Birds of a feather flock together. The truth of this old adage never hit me until my late twenties by which time I had changed places and jobs a few times. Growing up with an ill defined idea of who a friend was, I imagined I would have friends of all kinds around me who would challenge my thinking and perceptions by simply being who they are. Like some carefully assembled bouquet of exotic flowers I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with. I found that people I knew from an earlier period in my life, like a neighbor or a high school friend, came to see me as being different because of the wildly different path I had taken later in life. I would like to imagine that close friends from a young age don't just fade away because you went to a different school or took a different job, but that's how it has played out consistently in my life. In brief encounters with such friends I learnt that they treated me differently and were too eager to put me down, either out of some deep insecurities, afraid of who I was or simply from an effortless nastiness that came to them. I think this (late twenties) is a time when some people become acutely perceptive of keeping score and start playing the status game etc. I uniformly avoid such idiots from my social life, when I just want to hang out without the specter of my career looming over every conversation.