I've recently been getting the feeling of drifting away from all my old friends. It's hard to know how much is the distance, and how much the changes in our lives. It's depressing to realize how little I know about the last few years of many people's lives. Which makes it harder to talk, since there isn't that same common base of experiences/knowledge that I always took for granted when I still lived in the same town as all of my friends.

The real problem, I think, is that even with all of the advances in ease of communication that the internet has brought to us, I still haven't found a good virtual analog to hanging out.

As one of my now-departed college friends so insightfully pointed out: even if we could play Apples to Apples online, we'd still need virtual M&Ms.