the word I'm looking for

My friend Ryan came up with the challenge recently, for me to write about something in particular. About the feeling you get when you are more PFA than everyone else around you. The knowledge that you are the cool kids in the room.

It seems that I forget what that feeling is like. Living in South Florida to some degree takes that away, because you don't have the same sort of backward, clumsy, adorable folks that you do in Central Florida. The metro Orlando area, excuse me for saying it, is a place where people are trying so hard to be cool and fun and well, something. I won't say I was outside of that.

In the metro Miami/Fort Lauderdale/West Palm area, people already know they're cool and they give you dagger eyes most places you go. It's not so friendly down here, and it genuinely is harder to go out and find a place where you feel at home with friends.

There is a moment when you walk into a place, and you feel like you get it. You feel like it's a place for you, and that you may be the smartest and most interesting people in the room, but it's hard to do that without people who are your true and beloved (and much missed) friends. It's walking into Denny's with Marc and crew after a show, and discuss George Romero movies and minor Beatles references late into the night.

That happened for me in my hometown all the time. It was a fun way to be, I suppose. It sort of happened a few weeks ago when I had gone out to a club with my friends Elizabeth, Jessica, and Tim. The latter two I have made acquaintance with through Elizabeth, but there was a point where Tim and I, who were tearing up the dance floor on our own and simultaneously looking as dorky as humanly possible, just sat on the side and made snide comments about some of the other people there. Was it mean? No. Was it snobby? Maybe. Was it self-satisfying? Sure.

There was a little bit of it when I spoke to the fine Carmax salesman who is very likely (and hopefully soon) going to be selling me a car. He had picked up on the conversation of my friends and I while I was test driving a car, and starting talking politics and Thomas Friedman with us. That was a moment. When the boring circumstances around you sort of fade away, and you connect with someone as though you're the only person, or the only group of people who matter.

And that's a sense and a sort of friendship that I miss. I miss having a ton of people around me to point out others with icky attitudes and laugh at them. I miss being surrounded by people who can recognize actual pretension when they see it, and be pretentious enough to laugh about it. There's some of it down here, but not nearly as much as I was surrounded by in Orlando.

I was charged with finding the word to describe the feeling that you have when you walk into the room and you and your companions are able to see right through the bullshit around you - and most of all, laugh at it, and be yourselves.

Instead, I have once again found the feeling of missing my friends terribly. Maybe I will recall the words when I get to see my friends again, and pick out stupid greeting cards at Hallmark with them.