One of my favorite song lyrics is from "Made-Up Dreams" by Built to Spill:
No one wants to hear
What you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them
Very true, but it's just one example from a large set of items of the form "No one wants to hear x, unless x is about them." There are many things x can equal here, and I've learned throughout life that one such example is x = uncanny coincidence. Nobody cares about your crazy coincidences unless they involve them. So many times I've experience something uncannily amazing and told somebody about it in utter disbelief, and their response is something akin to "hey... uh... yeah... how 'bout that?" This happened to me recently while playing trivia, and I'm going to write about it, because if my blog isn't for writing about stuff nobody cares about but me, then I don't know what it's for at all.
I went to grade school with a girl I'll call Jenny Bannister. She had a sister named Daisy Bannister. They were both super-smart and super-ambitious. Jenny graduated high school at, like, 13 or 14. She was always skipping grades, but for a few years we were in the same class. We were in the "step up" program together, so I knew her pretty well and spent a good amount of time with her, collaborating on various smart-kid projects (e.g., Odyssey of the Mind performances). We weren't friends, but we weren't specifically not friends either. I liked her fine even though she was kinda a pain -- so uptight, no chill at all. Her mother was even worse (which is obviously why Jenny was how she was) -- super involved in her kids' school lives, always agitating and lobbying the teacher for Jenny to get a position of privilege -- first chair violin, the lead role in a performance, class rep in the spelling bee, etc. I hated this at the time (I was also very confused by it. Why did Jenny's mom know so much about her academic life? I told my parents as little as possible about school.), and looking back on it, I still don't like it. It's one thing to be an advocate for your child; it's another to think they are always the best at everything and that they should get advantages over other kids because of it.
But it mostly worked (which made it even more annoying). Jenny thrived in that environment, even if she did occasionally complain about it in moments of candor. Once she told me that what she wanted for her birthday was two-hours of free-time so that she could read a book "for fun" -- not play Nintendo, not watch TV, not go to the movies, just read a book that wasn't for school. That's the type of life this kid had.
Anyway, she quickly skipped ahead of me in school, and I basically never saw her again. But I did receive an out-of-the-blue email from her circa 2002. She found my grad school email address online and sent me a "Hey, remember me? What are you up to now?" note. This was in the days post-Google, when it was easy to find people, but pre-Facebook (pre-MySpace, even), so these types of messages were somewhat common. I emailed back, and we had a brief exchange, in which I found out she was a high-powered corporate attorney. After that I didn't think about her again for nearly two decades.
Fast-forward to last Sunday. I'm playing pub trivia with my pub-trivia crew -- all of whom are at least four years younger than me; none of whom grew up anywhere near me, by the way -- and one of the questions is something about flowers. The answer was daisy, and somebody in my group gave a little factoid about the daisy. This made me think of Daisy Bannister, so just to be goofy I said, "Daisy is also the name of the sister of a girl I went to grade school with. She was two years younger than me and graduated high school with my sister who's three years older than me." Then one of my trivia companions R piped up.
I went to grade school with a girl I'll call Jenny Bannister. She had a sister named Daisy Bannister. They were both super-smart and super-ambitious. Jenny graduated high school at, like, 13 or 14. She was always skipping grades, but for a few years we were in the same class. We were in the "step up" program together, so I knew her pretty well and spent a good amount of time with her, collaborating on various smart-kid projects (e.g., Odyssey of the Mind performances). We weren't friends, but we weren't specifically not friends either. I liked her fine even though she was kinda a pain -- so uptight, no chill at all. Her mother was even worse (which is obviously why Jenny was how she was) -- super involved in her kids' school lives, always agitating and lobbying the teacher for Jenny to get a position of privilege -- first chair violin, the lead role in a performance, class rep in the spelling bee, etc. I hated this at the time (I was also very confused by it. Why did Jenny's mom know so much about her academic life? I told my parents as little as possible about school.), and looking back on it, I still don't like it. It's one thing to be an advocate for your child; it's another to think they are always the best at everything and that they should get advantages over other kids because of it.
But it mostly worked (which made it even more annoying). Jenny thrived in that environment, even if she did occasionally complain about it in moments of candor. Once she told me that what she wanted for her birthday was two-hours of free-time so that she could read a book "for fun" -- not play Nintendo, not watch TV, not go to the movies, just read a book that wasn't for school. That's the type of life this kid had.
Anyway, she quickly skipped ahead of me in school, and I basically never saw her again. But I did receive an out-of-the-blue email from her circa 2002. She found my grad school email address online and sent me a "Hey, remember me? What are you up to now?" note. This was in the days post-Google, when it was easy to find people, but pre-Facebook (pre-MySpace, even), so these types of messages were somewhat common. I emailed back, and we had a brief exchange, in which I found out she was a high-powered corporate attorney. After that I didn't think about her again for nearly two decades.
Fast-forward to last Sunday. I'm playing pub trivia with my pub-trivia crew -- all of whom are at least four years younger than me; none of whom grew up anywhere near me, by the way -- and one of the questions is something about flowers. The answer was daisy, and somebody in my group gave a little factoid about the daisy. This made me think of Daisy Bannister, so just to be goofy I said, "Daisy is also the name of the sister of a girl I went to grade school with. She was two years younger than me and graduated high school with my sister who's three years older than me." Then one of my trivia companions R piped up.
R: She skipped five grades! Wow!S gave me a similarly unenthusiastic response, and then tried to equate it to a time she was in South Africa and met somebody who went to Syracuse like she did and they had the same professor -- as if a major American university with a 20,000-person annual enrollment is in any way the same as my grade school class of like 100 students. Eh... what can you do?
Me: Yeah, crazy -- Jenny Bannister.
R: Wait, Jenny Bannister? Is she a partner at [law firm whose name I don't remember].
Me: I dunno... she did tell me once she was a lawyer... so, probably, yeah.
R: [Taps button on phone; shows me a professional profile pic] Is this her?
Me: [Squints; does mental aging] Yeah... You know her?!
R: No. Dan and Priya who play trivia with us sometimes know her. They just told me about some woman who graduated from law school at, like, age 20, so I looked her up once, and the name stuck with me.
Me: You just randomly looked up somebody your friends mentioned once, and remembered her name?
R: Yeah.
Me: And it's the same person I randomly brought up now? The one I went to grade school with 30 years ago?
R: I guess so, yeah.
Me: [To the entire table] Everybody! Can we just please acknowledge how weird this is?! I mentioned a girl I went to grade school with -- decades ago, thousands of miles from here, on the opposite coast -- somebody I haven't thought about in about 20 years, and R knows who she is! That's insane, right?! Can somebody please back me up on this?!
Rest of the table: [Stop for a beat, look at me, turn back to one another] So how much should we bet on the bonus question? I'm thinking if we do five points then...
No one wants to hear
About your coincidence unless your coincidence is about them
Until next time...
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