interconnectedness-es (ie: synchronicity)

I'm just gonna start a list and keep adding to it, cause I think these are just freakin' cool.

06/30/09: My cousin's friend Mike, who's a journalist/reporter, had written a column in which he'd mentioned J. Seward Johnson, an artist and sculptor. (I had never heard the name before, and didn't realize that I had seen his work.) Later that same afternoon, I was talking with a family friend and his son, and he mentioned the same artist, and the only pieces of his that I'm familiar with, which happens to be on an off-the-beaten-track road in New Jersey.

07/11/09: I was staying at a cottage in Maryland for the weekend with some friends-of-family, and one of them mentioned a lake in the Adirondacks that I'd only vaguely heard of years before [and have now forgotten again] - and the day after I got home, my step-mother brought up the same lake in conversation.

07/24/09: After my cousin asked people for advice about whether or not to detour onto the Blue Ridge Parkway during an extended roadtrip with his family, the next day I was organizing old bills and paperwork in my living room, and came across a brochure for the Blue Ridge Parkway.

07/25/09: I couldn't remember my cousin Jamie's word for these little coincidences, so I looked at his blog (where I knew he'd posted about them) to find the word - and saw that his latest post was about how he likes to read about guys living to 113 years, because then he doesn't feel middle-aged. -Which is exactly what my friends and I were talking about over dinner 2 hours before.

07/29/09: on the way to my sister's house, I was driving along I-81 towards Philly, remembering the previous visit to my Philly cousins' house - just then I looked up and saw that the truck in front of me was painted with a huge logo for Black Horse trucking.

07/29/09: on the same trip, I was listening to my iPod on shuffle; a DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince song came on; at the same instant I saw the first sign for Philadelphia, they sang the lyrics "Philadelphia, Pennsylvania".

08/04/09: Playing Yahtzee with my friend Sylvie, I was dismayed when she rolled her third Yahtzee, while I had none. She suggested that I go again, and I said, "What, you want to give me an extra turn to see if I can get a Yahtzee?!" I rolled, and got one. (this sorta doesn't really count, but it was still weird. ;-))

08/20/09 Bob Dylan has come up in 3 separate contexts today.

09/03/09 The Director of Financial Aid came to my office door to discuss a student's situtation. I had been entering information in an Excel sheet that contained names of all the 1400+ students on campus. As I looked down at my computer screen, I realized that my cursor was one space above the name of the student she'd been talking about.

09/06/09 I spent the weekend with my aunt and uncle, and discussed with them whether or not they could fit their dog into their new kayak for a paddle on the lake. The next morning at work, I opened an email from my co-worker - she'd sent me a photo of her husband and their dog taking a ride in a kayak.

01/18/10 Last week, my cousin posted on Facebook that she'd had to recite the Declaration of Independence for class, which got me thinking about the Gettysburg Address; the only other historical text I'd memorized in high school - and I was remembering the trip I took to that battlefield a few years ago. That same night, I had my dad over for dinner, and he brought up a book he's reading called "Lincoln's Melancholy" -and in the course of telling me about the book, he brought up Gettysburg and talked for quite awhile about the battle.

02/23/10 Yesterday, for some reason, a line from Lorca's play Blood Wedding came into my head "Good esparto harvest." Tonight I had dinner with my father, and mentioned the play and the line. He said he'd just looked the word "esparto" up today, because he was researching the etymology of "spire" and the two words are related.

07/13/10 (I've missed quite a few, but here's another) I was just going through old tuition promissory notes at work, and had a pile ready to shred sitting on my desk. Then the day's mail came, which included returned mail sent to a student - I updated the address and set the returned envelope on top of the pile of promissory notes, reminding myself to file it. When I got up to do so, I realized that the student whose promissory note was topmost in the pile, was the same student whose address I had just updated.