the next day, i sobered up and proofread it.

i swiped the first few paragraphs, but there's a link to the full thing at the bottom
if you wanna keep reading it.



The One With All the Loneliness
(an embarrassingly earnest essay about the syndicated television show, "Friends")



Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I turn on the television. Call me crazy, but it’s reassuring to hear some other voices in the room. My problem with sleep is the vulnerability. I lie in bed, eyes closed, preparing for sleep, and I am forced to confront a final moment; at some point, I will lose consciousness, and I don’t know what will happen to me next. What or who I am afraid of, I can’t be certain, but sometimes it keeps me awake for hours on end. It’s a scary thing to confront for sure, but I always feel a little braver when there’s a familiar somebody beside me to help me fill the space.

And when nobody is around, I just start watching reruns of Friends.

Watching Friends is like visiting an alternate universe that is refreshingly removed from the sometimes-sad world of adulthood. Here the real world, our closest friends are scattered all across the country. We are geographically separated from each other; as we all pursued our careers, got married and started families, meetings became more and more infrequent as life got in the way. Getting together used to require little more effort than a phone call and an offer to grab lunch. Now it requires weeks of planning and significant monetary expense. So whenever we do see our buddies from the good-old days, we can’t help but feel a tinge of regret for the way we used to be. It’s not that the past was really all that perfect, but at least we were together. Here in reality, as we begin to become aware of our age, we start to look back on the times when we were all together as a sort of golden era-- a magical time where all of your closest friends lived within walking distance.

In the world of Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel, Monica and Phoebe, life never got in the way of the things that we grew to miss the most. They hardly ever spend any time at all working at their jobs. Whenever they get promoted, they never have to move to a new city. They constantly bump into each other at the coffee shop, and there is always time to waste time in Monica’s apartment....


continued below...


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