Friends

And another thing....why didn't anyone tell me it would be nearly impossible to make friends after age 28? It all seemed so easy up to that point, surrounded such as I was until that time with built-in systems of friend production: school, college, "leadership" opportunities and conferences, structured post-college employment experiences, graduate school.....But then it was off the edge of the cliff into the real world where friend making becomes a gauntlet almost as formidable as internet dating. Real life, it tuns out, presents numerous obstacles to profound friendship creation including, but not limited to:
a) a vast majority of one's time spent actually working rather than engaged in some form of thinly masked socializing such as "studying" or "team-building."
b) the reality that relationships with others at work, even if one finds those others amicable and not aggrevating, are inevitably complicated by hierarchical concerns and questions of appropriateness
c) the growing sense that everyone else has already settled into their friend patterns and that there seems to be growing rigidity around accepting new additions.
d) the truth that making friends takes time, which is a commodity in shorter supply when one actually lives in the real world where such concerns as financial well-being, professional achievement, intimate relationships and family building, homemaking and maintenance take up the lion's share of one's time and mental energy, leaving little room for the unending social marathons of youth. 

Ah, to be 20 again, completely self-absorbed and full of unlimited potential, new friends raining down left and right like so many apples from the trees in fall! A dream, now, no?