what a difference a minute makes

today i ran into another friend on the subway, the fourth random run in i've had since i moved to new york.

it all happened because i decided to work late, and then spent a good 20 minutes in duane reade. a guy from my hometown was walking out of the broadway lafayette subway stop as i was walking in. it was serendipity.

i was nice to see him and catch up. i learned one childhood friend is getting married, another is having kids. amazing.

but beyond that, it got me thinking. what other friends have i passed on a crowded manhattan street without noticing? who could i have run into if i hadn't taken that shower at the gym? well maybe that's a bad example. no one wants to run into an old friend after going to the gym and skipping a shower.

after working and living in new york for a few months, last summer i thought it would be interesting to keep a record of all the famous people i saw. now i'm pretty sure that it would probably be a good idea to collect old friends the way i once collected celebrities. it wouldn't be hard.

sometimes i like to fantasize about what a group of all the people i know in new york might look like. my extended social network, in other words. imagine this: i am in a circle in the middle, and everyone connected to me are my friends and people i know. people who are closest to me, my boyfriend, roommate, friends i talk to at least once a week and coworkers, would have the shortest lines connecting to me while people who i see from time to time would have longer connected lines.

attached to my friends would be similar lines, connecting them to people who they know in new york. it could go on and on. i think if i got a collection together, a party if you will, it could have the potential to be quite large, what with all those second and third tier friends of mine (as we called them in college), along with their friends.

running into old friends makes me feel like the world is very small, and new york, no matter how big and imposing it seems, actually seems to shrink to fit around me. but i know this is not the case. there are reasons why so many people i know live here. and because there are so many of them, i have a greater probability of running into one of them. but it makes me feel a lot less like a small fish in an ocean.

and that's a pretty nice feeling.