How do I love thee, Mani?/ Small world interlude
February 01, 2005
I mentioned many months ago that I have a little crush on the Israeli Attorney General. In an attempt to sweep that crush under the rug and avoid further ridicule from people like Lady Di - who upon hearing about my crush said, "You need to get laid!" (she's probably right) - I stopped commenting on the little things that Mani (yes, we're on a first name basis) does to make me love him.
Mani, I don't know why you do the things you do, but I love you for them. Plus, in the picture accompanying this article you look dead sexy to me. Just my brand of ugly.
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Quick change:
Because we have just hired someone new to work with us, I got to come in really late on Sunday, because Monde wanted some alone time with the new hire to go over some stuff. And I had worked on Saturday. Anyway, I used the morning to go to AUC and get my academic life fix. While there, I met up with Teej, who I haven�t seen since he went back home to Boston a month ago. While sitting with him at the caf� on campus I proceeded to have one of the most condensed what I like to call �small world� experiences ever. Well, almost. Anyway, I got to the coffee and found Teej sitting with a guy I knew back in the days when I was a study abroad at AUC. He was dating this girl who was really good friends with a friend of mine from Penn. (Minor, but totally random small world connection number one). While sitting there, a girl walked in, spotted Teej, pulled up a chair and proceeded to regale us with the adventures she had had in India over the past month. �Kim� had spent a month in Kerala and surrounding areas advancing her yoga studies in preparation for the yoga studio she is opening here in the middle of this month. It�s right near my house and I have been thinking lately that I�d like to pick up yoga again, which, though I tried to do on my own on and off throughout high school, is not something I can do on my own. A couple summers ago I started doing it at the local club, but I didn�t like the instructor there either. So, I�m really excited at possibly starting yoga at Kim�s new studio. So Kim told us a bit about Kerala, and I told her how I�ve been wanting to go for years etc., and anyway�she was starting to seem like a very cool girl. A little while later, two guys walked in looking for Kim, and then joined us for some coffee. In the course of the conversation I found out that one of the guys, �Dan�, had, like me, just been in Tunisia and we proceeded to swap stories about where we�d been and what we�d been doing. Then Teej, a by-birth Patriots fan, mentioned the super bowl and almost in unison, Dan, Kim, and I voice our support for the eagles. Dan and Kim and the third guy, Tim, who already know each other, turned to me and asked if I�m from Philly, and I told them that to put it simply, no, but I went to uni there and I love it, and am actually really excited about the Eagles making it to the superbowl. Kim then asked where I�d gone to school, and it was then that we discovered we�d both gone to Penn, and had been in the SAME DEPARTMENT until she graduated in 2003. Small world. Dan, the one who�d been in Tunisia the same time I was, turned out to be from outside Philly. Finally, as we were all getting ready to leave, I turned to Tim and on a whim (because he looked really familiar) asked him if he happened to live in a part of town where my family had an apartment that we had recently rented to five AUC students. It turns out that he does in fact live in my family�s apartment. (I�d never met him before, but remember seeing him briefly at my house one night, the night they were signing the lease.) Anyway, he told me how great the apartment was and how great my dad has been. Yay baba. In the half-assed fantasy I have in my head, Tim goes back to his five male flat mates and says, �I met our landlords daughter today, and she is HOT!� and a struggle ensues amongst them as they concoct slapstick schemes to get with me. (Okay, I met one of the guys renting the apartment and he is really hot, so this isn�t totally pathetic. Just a little pathetic.) But more likely, if I even get a mention at all, it will be something along the lines of, �I met our landlord�s daughter and she is kinda geeky and her boobs were busting out of her shirt.� (I am, they were, and not necessarily in a good way.)
Anyway, I love it when shit like this happens�where I just sit down with a bunch of people and it turns out I am connected to each of them in some small way or other. It at least makes me feel justified about the paranoia I was famed for among close friends in college. They�d often tell me that there was no way my parents could find out about some thing or other I�d done, and I�d always respond that they have no idea how small the world really is. And on the plus side, it in some way justifies my feeling that we are all connected, we just sometimes have to be watching for it.