in a past life I must have been a semi-good girl

02Oct07

I was going to write about karma or coincidence or whatever the name for it is when things overlap in such a weirdly precise way. But I got sucked into facebook because Halfmama and Mama Nabi are such powerful influences over me.

I’m gullible, highly impressionable and consumeristic to the point of absurdity. For instance, I bought my camera based on a single post by MN where she debated the pros and cons of a particular brand…I don’t like thinking for myself, so it’s helpful to have all these people blogging online to tell me what to do and say, how to act, how to waste time, etc.

Oh, and I just finished reading American Pastoral, because Metrodad keeps going on about Philip Roth like a giddy school girl, to paraphrase his own description of his fascination. Fucking heartbreaking, but that’s for a later post maybe. The point is that I am easily influenced.

And so, I joined facebook. And I’m ready to give up all this blogging, for that – It’s so addicting. I mean honestly, I don’t have time for both! I can’t help myself.

The only reason I’m getting this particular story out of my head is because it’s more proof that my superstitions and annoyingly fatalistic ponderings are not completely unfounded. It has to do with Half Mama, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Interconnectivity is rampant in movie plots, TV shows and books. I’ve experienced a lot of strange happenstance that would seem to be so deliberate and planned out were it not for the fact that these incidents are simply not.

My first marriage happened on Memorial Day. It was a rainy Saturday. I was 25. The details of immediate regret and immaturity aren’t pertinent here so I’m skipping that part. For the first anniversary of that marriage, my ex and I travelled to Seattle. I had made reservations at a tiny restaurant in Pike Place Market that had maybe 12 tables at most. I think I actually got the idea from Frasier, because those two dandies were always talking about getting reservations at Chez Shea.

After the waiter had seated us in the corner, I looked across the small dining room and started to fixate on a young Asian woman who reminded me of a childhood friend that I had met at music camp in North Carolina one summer. The conversation with my ex-husband would have been stilted without the added distraction of this tiny woman sitting across the room looking more and more like my old pen pal, my old good friend.

She looked a little different than I would have imagined her. Enough so that I hesitated all through dinner and made no attempt to cross the room to talk to her. I just couldn’t be positive.

Finally, and I don’t know why I was so nervous, I asked our waitress to ask the woman if her name was M.W., and if it was, to tell her that the future momomax has been staring at the back of her head for an hour and a half. I saw the waitress walk over and bend down to inquire, but there was no snapping back of the head in shock and recognition of my name, there wasn’t a jumping out of her chair to run over to give me a hug. I was so disappointed that this woman wasn’t the girl I bunked with in the humidity of the south to end up faithfully writing letters back and forth until our 2nd year of college. I even visited this friend of mine when she was at Cornell in the god awful frigid winters that upstate New York endures every year.

The waitress finally came back to my table and I was looking at her with eyes popping out of my head, nodding slightly to see if it would make her spill the verdict faster.

Well? Is her name M.W.?

(calmly and with no emotion) Yes.

*the hell?*

It IS?? Did you tell her who I was??

Yes I did. She said that she would come over in a few minutes.

*breathless*

Thank you.

It seemed like an hour before my friend walked over with her husband, boyfriend?? He looked familiar. He looked like the guy she was dating in Cornell and had shown me pictures of.

We exchanged all the OMG’s and I can’t believe it’s you’s and then asked what the other couple was doing in Seattle.

We’re on vacation.

Oh, we live here.

That is so great. We’ve been thinking of moving out here. We’re celebrating our first wedding anniversary…today!

(long pause)

Wait. WE’RE celebrating our first anniversary today too.

What?? You mean TODAY today?

The reason why it took them so long is because they wanted to finish their romantic dinner and truly spend the time that their amazing relationship deserved on their first wedding anniversary. We had both gotten married on the same day and had tried to invite the other, but had lost addresses, sent invitations to parent’s houses, but to no avail. We missed each other’s weddings and the notifications of them. It was all so incongruous with reality. Seemingly impossible that our missed opportunity to toast each other on our wedding days was presenting itself again a year later to the day.

She is still one of my most cherished friends. A brilliant physician and a mother of two. We don’t see each other more than once a year, but it never seems like there is any lost time between our visits. I made sure that she attended my second wedding and it was one of the highlights of that day to see her and her awesome husband there.

What does this have to do with Half Mama? Well, after getting trapped in facebook world, I looked her up and saw that she graduated from the same school as me two years after me. We probably passed each other on campus every day or ho’d it up with the same boys. kidding.

She’s become one of my favorite reads with her funny, insightful, emotional and trash talking posts. I’m just waiting for chance to blow us around a little closer together so we can hang out in person. I can’t wait.

I’ve been sort of disenchanted with the blogging lately, but after meeting just the few people online that I’ve come to rely on for their anecdotal evidence of life during parenting, I’m thrilled and sad to discover that I am unable to use this platform as the flippant platform to exorcise my “fuck off” commentary and, worse, my snarkiness as originally intended.

As far as you know, I’ll still be writing about the trivial tribulations of being a somewhat succesful architect with an amazing husband who likes to talk about balls and the vahj, (anyone see Superbad?), complaining about things I shouldn’t be complaining about because I’m a lucky a-hole who should be more thankful for what I have. No, as far as you know, I’m not editing myself because I’m convinced that my husband leaked my blog to friends of friends, like Metro Dad’s doppelganger, and it’s just a matter of time before I have two G-rated blogs on my hands.

I keep telling myself that I’m not performing a community service, this is not a job, but the longer I stay in it, the more real it’s becoming. I think I welcome that. I mean, it’s still not about service, but it really is about community. And a bonus perk is that I get to meet online the likes of HM to trick her into thinking she made out with the mister in a drunken stupor at the school we all went to AT THE SAME TIME.

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