01st Jul 2005
MIT Blog Survey, and My ‘Friend’ Cameron?
Can’t remember how I stumbled on this survey about blogging (probably via DayPop). But anyway, I just filled it out, and only at the end of which, when I saw this button among the choices for buttons to promote the thing, did I realize it was from my buddy Cameron Marlow, who is also the mastermind behind Blogdex.
Funny, I can confidently call Cameron a “buddy,” which seems like a non-committal kind of term. But having just completed the survey, I wonder whether it would be accurate to call him a “friend,” at least by the definition of that term given buy the survey itself. I don’t have it open anymore, as I already pressed the “submit” button and moved on. But it asked you to identify certain people as friends, family or acquaintances, and for “friend,” the definition was something like “someone you are especially close to.”
Am I especially close to Cameron? Hard to say. We’ve gone out to lunch together just the two of us. We’ve been together in small groups with friends, such as at picnics, as well as at parties and such. We’ve always got alone quite well. But am I espeically close to him? That’s probably overstating it (no pun intended). (He does live in another city, after all.) But an “acquaintance”? That seems a bit cold.
In Hungary, the term “friend” has a different connotation than here. A friend in Hungary (or perhaps a friendly acquaintance?) once explained to me that in Hungary “a friend is someone whose home you can show up at four in the morning and ask to borrow $5,000.” The idea is that you really have only one friend in your life, maybe two if you’re lucky. Like the expression in America that “a friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move bodies.”
Cameron’s a great guy. I’d happily wake up at 4am to welcome him into my home in a time of need. $5,000, that might be another thing. I’d help him move (in principle; he lives in the Boston area; I’d help him move if he lived in NYC). Moving bodies I don’t want to know about.
Anyway, if you blog, take his survey.
UPDATE:
I see that on his blog he links to me among a shortlist of blogs under the header “Friends.”
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