This is what transpired.
A few weeks ago I tried out for a short film. (Oddly enough, I was chosen as female lead(!).) So we’re meeting the other night, going over the schedule. One of the crew says something to the writer/director about a party he’d recently thrown — a party at which people had yearbook-esque photos taken that were then compiled into a yearbook-esque yearbook. Realizing that I had heard, from one of the three people I know in Portland, about this very party, I casually asked the director about it. Turns out, he’s good friends with one of the aforementioned Three.
Coincidence #1! But okay, fine. A coincidence was bound to happen eventually, with someone new knowing someone I already knew. But then.
We meet again to go over the script. Director Who’s Friends With My Friend talks about the digs he’s had in the past, then asks about mine. I tell him my cross streets, that I’m in this ugly apartment complex that looks like a crappy motel.
“Washington Towers?” he says. “I used to live there!”
Not only did he used to live in the glorious Washington Towers — which name, by the way, is quite the misnomer, as the building is about as un-”tower” as can be — but Director Who’s Friends With My Friend lived in the apartment directly below mine! Even remembers the older woman who lives above me — the one constantly, I mean constantly, doing laundry.
- NOT a tower (unless you turn it on its side).
So yes, Portland: you are a small place. However. This is reminiscent of a time in. . . you guessed it, New York. A few years ago I was apartment-hunting via Your Friend & Mine (a.k.a., Craigslist), and went to Astoria to check out a room. Two chicks there interviewed me for a while, showed me the spot that was about to be vacated. When they asked where I worked, something rather improbable came to light. The very room I was looking to move into was the about-to-be-erstwhile room of a coworker!
Meaning: out of the several million rooms in the vast and overpopulated city, and the thousands listed each week on the behemoth that is Craigslist NYC, it was her room I had gone to see.
Now that, that was Something. It cried out for some math person or other to do some ‘rithmetic, to create a formula to show just How improbable this improbable occurrence had been.
Then again, human circles overlap. Then again Part II: human circles especially overlap in places filled with people of the same ilk. And Portland — have I mentioned this yet? — is as homogeneous in the Ilk category as the Ilk category can get.
Still, in the end — perhaps every place is small?
The second weekend I was in Prague, I traveled to a tiny Czech town called Kutna Hora to take in a church that was apparently filled with actual bones. Neato. Waiting in line to enter, a voice called out behind me: “Hey! Do you work at 440 Studios?”
That’s right. I ran into somebody I knew not in Prague itself but an hour and a half outside of Prague.
So in the end, I’d say: the world is small. Although that vacant room story is still pretty damn unbelievable.
interesting thing about such occurances.. when someone wins the lotto on their birthday, or wins the lotto twice, for example, we say it is sooo improbable. yes, it is improbable for any given person that you pick beforehand at random to win the lotto twice. yet no, it is not NEARLY that improbable that SOMEONE will win the lotto twice, out of all of the people who play the lotto.
if you are living your life amongst those white hipsters in their twenties in any city, even sao paulo, or mumbai, (i think over 20 million apiece) you are bound to have some coincidences, but they only seem improbable when you weigh that they themselves happen versus them not happening. what you should be doing is weighing the probability of something coincidental happening out of all of the situations you are in. which in fact is rather high. i think this accounts for much of deja vu as well.
thank you rick durrett, “math 275: living in a random world” was much pleasure all around.