I recently found myself trapped in the arms of a shaman. It was a hug — and a consensual hug, let me be clear — albeit an unexpected one. I had held out my hand to offer this person a shake, as we were meeting professionally for the first time. He rejected my hand and instead pulled me in for a warm hug. He smelled amazing.

A few seconds later, I was preparing to pull back, and yet there we stayed in an embrace. And stayed. And stayed. By the time the hug was finished, I was so panicked about the emails piling up in my inbox that I was practically convulsing.

“It takes forever for him to leave a party,” the shaman’s assistant said, rolling her eyes.

I am a New Yorker. If the involvement of a shaman hadn’t tipped you off already, this hug occurred in Los Angeles.

But the shaman was not an outlier. In my entirely unscientific research, this is the way that some people in Los Angeles — you know, the clichéd touchy feely types the city has always been associated with — seem to greet each other.