I'd just like to say, at this point, that there is nothing wrong with having a lot of friends on the Internet, even compared to having fewer friends in your local area.

I had "friends" in high school. Only a small handful were *true* friends...only a small handful never turned away from me out of indifference when I became too ill to 'hang out', and only a handful of 'friends' never stabbed me in the back.

Since high school, being more or less a stay-at-home for the last six years, I don't meet many people. There are times I think this is probably for the best, because while I've had bad experiences with people being judgemental and treating me poorly in the 'real' world, the friends I have online are a different matter entirely.

On the Internet, popularity and cliques don't really matter (or shouldn't). Here, nobody is a 'freak' or a 'geek' or a 'nerd' or a 'loser', or any of those other weird social connotations we come up with when we're cruel teenagers in a cruel world. On the Internet, we're all people. Some people are nice, some people are jerks, and some people are just downright clueless. But we're all people, and as such, when we communicate, we're communicating with other people *as* people. There's no social stigma or awkward physicality to complicate matters...everything here is a matter of the intellect, of the mind reaching out in ways that aren't nearly as simple for most people in 'real life'.

Because of this, friends made on the Internet are, in most cases, every bit as true as friends made offline, and in many cases even more so. Having friends who can *really* relate to who you are as a person is very important, and that's what friendships forged online are all about.

-Trunks (rambling incoherently at 7 in the morning)