Maybe it's a result of being bi-cultural, but friendship is something I've been thinking about since I can remember. Growing up, I think I was aware of how friendships could exist across vast spaces in ways that I don't know that my peers were, as most of my parents' close friends came from very far away to visit. I also saw that their friendships with people from their home country were different from the people they called friends here in the States, something which I found confusing, having little experience with the different kinds of friendship that can arise over a lifetime and through different cultural contexts. I also thought that it was a bit sad that my parents had few close friends close by. For a while, I only considered people who I was close with in my immediate are to be friends, but over time that has certainly changed.

That said, proximity certainly has an effect on how people interact with each other, if only in the frequency with which they interact. Since I moved back from living abroad, I've spent much more time maintaining the friendships I do have, that I consider to be quality friendships as when I moved abroad in the first place, I noticed that I lost touch with some good friends from Boston. When I hang out with friends from Boston now, it feels easy to get back into but when I leave, that sense of closeness fades pretty quickly and not much effort is made on either side to be involved with each other's lives until one of us informs the other that we will be in the area in which one of us lives. That may be a quality of the people I'm friends with in Boston, who by and large have not traveled much and don't have a large number of friends outside their immediate geographic region. Also, New England isn't exactly noted for its warm interpersonal interactions, so I think it may be cultural as well.

I know that as time goes on, it's normal for people to have at least some friends that are not in the same geographic area, especially now that many people go to university far from where they grew up. Most of my very close friends are scattered around the world and in fact, I don't really have anyone I would consider a friend in my immediate geographic region, though I am often introduced to people I meet in social situations as "X's friend" or "a friend from high school" or whatever.

I don't know how other people think of or qualify friendship, if they do qualify friendship at all. At this point in my life, I think that friendship is dependent on the quality of the interactions as well as how much we can depend on each other. For example, I don't talk much with the guy I consider my best friend and to be honest, he's a pretty unreliable dude in many circumstances, but when I've been in a bind he's always done his damndest to come through for me and I've tried to do the same for him.

To answer your question, I would have to say that given my limited experience and the fact that I've lost touch with my own anonymous friends from the ICQ days a decade or more ago, right now the person I feel the closest to that I've never met would have to be thenewgreen as he is my pen pal. I enjoy corresponding with him and I think that we might be friends in real life, though to what degree I couldn't really guess at.

I like interacting with a lot of the people on hubski too and I think it would be interesting to get to know some of them, but I do wonder about how the reality of a person contrasts with how they are in real life. That said, I do value the interactions on hubski for what they are. For example, I appreciate that you take time to answer my questions and allow me to bounce ideas off of your experience. I certainly hope that we could be friends in real life :)