Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Flashback Friday: Three coincidences

Today's flashback will walk you through three coincidences, all involving a CD or DVD of music or speech, now that I think about it. They're not as weird as my personal Twilight Zone flashbacks, but they'll do.

1. The first took place way back when I was in high school. Do they still do school pictures these days? When I was growing up, they did. A photographer came to the school and took headshots of everyone and a few weeks later, you got a crinkly envelope full of glossy pictures of yourself. Then you got to exchange pictures with other people.

Anyway, I had a few school pictures of friends arranged casually on the bulletin board in my room. One evening, my sister Teresa was in my room chatting with me. In the background, I had the soundtrack from The Last of the Mohicans playing quietly. Well, it was playing quietly until an apparently big moment in the movie. It happened right when Teresa asked me who one of the pictures was. I said his name, "oh, that's [Person McSoandso]" and right then, the music swelled and did an intense, drawn-out chord progression. It was so dramatic. And even though I am not really anything anymore beyond facebook friends with this person, every time I happen to come across his name, in my mind it's said in a serious, dramatic voice with a huge orchestra punctuation mark. Probably for my sister, too.


2. I wasn't in the room when this happened but I've heard the story so many times it seems like I was. My sister (or brother, depending on who tells the story) was watching this part of Evita:

At 0:52, Colonel Peron asks, "are you here on your own?" and Evita quietly answers, "yes, oh yes." Except when my sister was watching it, the answer was "yes, oh YEAHHHHHH!!!!!!" This perfectly timed outburst was courtesy of my other brother, who was watching some kind of sports event on TV in the next room and got really excited at the exact moment Evita was answering "yes."

3. This last one freaks me out if I think too much about it. I was driving to Syracuse one afternoon in October to pick up my brother and niece at the airport there. I used the time to catch up on some podcasts I'd been meaning to listen to, specifically an episode of America Abroad about NAFTA. At one point, the podcast played a clip of a news program from the early 1990s that had Dan Rather (or whoever) saying, "citizens here on the main street in Cortland, New York are concerned about the impact NAFTA may have on their businesses." Guess where I was driving at that exact moment in time? THE MAIN STREET IN CORTLAND, NEW YORK. I was so surprised I actually looked down at my car's CD player controls, as if they could give me any explanation. What an eerie feeling it was to happen to be in the specific part of a small town in upstate New York that was mentioned in an obscure clip of a 20-year-old news broadcast. Don't you agree?

Genesis

Ignorance is bliss