A social calendar can be a confusing thing - packing in friends, family, obligations and relaxation will never be easy. Writing to them. Texting them. Meeting up for a drink. It would be fantastic to have all the time and money in the world to be with people but its not a realistic hope for those without a serious acre of funds behind them. One of the biggest things that always stands in the way of meeting up with peeps has become the weekend/weekday divide. Students and workers will never be best buddies with this standing in their way. You say a tuesday night out for cheap drinks? I say I have to be up at 7 on wednesday. This was never going to be easy but why is it that a creeping sense of being boring, a slight greying up of your personality, begins to bother you?

Being nagged by a sense of my lack of cool is not exactly a cutting edge phenomena for me. Having lost contact with some people totally and most meaningful contact with others I begin to consider that most revolutionary of pruning techniques - the facebook friend purge. Cut for not talking to me in 5 years. Cut for being an old university acquaintance. Did I work with you on a student film once? Cut! Does culling make me cool? Is a statement of needing (or NOT in this case) symptomatic of a loser or a creepy collection aspect? I don't subscribe to that so much - if cool is relaxed then presumably axing people is such an actively dismissive decision it becomes uncool. Or is being friends indiscriminately just as bad? Being cool online is certainly very catch 22 in its logic. At once yes you can have pretensions to awesome behaviour online but...you're still sitting inside typing it up. That's anti-life equation right there. Maybe cool can't exist in a world with the internet and all attempts to prop it up with tweets and teenage sincerity are utterly fruitless.

Needless to say if you can dispense with someone online then why would you need to talk to them in real life? Frivolities are actively encouraged on the web but once you get beyond cats and memes what can we talk about? It certainly isn't what I did yesterday (online) or how funny something (online) was/is. What about football? Male niche for the most part. Sparkling conversation? I read a guide for that on ehow.com once. It is hard to escape from the net (haha!) but the more I see of the world the more I see that as a chronicling tool the internet is a fantastic option - it is a wonderful repository of information. What it can't replicate is friends in the same room spending time with each other. It is the fine balance between recording our lives and making them worth recording that we could improve.