Sometimes NYC is unbearably big. There’s no such thing as Central Perk or whatever the name of the bar in “How I Met Your Mother” was, because real friends live miles apart in different boroughs, and no one wants to just travel from Brooklyn Heights to the Upper West Side to drink for five hours on a Tuesday night. There’s nowhere that everybody knows your name, because eight-point-four million people live here, and everyone’s cooler, richer, and better-looking than you are, so who’d bother. No matter how many people you know, you’ll always know more wherever you came from, and you don’t just run into people you know here like you do in smalltown Ohio.
But sometimes, you buy donut-flavored lip balm with your friend Kim in Chelsea and then decide to walk down to Greenwich Village, and on your way to buy a pickle from the pickle stand–because you live in a city where sidewalk pickle stands exist–someone punches you in the shoulder. And you don’t immediately shiv them, because it’s a beautiful fall night, and you have the flavor of donuts on your lips. But you turn around, and it’s your friend Sanjay, whom you know through your friend Henry, whom you know from eating extravagant foods in large quantities and blogging about it. And you stand and talk for fifteen minutes about the burger at this place and the carrot tartare at that place with the friend YOU JUST HAPPENED TO RUN INTO in a city of EIGHT-POINT-FOUR MILLION PEOPLE, and then the guy at the pickle stand gives you free pickles.
Because sometimes NYC is great.
