Dünya küçük (or, It's a small world)
Yes, my "small world" Spookytown experiences keep rolling in with just a little more frequency than you might expect, like the fog rolling in over the rockbound coast of Maine. Last night, met a guy at a political-type meeting in DC - just minutes into our conversation, it transpired that his sister is weeks away from finishing the very same master's program that Stovie graduated from back in '04. I'm still waiting for the return phone call confirming my suspicion, but I bet he knows her (if she's anything like her brother, she's very good looking, and if there's a good looking young female urban planner bopping around campus, my money is on Stovie knowing her).
Not 10 hours later I found myself at the allergist as we attempted to figure out just what the hell is up with my hives (turns out they are not related to any medications that I've been taking -- more on this later). He placed 22 tiny droplets of highly concentrated potential allergens on my left arm and said that we'd have to wait 15 minutes to see what effect they had. "Oh, so I have 15 minutes to kill?" I asked, showing how very clear-thinking I am when on very little sleep (from being itchy) and distracted by the all-over hive experience. "Yes, you can read a magazine, or something," he kindly suggested. "Yeah, I think I'll just do some Turkish," I said. Long story short: he himself is Turkish, and his wife, who grew up in Turkey, is of the ethnicity that I do almost all of my academic writing about, and her grandparents fled to Turkey after the revolution from the very city where I spent a year doing my fieldwork. If I were a bit more omniscient (just a little!), I bet I would find that people I know in that city know people related to his wife. Seriously, I'm sure of it. Anyway, as was fitting, he taught me how to say "small world" in Turkish, and promised to google me and download some of my relevant articles for him and his wife to read. It can't be only me that this kind of thing happens to, but seriously, is it only me? It's really quite bizarre, I'm like the vortex of human coincidences or some such...
Not 10 hours later I found myself at the allergist as we attempted to figure out just what the hell is up with my hives (turns out they are not related to any medications that I've been taking -- more on this later). He placed 22 tiny droplets of highly concentrated potential allergens on my left arm and said that we'd have to wait 15 minutes to see what effect they had. "Oh, so I have 15 minutes to kill?" I asked, showing how very clear-thinking I am when on very little sleep (from being itchy) and distracted by the all-over hive experience. "Yes, you can read a magazine, or something," he kindly suggested. "Yeah, I think I'll just do some Turkish," I said. Long story short: he himself is Turkish, and his wife, who grew up in Turkey, is of the ethnicity that I do almost all of my academic writing about, and her grandparents fled to Turkey after the revolution from the very city where I spent a year doing my fieldwork. If I were a bit more omniscient (just a little!), I bet I would find that people I know in that city know people related to his wife. Seriously, I'm sure of it. Anyway, as was fitting, he taught me how to say "small world" in Turkish, and promised to google me and download some of my relevant articles for him and his wife to read. It can't be only me that this kind of thing happens to, but seriously, is it only me? It's really quite bizarre, I'm like the vortex of human coincidences or some such...
posted by Pangea at 5:15 PM
1 Comments:
There was a period when I kept encountering the same kind of coincidences. But I don't know that my examples are as good as yours, because they don't illustrate that it's a small world as much as they illustrate that Korea is a small country. Or that the world of Korean emigres is smaller still. (Can I use such a fancy word as "emigre"? I usually just call myself an immigrant. I guess because I don't know how to add accents in Windows I really shouldn't use such a fancy word.)
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