weather	:		light rain
outside	:		8°C
mood	:		matter of fact

I attach no social implications to my Friends list. Please feel free to add me or drop me as you see fit.

Whether I am a Friend Whore or not, is not for to you to decide. How you interpret the LJ Friends feature, applies only to you.

I may have added you because I like what you write or the way you write. I may have added you because I would value your input and commentary in my journal including the very rare Friends-Only posts. I may have added you because your Friends List serves as a good pool of random journals, pre-filtered of idiots for me.

I might be sick of seeing your stupid monkey ass mug in my FriendsFriends and have added you so that I can filter you out.

In any case, reciprocation is welcome but not necessary. I also fully accept the fact that I do not own my Friend-Of list and have no real influence over it.

If you'd like me to remove you, I will, by all means, respect that. If you're not comfortable with confrontations of that sort, just tell me that you "would like to maintain balance in your Friends List" and I will understand. I'm very much a proponent of "merry meet, merry part and merry meet again".

Being on my Friends list does not necessarily mean you can see any Friends-Only entries. All of my locked entries are safeguarded, written to a specific filter. I never write anything as generic Friends-Only. I explicitly decide whether or not to add each new user to one or more of my permission filters. This way, if I wanted to add someone, but weren't comfortable with them reading my Friends-Only entries, they would not be automatically opened to the new person.

And with a few exceptions, I believe that if you can't post something wide open to the public, you have no business posting it at all. In the 5+ years that I've been keeping this journal, there have only been about a handful of Friends Only entries. So, you're really not missing anything.

My Friends list does not completely reflect who I read. I have non-LJ friends that I read; I read my FriendsFriends list; there are people I read through Community Friends lists; there are LJ people that I read that I've only bookmarked and not added. A really good friend of mine has an LJ, but he writes so infrequently that all the other peoples' entries will push his down faster than I can get to it. I can only read his journal via bookmark, otherwise, I'll miss everything.

Conversely, there are people I've added that I don't read.

My Friends list does not necessary reflect who reads me and who doesn't. There are anonymous regulars reading my journal through my RSS and Atom feeds with an aggregator. There are regular LJ'ers who read my journal, but for their own reasons have not added me. There are LJ'ers who have added me but don't read my journal.

Know that I'm perfectly fine with this and you're still perfectly welcome.

I have a pretty good idea who reads me, who doesn't and how often. Whether they comment or not. Whether they have me on their Friends list or not. Whether they even have an LJ or not. Whether they have a permanent IP address or not. I know of one fellow who reads me from home, work and several public internet access locations in the vicinity of his home and work. I pretty much know his weekly schedule. And when he's travelling on business, I see the different locations come up in the list as well. I'm not stalking you, pal. You're the one reading _my_ journal. *giggle* =)

I say nothing to anyone when I remove them from my list. It's my prerogative; I don't have to explain. If you find yourself with a negative emotional response to being dropped, remember that I am but a Random Internet Stranger and, as such, am not important enough to make statements about your worth by managing my own journalspace.

I don't pressure people to comment to stay on my list. I will read your journal if I read your journal. You will see the entries that I let you see and I don't mind if you read carefully or skim. If you're interested in what I write, you will read it carefully and if you're not, you won't. It's as simple as that. It's not an indication of how much you value our friendship.

I don't respond to the posts that ask me to comment to stay on your list. I will never question why you removed me. I jump through enough hoops in life and this will not be one of them. Whether you want to read my journal is completely up to you. I will read what you let me read.

If I don't see anything from you in a while, I might look at your calendar to see if you've written something to a filter that I'm not in. But I will never be offended at being left out. I'll be only all too happy to see that you're actually alive [enough, maybe] to post. As opposed to dead, in some state of decomposition and floating face down in a muddy ditch in the middle of Nowhere, USA with multiple stab wounds and blunt force trauma to the head.

Namaste. =)