How You Doin’, IKEA Lamp
Three facts that hold for every person alive. One: double cheese on a pizza is always, always better—no exceptions, no context changes this. Two: Ladyhawke has to play at least once per hour at any genuinely good party. Three: Friends is the greatest television series ever made. Still. Permanently. Yes, alongside Skins and The O.C.—but you know what I mean.
The last two weeks I barely left my apartment. Officially: bad weather in Berlin, important projects, the usual. Actually: I watched all ten seasons of Friends back to back. Ten seasons. At a stretch. And now I’m somewhere in the withdrawal, blinking slowly.
The theme song has burrowed into my skull like a tapeworm with impeccable taste. I started using "How you doin’?" on my IKEA lamp. Last night I dreamed I was on a detective adventure train ride across the Orient with the entire cast—sandwiches, a murder, someone with a guitar—and then Mischa Barton came running in and tore her dress off, but that’s just my standard sleep programming at this point.
Back when the show was actually airing, my best mates and I treated the character assignments with the seriousness of a legal hearing. Schinken-Eniz was Joey, obviously. Mille became Chandler every single evening without even trying. I got stuck with Ross—anxious, overthinking, perpetually wrong about everything—but at least he ended up with Rachel, so I’ll take it.
No other show has taught me more about how to live. Six people in New York, figuring it out, failing each other, forgiving each other, mostly inside a suspiciously large apartment they couldn’t possibly afford. It argued, consistently, that most problems should be solvable within an episode—through honest conversation and a hug—which sounds like a children’s lesson until you’re thirty and realize it’s basically accurate. And that you always need to carry a little Joey with you.
They should never have taken it off air. The spin-off, Joey—Tribbiani wandering around Los Angeles, eating his feelings—doesn’t exist, we’ve agreed on that. Everything that’s tried to claim that Central Perk territory since has been, at best, a warmed-over mutation. None of it hits the same way. You know this every time you hear I’ll Be There for You on a bad enough day and feel your whole chest organize itself around it. That’s not nostalgia. That’s just the truth of the thing.