Friday, March 21, 2008
Worlds are colliding!
For 18 years, I lived in the same small town and had pretty much the same circle of friends. Sure, there were subtle shifts as the years passed and our ages and interests changed (case in point: Bri, whom I've known pretty much forever, used to be my sister's best friend when we were all still in the single digits, age-wise), and there were some peripheral people from camp and band and other activities whose paths occasionally converged, but for the most part, I'd known all of my friends in some form or fashion for most of my life, and therefore was pretty much immune to those cool little cross-connections that the writers of Lost are so fond of.
Fast-forward 10 years, and the waters of my circle of friends have gotten a lot muddier. I've lived in four different places (Columbia, London, Birmingham, D.C.) since leaving home, and now I have several subsets of friends to keep track of. Not only that, but there are certain people who fit into more than one category (I met Danielle in college, but we weren't really friends until she moved to Birmingham; I grew up with Ryan, and then he ended up at my college...and then in Birmingham), which makes it all the more confusing.
So when I saw the notice on my Facebook feed the other day that Chase and Jessica were now friends, it didn't occur to me as strange at first, since I knew both of them. But then it dawned on me: Chase and I met in college; Jessica is a friend of a friend from Birmingham. There's no way they possibly could have met each other through me, and so they must know each other some other way. Yep--it turns out they went to junior high together. Whoa.
I think it's incidents like this that make it possible for me to wake up from a dream in which Taylor Hicks is proposing marriage to me and not think it's all that strange. (I also had one recently in which I was giving Billy Bob Thornton love advice, but I did think that one pretty strange. And yet also an improvement on my last Billy Bob Thornton dream, in which I was naked in the back of a pickup truck.)
For 18 years, I lived in the same small town and had pretty much the same circle of friends. Sure, there were subtle shifts as the years passed and our ages and interests changed (case in point: Bri, whom I've known pretty much forever, used to be my sister's best friend when we were all still in the single digits, age-wise), and there were some peripheral people from camp and band and other activities whose paths occasionally converged, but for the most part, I'd known all of my friends in some form or fashion for most of my life, and therefore was pretty much immune to those cool little cross-connections that the writers of Lost are so fond of.
Fast-forward 10 years, and the waters of my circle of friends have gotten a lot muddier. I've lived in four different places (Columbia, London, Birmingham, D.C.) since leaving home, and now I have several subsets of friends to keep track of. Not only that, but there are certain people who fit into more than one category (I met Danielle in college, but we weren't really friends until she moved to Birmingham; I grew up with Ryan, and then he ended up at my college...and then in Birmingham), which makes it all the more confusing.
So when I saw the notice on my Facebook feed the other day that Chase and Jessica were now friends, it didn't occur to me as strange at first, since I knew both of them. But then it dawned on me: Chase and I met in college; Jessica is a friend of a friend from Birmingham. There's no way they possibly could have met each other through me, and so they must know each other some other way. Yep--it turns out they went to junior high together. Whoa.
I think it's incidents like this that make it possible for me to wake up from a dream in which Taylor Hicks is proposing marriage to me and not think it's all that strange. (I also had one recently in which I was giving Billy Bob Thornton love advice, but I did think that one pretty strange. And yet also an improvement on my last Billy Bob Thornton dream, in which I was naked in the back of a pickup truck.)
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