coincidences
maybe you believe in coincidences. maybe you don’t. maybe you ascribe them to fate or God or something.
I like coincidences. They make me like life.
Friday night I went up to the City to go to the m.ward show with Gums and Dasha. We met up for a drink beforehand at Toronado. We walked down to the Fillmore and when we got to the fillmore, I discovered m.ward had sold out the place (a place larger than Slim’s, which he half-filled last time through SF). Scalper’s wanted more than 2.5 times the face for a ticket, so I said screw that and started walking back to my car. On the way, I decided to see what people were up to in SF, since I was there anyway. I called dug, who was at the (birthday) party a girl I’d met once (at a dinner jwerberg threw when he was out here—she was the then roommate of one of jon’s former housemates, an acquaintance of mine) and he invited me. I was a bit reluctant to go, though the party was pretty close to where I’d parked. I was considering it though; after all, I had met her and, actually, another person I had randomly evited me to this party earlier in the week.
I was on the fence until about 3 minutes later when I got a call from yet another guy at the party that I knew and he handed the phone to none other than Zach Anderson, USC HS class of ’00. Yeah, a guy I went to high school had heard dug mention me (first name and last, probably due to my relative unfamiliarity to the hostess of the party) and said that he knew me from high school. Turns out he was friends with the hostess due to them both currently being at Berkeley. That pushed me over the fence and I went to the party.
I’m glad I ran into him. It was cool catching up with him.
I’d run into another guy I knew from high school, Balaji, after a Giants-Pirates game, but that’s really not much of a coincidence, because after all both of us had a greatly increased likelihood to go to said game.
I’d say that was the second most coincidental happening in my life.
The first was as follows:
My brother and I were newspaper delivery boys back in middle school and junior high. One time my family was going on vacation so asked my friend John to deliver ours for us for that week, as he was also a delivery boy. I also happened to take piano lessons from John’s mom. Part of the piano education were these group lessons once a month or two months in which you had a lesson with people of a similar skill level and basically practiced playing in front of people. These lessons were at a different time and day from my normal lessons. So I was at John’s house at a different day and time from my normal lessons and the phone ringed. John’s mom didn’t normally pick up the phone during lessons, I think, but she did that time. Next thing I know she was handing the phone to me. It turns out that one of the people we delivered newspapers to wanted to stop her newspaper for a week while she was on vacation, so she found the flyer we sent out when John was going to be taking over for a week, with his phone number on it and had called thinking it was our number during the one hour that I was at John’s house on a different day and time than I normally was there and asked for me.
That was more of a cut and dry weird coincidence.