Wow.

You should meet, if only because you'd have such a good 'couple story' if it worked out.

Yeah, I keep thinking something along those lines. It's one of those "it was fate" stories. Except of course that it never is fate. Saying someone is your destiny implies that you don't have a choice about being with them, and of course you always do.

Amazing, OS.

Not quite as amazing, but here's mine:

My dad was in the Navy, so we moved a lot. When we lived in Jacksonville, FL (I was around 8?), we lived in Navy housing on the base, and I used to play with some twins that lived down the street from us, Matt and Andy.

We moved a few times, and ended up in Burke, VA, in the middle of my eighth grade year. I was assigned a lab partner in my science class, and this kid kept looking at me funny. Finally, after a day or two, he said, "Did you ever live in Mayport, on Oriskany St?" I'm like, "Yeaaaaah....." He said, "Do you remember me and my twin brother, Matt? We used to play together!" I totally didn't, but I verified the story with my mom that afternoon. Craziness!

Oh, on reread, my story doesn't make it quite clear. Andy was my lab partner.

How neat!

I love stories like that, but I don't really have any. The closest I can come is that I was supposed to sublet this apartment from a guy who was going to Greece for the summer (I was looking for a temp. place to stay while I worked out details of leaving my husband). Well, my husband talked me into coming back, and so I let this guy down when he had been counting on me to take the apartment, and he had to scramble to find someone at the last minute.

Well.... Do I need to tell you the rest? In the end, of course, that apartment guy turned out to be my own dear true love. But it's not such an amazing coincidince thing, because I got the tip to check out his apartment sublet because somebody I knew was acquainted with him... blah, blah, so that later when we came together socially (at first) it wasn't really so surprising. But it's very surreal for us when we recollect ourselves back at that point, simply negotiating a summer sublet.

When I was new in my current job, one day my coworkers took me out to lunch. I was chatting with one of the women in my work unit about where we grew up. She mentioned a town in another state where I lived from first to fourth grade. I knew she was older than me, so I asked if she had brothers and sisters in my grade. One of her brothers was in my class in second grade! And further, we all live in the same town.

This one time? At my summer camp? When I was a counselor there in college, I had a close friend called Amy. One summer we had an injoke amongst the staff, taken from something a camper said about our staff meetings. It was known to the campers that occasionally we had need to talk about individual kids and how to handle them. We also had a 'camper council' segment where kids presented their requests/complaints to the staff. This one camper from camper council overheard the later kid-discussion session, and made a memorable and indignant statement to her peers: "They invite you to that meeting, they're all nice to you while you're there, and then afterward? They talk about you -- like a dog."

The 'like a dog' part became an inescapable meme, often repeated by the staff for comic effect throughout the summer. Amy and I used it a lot.

End summer, back to college, an entirely separate world with 0 people in common. First night back, my friend Russell met me in the dining hall. The first words out of his mouth were: "Oh, so, you go to school with me - you're all nice to me while we're there -- then you go away for the summer and talk about me like a dog."

I was dumbfounded. How could he know about this joke? Turned out -- crazily -- that Amy was roommates at her college with Russel's long-time girlfriend. I had met her many times on visits, and we never put two and two together. They had stumbled across this somehow in conversation, and Amy put Russel up to saying that line to me. It was a weird experience.

Another coincidence story: My mom used to be the Director of Nursing at a hospital that had recently merged with another and was looking to build a new facility. They hired an architectural firm to design the building, and she met a young architect she thought would be perfect for me. So she gave him my phone number. About a week later, I got home from my night job around midnight and picked up the phone to call a friend, but the line was dead. I was irritated and said, "Hello! HeLLO!!" This voice on the other end said, "Uh hi, can I speak to initapplette please ..."

We've been married almost 12 years.

lol, Miko! And, lovely, initapplette!

Seattle (despite the efforts of the "Greater Seattle" types) is really a small town. This kinda thing happens all the time around here:

1. Right out of high school, I got hired at an insurance company. I was introduced to a young woman named Sylvia, who for some reason seemed really familiar. Turned out we sat next to each other in 4th grade. Oddly, she didn't remember that...but her mother did.

2. My old roommate took to his office holiday party at this huge nightclub. I was introduced to an arresting young lady (who was the platonic date of one of my roommate's coworkers and we started chatting. I asked her if she knew, "Dan The Man" who I used to live with. Turned out she did. Not only that, but she'd been to a party at our house and knew several of my friends!

3. My friend Laurie moved here from NYC a few years ago. She decided to go back to school to become a documentarian. A few weeks ago she invited a bunch of us to see some work she'd done for The Seattle Channel. Turned out her cameraman and the executive producer were both people I'd gone to high school with.

MeCha version: In some random thread, I discovered I knew hellbient independently, from another community blog we both belong to.

Does that make us nerds?

I was at the Westville Pub a few months back and walked outside to smoke a cigarette when I overheard these three guys mention someone I knew - in Baltimore. I said, wait, do you know so & so? And yes, not only did they know her, but - and this is the really weird part - between the three of them, a 60 something guy, a late 30s guy and an early 20s guy - they pretty much knew almost everyone I AND my daughter knew in Baltimore. The 60 something guy knew my ex in laws and one of my best friends who is also the mother of several of my other friends, the guy near my age knew all the people I used to know around the Maryland Institute (we can't figure out how we never met, since we were totally at a ton of the same parties in the 80s) and the younger guy went to the school for the arts with half of my daughters friends AND - remember my friend above, who is older than me? Her youngest daughter.

None of these guys knew each other in Baltimore but had met here in Asheville. We had this insane conversation based around do you know, do you remember for like 3 hours and then that was it & I never saw any of them again.

Hey, Orange Swan- drop by MoFi once in a while, wouldja? There's a parallel Ontariariarian LavaLife saga going on there. How do you feel about witty lawyer types? Heh.

I hate these stories because my dad is a complete motherfucking Mexican 24/7 factory of them, he's relentless at figuring out how two people have six degrees of separation, and he expects everybody around him to be slackjawed amazed at the stuff he figures out. Except it isn't meaningful at all, like Orange Swan's story. You have to go through so-and-so's uncle's hometown, after he lived there, was where such-and-such moved to. So the fuck what, dad?!

Not to have my cynical take rip down anybody else's sense of wonder. I just set a high bar for when I'm surprised ....

Follow-up to me and Jude. We originally spoke on a Saturday night. I wasn't that enthused about him, but as the week wore on I thought, well, why not at least have a drink with him.

So I called and left him a message Thursday night. Friday night when I got home from work I found a message on my call answer saying that he had found out Monday that someone he'd met weeks ago was interested in him, though he'd thought she wasn't. So he was going to pursue things with her.

Well, this wasn't in itself a big deal since Jude had behaved well and I wasn't that interested in him anyway. So I sent him an email on Lava thanking him for letting me know and wishing him and the object of his affection well.

This was all well and good until I happened to notice that he never took down his ad from Lava and seems to still be on it and visiting daily three weeks later.

I'm assuming he was either lying to me or lying to this woman who liked him, or maybe both.

Whatever. But what a prick.