New York is a city that sometimes seems unmanageable - that whole "sea of nameless faces" thing.  Sometimes, it feels like a small town.  Sometimes it feels like Hell, but I guess that can be said of any place.  Recently for me, it's felt like deja vu.  After stopping in at my 10 year high school reunion some six months ago, I can't seem to go more than a couple of blocks without running in to someone who I knew back then.  The conversations all start the same way, either with "can you believe how poor a showing it was at the reunion?" or "how come you weren't at the reunion?  oh, good point," and then generally move to a very gossipy place.  Usually, I take no truck in that, but since there's been such a groundswell of information lately, I've started to find the update-mongering somewhat amusing.  Generally there isn't too much of note, so far there's only one Class of '98 baby, not one of the handful of marriages has ended yet, more than a handful of people are employed as social workers.  But there is one classmate who had sent out a mass email regarding the birth of his tech blog to most of the class, though I was not popular in high school and thus not a recipient, and everyone seems to have been taken aback at the angry subtext of his posts.  When his name came up, the surprisingly improved in the looks department classmate that I had just run into said this: "For him, it was always big time movie star or nothing, and now that it's nothing, he's losing his mind."

Apparently she is also much improved in the brains department because this might be the most insightful thing anyone has ever said about that guy, and probably me as well.