When we were in NYC last weekend, we decided to try and find the Friends building. Thanks to Google, we did.

Tourist shot of the Friends exterior.

As we were being total tourists and taking photos (like the one I took above), a girl comes up behind us.

“Is this the building from Friends?”

We turn around to tell her it is. Her hair is in a messy ponytail and she has yellow paint framing her face and down her neck. She pulls out her earbuds.

“I wondered if it was. I just moved here and I always see people taking pictures of this building, you know?”

“Oh that’s great,” we smile and start to put our phones/cameras away, getting ready to move on to the next stop on our self-guided tour of 90’s TV show exterior shots (we did other cool NYC stuff too, I promise). She didn’t take the cue…

[Please now imagine that every other word in the monologue below is a curse word. I’m far too kind/scared/goodie-two-shoes to write what actually came out of her mouth]

“Yeah. I lived in San Fransico, but before that I lived on the east coast. But then I got my MBA and couldn’t find a job out there because it wasn’t, like, a top tier school, you know? So I decided ‘to hell with it’ and I just packed up my life and moved here. Because I want to get into corporate social responsibility and this is where all those jobs are, like with big corporations, you know?

“That was back in the winter. It was really cold. Do you know how hard it is for a California girl to move to NYC when the weather was like that? Anyway, I went on a few interviews, but I think I was too polite, you know? I think it was because I was in California for so long. Because when I moved to California, people said I was too ‘east coast’, you know? But I guess I lost that over there, so now I’m trying to be all ‘east coast’ again.

“But it’s impossible to get a job here, you know? There are like thousands of applicants for one role. And it’s expensive to live here. Like man. My rent is $1750 a month for a ROOM. Just one room.

“But this is what I want to do. And to do it, I had to just pick up my life and move. I don’t even really know anyone here. It’s hard, you know? But yeah, I had to take the chance. I just had to.”

I’m not sure who this girl is and why she felt the need to tell us her life story without us asking, but man, that girl is choosing butterflies, you know?

PS. I have no idea why she had yellow paint on her. This may bug me for the rest of my life.