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Thursdays with Tina: Would You Believe Me If I Blame This On Server Trouble Edition
Wouldn't it be awesome if Tina was at the Correspondents' dinner?Aaarggg! I give up. I'm not even drunk. Yet. (The server has been giving me a lot of trouble, though. Really.)
TinaSpeakWhat it meansSince the finale of "Friends" has been declared a national day of mourning, I am trying to whip up an appropriately solemn sense of loss.I cannot find my medication.Here's a reason to miss "Friends": nostalgie de la boom . Through "Friends" we could keep on living the good life of careless Clinton-era prosperity.Sigh. In the mid-1990s, when the show began, the city's workaholism and materialism was in overdrive, fueled by the dot-com heyday.Some people also started magazines.The defining mood of that time was set by an iconic New Yorker cartoon, by Bob Mankoff, that was attached to every upwardly mobile fridge.Levitating refrigerators! Run away!None of the "Friends" characters worked for a dot-com company, but the ethos of that time framed the mood of the show.I am not one to let facts get in the way of a not-very-thinly veiled meditation on my own career.
Okay, not the sleepless nights of an Internet start-up, but the assumption of a groovy Silicon Valley working environment. . .Silicon Valley is in New Jersey or something, right?. . . the faith in spinning a stock-option fortune like so much digital cotton candy without hurting a soul. . .Money is like candy. No wonder I couldn't run my own magazine.For the past week, hard-charging business types have been talking sentimentally about Google like old flower children going on about Woodstock.Pets.com was their Altamont.Between downsizing, outsourcing, conglomeratizing a mysterious, volatile economy, business life today is complex and insecure.I am afraid to leave the house.A boss man who can bark "You're fired" without copious papering of the files, without sweaty hours with his human resources director, without even sweatier hours with his communications guru? Dream on.Sometimes I miss Harvey.
"Friends" reflects the boom years, too, with its characters' total lack of interest in what's going on in the world. They're focused purely on themselves and each other.
I am still sort of pretty, don't you think?