I don’t know if my friends are dead. I can’t tell. When I had facebook, there’d be constant bombardments of reminders. Not only were my friends alive, they were eating casseroles and playing chess and watching the kind of television that makes me worry about their futures in the way you do when somebody has a drinking problem. 

Now you could die and I wouldn’t know. For days, maybe even for weeks, if I don’t have any other friends who know you. I didn’t know Whitney Houston was dead for two days and a lot of my friends know her.

But the lovely thing about not knowing if my friends have suffered some terrible bungee-jumping accident is that I wind up calling them or sending them emails every so often making sure they are still alive. Sometimes I just say, “Hello,” but that turns into, “How are you doing?” and inevitably as the email chain gets longer, “Girl have you seen MIAs new video holllllerrrr also did you know Amy and Charley broke up? Thank god, she told me he never wiped, can you believe how nasty that is?”  

And that kind of friendship is priceless.