "primary friends," and that they must think that they're considered by me as "secondary friends." I suppose their assessment is probably correct. More than ten "primary friends" probably means that they're actually all secondaries. This is phenomenally sad.

I have nothing tremendously substantive to say in response, but it got my attention because we don't usually get to know how other people think about stuff like this. And when I read "social butterfly" in the first line, the image I get -- and it's just because the term makes me think of the obnoxious phony people schmoozing at cocktail parties, trying to shake everyone's hand and figure out whether you can help their career, and if you can't you're useless and they're off to find another conversation -- is of someone who's collecting friends like trading cards, not necessarily of someone who cares about his depth of relationships, so it's interesting just to know how someone else thinks about this stuff.

For me -- and this may be revealing too much about what goes on inside my head, I suppose -- I have some of the same worries, but coming from the other direction -- just to use NeoTokyo's terminology because I don't have anything better -- I feel like I have pretty good intuition when I meet someone whether he or she is someone I'd want to be friends with, whether I think he or she is a good person, who I'd want to know. But the relatively tentative, shy part of me isn't always sure how to translate that into actually becoming friends, and I think I tend to overthink stuff, trying to figure out how to "convert" the acquaintance into a friend, but also wanting to make sure I'm not wrongly thinking the other person would want to be friends with me. (Of course, this is only magnified when I'm thinking about whether if I ask a girl on a date, I think she's actually interested or not -- I feel like I have good instincts as to whether I'll like somebody, even just after meeting them for a moment, but I don't feel like I trust my instincts at all about whether she likes me back and am usually pretty clueless... and I'm not sure how one gets better at that... but probably everyone feels the way I do, on some level, unless they're just so taken with themselves that they feel everyone must like them... which may not be terrible for the one who feels that way....) These are some massive run-on sentences with all the dashes and ellipses. Sorry about that. And I think I'm revealing too much about the inner workings of my head. Oh well. I'll live.