OOoogly BOOoogly Messages from the Universe

“Hello, Universe?  It’s me, again.  What exactly you are trying to tell me?”

I have no idea what’s in the message but I’ve taken the call(ing) to heart and, boy-oh-boy, am I payin’ attention! I had the oddest, oogly-boogly moment yesterday.

Let me back-up just a wee bit… there’s a lead-in that I must address.

I got my first computer 5 years ago. It’s hard to believe it’s only been 5 years and at the same time, wow, it’s been 5 years. A lot has happened and the world, as I knew it, opened dramatically in those first days of web surfing. At the time, I was living in Tucson, Arizona but was connecting with people and information from around the world. How exciting was that!!

First of all, I had AOL as my provider. Yikes! I got it in the promotional package when I bought the computer and really didn’t know any better. Then I went to MSN, then MSN DSL, then Comcast, and finally to Comcast High Speed Internet. I was a long way off dial-up in a very short 6 months. I came to understand that learning via the internet was a very, very fast pace. As were the timelines I was living in when it came to connecting to other people. Online, an hour was a day, a day was a week, a week was a year (see how it jumps?), and a year was an entire lifetime. I could just barely keep up with all of the information, drama, and chatting news. I had no idea how to do it but someone (can’t remember who) turned me on to chat rooms and, voila’! An idea was born, taken to fruition, and eventually settled into the strange, rolling, voyeuristic conversations of non-sensical sentences and bit-map love. I enjoyed the pace of it if only to be able to show-off my typing/vocabulary prowess and hone my flirtatious wit. And… I made a few friends along the way.

I made a friend with a woman from New Mexico and we would talk about our favorite places to eat, the fact that my mom lives in ABQ, how many times I visit, and the next time I would be in town, we should have coffee. Anytime I saw her online, I’d buzz her and ask how she was doing and what was going on in Albuquirkie. Eventually, she got into a relationship, I got into a relationship, and we both stopped going online as often. As a result, we lost touch.  I haven’t been in a chat room in probably three years.  Blogging is now my “thang.”  I actually prefer to speak (parenthetically) in paragraphs.  HA!

Fast-forward two years later and I was living and working in the Chicagoland area. I was managing a Barnes & Noble in a small suburb just outside of Chicago. One day, I was standing at the customer service desk, and I looked up to help the two people standing in front of me. And who should that be? Well, none other than my New Mexico buddy and her significant other. That was really strange and we laughed and talked about how our lives had so strangely intersected. She’d moved to Indiana to be near her mother and I’d moved to Chicago for both a job opportunity and a relationship.

During the time I was in Chicago, I saw her four or five different times and we even had coffee a couple of times. S saw her more often as my NM friend was the store manager at the T-Mobile store in our suburb as we discovered purely by accident when S went in to pay her bill. Our lives were intersecting in the funniest, oogly-boogly kind of ways.

Fast forward approximately two years later…

Yesterday I worked at a different store while helping at a job fair. I’d gone into work early because I left my cell phone at work the night before. I then had to attend a Board of Education meeting which lasted until about 9:00AM. I decided it wasn’t worth my time to go home until 12:30 only to drive back to attend the job fair. My shift was supposed to be from 1:00 to 4:00.

Instead, I drove directly to the job fair. It was quite busy and my compadre saw me and said, “Oh, good, you’re here early! I need you to do a second interview with someone I just spoke to.”

“Um, do you mind if I put my purse down first? You know about my rule, right? I do nothing until my purse is off my shoulder.” I said jokingly.

I was teasing. She was serious. I quickly took off my purse and asked for a description of the applicant because there were several people waiting to be interviewed, many customers, and many, many people being interviewed. Once armed with a description (“Oh, somewhere between your age and so-and-so’s” to which I replied, “For God’s Sake! There’s something like a 20 year difference in our ages!”) I set about looking around the store. There was only one lone person sitting at a table and while the person didn’t exactly look like the description, I headed in her direction.

The closer I got… the more familiar she looked. ‘Hmmm…’ I’m thinkin’… ‘This person looks oddly familiar.’ Now, there are times when many people look familiar to me so this isn‘t such an odd sensation. Just the other day, S said to me, “Wow. All of these people look sooooooo familiar to me” We were at the fairgrounds and I asked her to never mention it again because, well, we were at the fairgrounds which suggested she was familiar with a buncha carnies. (Hahaha… It was funnier at the time, I guess…) Do you know what I mean? You can be somewhere that you’ve never been but for some reason, all of the people you run across seem familiar and, as a result, you are either frightened or warmed. Frankly, I prefer the latter.

So, I’m almost to the applicant’s table and the woman stands up and says, “Natalie?”

Oh. My. God! It was my former NM buddy! She’d just moved back to Albuquirkie six months ago. When I first got to know her, she didn’t actually live in Albuquerque, she lived in Southern New Mexico but her job took her to Albuquerque quite frequently. This was just too freaky! We laughed and connected and kept commenting about how weird all of this was and then… I interviewed her. Hahahahaha! Total weirdness.

Okay, here’s some more weirdness: as I was writing this, she just called me!

What. Is. The. Deal?

I just told her that her nickname is now “stalker.” Hahahaha! She’s now talking to S on the phone because they are both photographers. Coincidence? I think not. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, Canon, blah, lenses, blah, bald eagles, only had a 300 mm but it just didn’t go far enough, blah, blah, blah… let’s get together and shoot… blah, blah, blah.” Finally, someone for her to talk “camera” with.

The Universe works in mysterious ways. I am not really sure what all of this means but it’s pretty darned cool. My mom and I were talking about it this morning and both of us agree that the older we get, the smaller the world (or maybe even the Universe) becomes.

How about you? Is this phenomenon exclusive to my freaky, friendly nature or does this happen to other people, as well?