1. Do you remember your first best friend? Who was it?

Wendy Miltner. I have no idea how I even met her, as she didn't live in my town; she lived in the closest small city, in a two-story house with a small yard. Her parents were kind of freaky hippie-types who fed Wendy a handfull of vitamins every morning and had a healthy pot plant in their backyard. Wendy had a rabbit fur coat that I coveted. We played well together.

2. Are you still in touch with this person?

No. Adolescence interfered. We didn't know how to transition from getting together to play with stuffed animals to getting together and talking about our lives and shopping. Plus she went to a different school system so we had radically different friends. Every once in a while a parent would run into one of hers and I'd get an update.

3. Do you have a current close friend?

I'd say my pal Avani is my closest friend. She lives in California and 99 percent of our communication is via email.

4. How did you become friends with this person?

I think I blogged this story already, but: It was my last year of college. I had finally gotten in to one of the on-campus apartments (after being rejected by my peers for six semesters in a row) and I only knew one of the women out of seven in the house before I moved in. Then one day Avani is getting some food together and she's humming or whistling Roads Girdle the Globe from XTC's Drums and Wires. I said, hey, I know that song! And we ran upstairs and looked over each others' CD collections. And we clicked, just like that.

5. Is there a friend from your past that you wish you were still in contact with? Why?

I am only in very distant contact with two people from my high school whop are now married with two sons, and coincidentally living in the same town as my parents. There are a couple of others - Tina Huytera, Maria Finucane - that I wish I at least knew what they were doing now. They were the girls I most felt an affinity with in high school. The last time I saw Tina she was living with a bunch of Rocky Horror fanboys who kind of treated her shittily. Maria went to art school in Atlanta and spent some summers travelling in a Renaissance fair. Through some online detective work my sister found out that Tina is married now, but that's all we know.