Friendships

As expected, Donald Trump won the South Carolina GOP primary over Nikki Haley Saturday, but by a smaller margin than pre-election polls had indicated.

While the polls predicted a 30-point margin of victory for Trump, the actual margin over Haley was closer to 20 percent.

This apparently means that Trump supporters can be peeled away by direct attacks launched on him by an opponent. That Haley cut into his lead by a third (!) after a comparably short period of attack-mode campaigning may portend good things for Joe Biden and Democrats this fall.

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According to Google, the average American has about 16 friends, four of whom are "close" friends.  Google doesn't seem to be able to quantify how many friends, including close ones, that we may lose in a lifetime. Facebook, by contrast, allows each of us to have 5,000 ‘friends’ and probably at least a few of us would be close friends if we ever had the chance to actually meet. 

On a vaguely related topic, isn't it convenient that in the comics the characters have those little clouds above their heads? So you can tell what they are thinking even when they are quiet?

I've always wished real life was like that. 

But in a way it is. As anyone who does interviews for a living can attest, if you pay attention to facial expressions, gestures and body language, you can tell a lot about what somebody is thinking, even sometimes what they subconsciously are expressing. Then of course there is what they say -- and don't say. 

All of that is routine but every now and then, I meet somebody and something tells me I've just met a person with whom there is the possibility for a deep connection. The way life goes, that connection may or may not happen but I never forget the instinct. 

Even as we discover the friends we need, we seem to have to reject others. Maybe there's a lesson from Facebook's odd limitation -- that we have to lose somebody in order to let somebody else in. Sort of a serial monogamy type of thing, only 5,000 times over.

For me, these are the types of thoughts that came to me when I was lying semi-conscious after my stroke, with mortality hanging over me like a cloud that might envelop me at any second. There were no wishes for money or food or fame or success of any kind. They were only about the people I love.

It may sound silly or corny but that's why I write the way I do. 

(No headline links today.)