The chain

I usually eat lunch with my cubemates/co-workers, during which our conversations can run the gamut from string theory and Back to the Future to bears, with Big Lebowski quotes strewn in for good measure.

Sometimes, when the conversation comes to a lull, I throw out a convo topic like "what's your ideal weekend," or something goofy like that. (How it has become me that moves these conversations along is beyond me.) So, on Friday, with no topic at hand and no one else stepping up, I just started talking. And then talking some more. It began with two anecdotes, and then my attempt to figure out what those anecdotes meant.

1) In about 2003, my sister paid my parents and me a visit in New Jersey, during which we did the normal tourist tour of Central Jersey--Princeton, Lambertville/New Hope, etc. On the way home, we stopped off in Hopewell where my dad had just opened a photography gallery with a bunch of other photographers. Before leaving town, my sister and I headed off for a quick coffee at the local coffee shop called Failte. Decent coffee, but I thought nothing more of it, and we kept moving on. Three years and two roommates later, I was looking for a new place with my then roommate, and had found a place that was pretty cool in Yardley. As an afterthought, we decided to still go to a place we saw in the paper, which turned out to be the building where the coffeeshop was (the shop had since moved down the street). The place was a borderline disaster, but relatively large, and it had a huge attic, which sold us on the place. Years before, it was just a coffeeshop, and now, through a congruence of events that could not have been foretold, it was home.

2) My sister and fam lived for a time in Norfolk, Virginia, and we drove down there several times for Thanksgivings/visits and whatnot. We had to take I-64 from Richmond to the shore. I would look out through the car window to all the exits and towns that generally remain anonymous as you go between points A and B and wonder who lived there, what drew them there, what their stories. But, eventually, your mind drifts from the anonymity of what's going on outside to what mix to play next on the ipod, and then everything falls by the wayside.

After my sister left VA, I took a trip to DC where I met up my friend Greg, his brother, and Greg's friend Michele, who had just moved from Orlando to the area. We stay for a while in DC and then use Michele's place as a base. To get there, we drove south, through Richmond, and then on to I-64 to her house. Turns out she lived outside of Richmond. Suddenly, through turns of events, I had to take one of the anonymous exits, and I had become a part of the scenery that I saw fly past years before.

Now, how do these things happen? From anonymous, to not. In either case, the chain of events that brought these places from anonymity to something more permanent had no logic to them. Some times, you can figure out how a chain of events might occur, and what the outcome might be. No one could have foretold these events, as the separate links had no logic guiding them.

Strange, but very interesting.

Then, after we talked about this, I think we talked about monkeys or something.