20050127   

Michael considered fate at 16:15   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

The funniest thing happened to me last night. I wandered home from the computer lab around 5pm, ate some tofu stirfry, and went out for a few happy-hour beers with my roommate. I got back around 8pm and I settled into a nice cozy spot on the couch with my lap topped with my iBook and that was going to be the end of it - I had a few papers to read and some work to boot, so I figured for a quiet night.

I powered through some Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) research papers (a few approaches to computer-generated mosaics) and poked around at some compiler work I had to do but around 10:30pm I got a call from my roommate who was looking for a bar. I heard laughter in the background and it was clear they were having fun.. I sent them off in the right direction but it wasn't too much later that they were back in our place and they were more than I expected: a few girls he met off the street were tagging along. We headed downstairs to the bar, danced a little, had some more beers, and made conversation. It wasn't too long into this conversation that I realized these girls were not from around town, in fact they were visiting for the weekend from Maine. Maine girls. You all know what I think of Maine girls.

So things turned to Maine talk and they realized I was a Mainer too and we chit-chatted about the port city and all the wonderful little fluff things you appreciate about your real home and then they asked me where I had worked. I was surprised they knew where I worked.. but even more surprised that one of them had dated a co-worker of mine. Names started flying around and, well, it's a small small world, afterall.

It never ceases to amaze people, these little run-ins, these small coincidences of life, but I imagine it's not even that amazing. The math of it probably explains it all, and of course we forget the other 364 days of the year when nothing coincidental happens.. it's the odd occurance that really sticks with us, that's what we remember.

They were "up for anything" so we tromped through the snow and biting wind of the montreal night and plopped them down on a swank plush sofa in a strip club. We had rum and cokes and watched the dark-haired italian women strutting around on the stage. The quiet usher in formal wear lead parties through the tables and the young couple sitting next to us whispered and watched the show.

The night began to swirl and the red velvet made patterns on my eyeballs. The rum swished down my throat and the bass thumped through my feet. The lights flickered, time was up, so they giggled at the world as they realized they were out of money - after just one night in the big city.

Nowhere else to go but back to the loft so we lead them, slipping and sliding, up St. Laurent and up into the loft where we snatched a bottle of red out of our roommate's stash and fired up a smoke and listened to Otis Redding and Curtis Mayfield on the hifi, then some trance, and techno.. on up into the Run Lola Run soundtrack, and then back down into the woods of zepplin and out onto the nightmare plains of floyd.

On the way back from our ephemeral journey, they thanked us for our hospitality and thanked their lucky stars for the fortuitous occurance of a short conversation on a city street with a complete stranger.