Papua New Guinea

It has recently come to my attention that everyone I know knows everyone else I know. Thanks to an ever-consolidating circle of Stuyvesant alums and our NYC-based college friends, it appears that everyone is or was dating the friend of someone I had this or that interaction with in 10th grade, or my second year of college, or last week. And vice versa. And so on.

While this is a wonderful, intelligent, sophisticated group of 22-24-year-olds, it is also disturbingly incestuous. Or, at the very least, disturbingly provincial. I never thought of myself as coming from a small town, but apparently I did. It is inhabited by a disproportionate number of people who do well on standardized tests, but it is also one in which you can say the name of a social studies teacher at a party and half the heads in the room begin nodding and reminiscing.

Every time I hear of (or find myself in) another such connection, I'm half thrilled at what a neat group of people I'm surrounded by, and half ready to go somewhere where no one would be just a link away from every embarrassing thing that ever happened to me, ever. For some reason, I always assume this place would be Papua New Guinea.

The Papua New Guinea urge is different from the Israeli-army urge (one based on various considerations, but which will nevertheless be postponed for various reasons), or the weekend-away urge. Papua New Guinea would be all about... I have no idea, as I know nothing about the place, but I am almost certain I would never, ever, hear a thing that would all of a sudden summon the memory of a bad grade, an unrequited crush, or that time I forgot I'd worn mascara, had a snowball fight during lunch, and returned to English class to a some highly amused--or was it concerned?--classmates. From the CIA handbook: "Melanesian Pidgin serves as the lingua franca, English spoken by 1%-2%, Motu spoken in Papua region note: 715 indigenous languages - many unrelated." Fantastic. Sign me up.