Thursday, January 15, 2004
It's a small coincidental world after all.
Friendster has got me thinking about social circles and how people are connected. Other than my friends from high school, summerGeekCamp, and the Openface/HASC/computer science crew at McGill, most of my friends and I have social networks that intersect but don't have many common nodes. Even here in London I've met a lot of wonderful people who form distinct circles of friends and mostly don't know each other: the OR department, my flatmates and their friends, the BALADS dance fanatics, etc. Though maybe Future ThinkTanker and I'll have a party next Friday to celebrate our shared birthday and worlds will collide.
I think most people's social networks are like this, very loosely but extensively interconnected, now that we don't all study/work, breed and die in the place we're born. It may be surprising but it's not shocking when you meet someone and it turns out they know several of your friends, especially when you come from a small country of only 30 million.
But this afternoon was weird. I went to my tutoring gig for the first time since early December. As with the last two times, the class had a supply teacher while the regular teacher was supervising exams or something. He and I established that he wasn't any good at French, so I'd handle that while he did classroom control*, and oh, we were both Canadian.
At the end of class, we were trading stories of how we ended up in London. When he said he and his wife were both musicians, so they were supply teaching days, going to concerts and playing nights, I asked what instruments. Brass: him trombone, her trumpet. I asked jazz or classical. He did jazz at U of T. At that point I was almost certain, but still I asked. And yes, he started there at the same time as my good friend the Type-A Hippy, and they're good friends too. The last time they saw each other was at SupplyTeacher's wedding two years ago, he thinks.
I've met a few people at LSE where we know some of the same people, or first took a computer science course with Laurie Hendren (and loved it). If I hadn't asked the right questions, though, I never would have figured out that this person who ended up in the same Year 10 French class in a city of more than 7 million on the same January afternoon as I did, through a rather random series of events, was someone I've probably heard stories about before. So odd, and very cool.
*His job was much harder than mine. Fifteen-year-old girls, last period in the afternoon. They aren't nearly as rebellious or rude as they clearly think they are, but most of them are loud and obnoxious. I had a hard time alternately not laughing and not cringing. Underneath it all they're lovely and I'm sure they'll grow out of it, just as I did.
