"Friends"?

So I'm getting a little tired of one or two people who claim to be interested in me and my life and yet I hear the grand part of, well, nothing from them for most of the year.

If I receive a wall post, or an email, or a text, or a phonecall, or a voicemail....I reply. An old fashioned notion perhaps, but I'd like to think it's a polite one. Recently, I've contacted a couple of people (because they contacted me first as well!) with a reply, and a question as to how they are...and nothing back. This really gets my goat, especially more so when I didn't even make the contact in the first place.

Oh, I may as well make another list. What annoys me is:

• People who communicate - especially messages - through mutual friends, as though that counts as direct communication. Grow up and make the contact directly.
  
• People who ignore group emails, even if there are only about three people on the group message, and it's pretty personal with individual parts addressed to individual people..and then reply with one line that is irrelevant, or (even worse) a forward that says, "Forward this to sixty two people within the next 3o seconds or you will DIE", that sort of thing.
  
• Similar to the above, people who you hear nothing from all year then you get an email with "Fifty facts about me!" - I don't particularly care about your facts when I don't even know how you are, or where you are living.
• People who expect me to know how they are feeling/what is going on in their lives when they have not made contact?

I guess the point is, if you are friends with someone, you make the effort to be interested and reply, even if it's sporadic and only once or twice a year. Two of my best friends are em and Niamh who I met seven years ago, and only seen three or four times since. We go for months without contact and then will send one drunken text and it's all fine. People who do any of the above - well I guess as we all get older and wiser you realise who it's worth keeping in touch with and who it's not, and you realise time is accelerating at a scary pace...and I suppose you realise that the people who ARE amazing friends are worth ten of the ones that aren't. And that's a very cathartic thing to realise!