it's easy to be lonely and pathetic when you work from home and have no friends living in the same state as you

I need to make more friends.
       I've come to realize that all of my closest friends are people who I've lived near.  In Chicago, my best friends lived down the street from me.  In college, it was either people in Murray or who worked in the Writing Center.  I think I can only become friends with people who can't get away from me.
       First impressions never swing in my favor.  Right toward the end of college, I learned to be socially adept(ish).  Before that, and occasionally it feels like since then, I'd been stuck with the social skills that prematurely stopped developing sometime in middle school.  A couple weeks after meeting new people, I figure out how to not be a painfully awkward weirdo and just settle down into being my usual tolerably awkward self.  And I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not the totally wretched twerp I was up through my junior year of college, that I don't have to be painfully self-conscious, and that there is a distinct possibility that people actually do want to hang out with me.
       It turns out that the tapes we watched in fourth grade about self esteem were right - confidence trumps awkwardness most of the time.
       I just have no idea how to find the intellectual, bizarre people with whom I tend to get along.

       The friends I made working retail over the holidays are reasonably cool, and I suppose normal adults meet people through friends and friends of friends and so on.  However, going out clubbing (the kind that involves techno and strobe lights, not the kind that involves bludgeoning baby seals to death) has never been my idea of a good time (either version), and that's pretty much all they do.

       This is a skill you're supposed to learn as a child, and it turns out I'm still terrible at it.  I blame education.  It got in the way of my social development.