I took unfamiliar subway lines to get to an unfamiliar part of town, and to tell the truth I loved it. The process of meeting friends is a very active one here. It involves train stations and transfers and jaywalking and jogging. It’s active mentally, too--navigation is required, manipulations of cognitive maps and intentional direction of working memory. (That last part is key, because your phone is by then on its deathbed and there’s not much you can do other than let it die peacefully at home in your pocket, surrounded by loved ones.) The point is that there is an exhilaration in getting to your friends, not just in whatever you do once you get there.
Once you get there, in fact, it feels about the same as anywhere else. When I walked into Joe’s Ginger, the Chinatown restaurant on an obscure side street I had so exerted myself to find, and took my seat at the Wayne Szalinski boysz’s table, the location was suddenly irrelevant. It was not a distinctly New York City hangout--it was just me and my friends, hanging out before a show, the same way we’ve done so many times before.
This has the potential to turn into something horrible and cliche about friendship and home, so I don’t want to drag it out too long, but let me say this: There is something to this idea that friendship is not geo-tagged.
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