31 Aug 2009
Poison Ivy and the Mandelbrot Set
July 9th 2007
One evening I was online, trying not to scratch my wrist, which had broken out in a rash in reaction to poison ivy – which is why I was online trying to find out if steroid cream really expires (I had most of a tube left over from my previous run-in with poison ivy, two summers earlier).
Googling didn’t help, so I posted the question on a forum for such things.
My (now-ex) girlfriend M was busy programming her new cellphone, so I checked my email – and found a new “synchronicity” Google Alert.
I was instantly interested to see a blog post titled “Books, Lightning, Poison Ivy, and the Bizarreness of the Everyday” … since I’d been looking stuff up about poison ivy seconds before, it had been thunderstorming furiously all day – and the post was apparently about synchronicity.
A minor coincidence to be sure, but fresh on the heels of the recent Rubber ducky “chain synchronicity,” I was paying attention …
I told M what I’d found, reading to her aloud from the blog, which started out about the author’s serendipitous, synchronous relationship with a local used bookstore.
Then in one of several PS notes, the blogger talked about having to program all her numbers into a cellphone – which of course was what Mandy was doing at that moment. We laughed at the coincidence.
In the next PS, there was a link to an article about Roger Penrose, a scientist I like. So I clicked and started scanning the article.
Then M asked me to call her cellphone to test the ringtone – so I pulled up her new number on my cell. Since her old number was in there with her real name, I’d put the new number under her nickname – “Mandelbrot.”
I called her, the phone rang, and I went back to the article – and the first paragraph where I’d left off began with “Penrose cites the Mandelbrot set as an example.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVtzcCwLc2o]
I burst into laughter – which seems to always be my response to coincidences, post-Teapots.
(When I dug into the blogger’s past posts a bit, I found that she was worried that she might have MS … and I was about to be really freaked out if she, too, was diagnosed with it (this was shortly after my weird MS diagnosis / blogger sychronicity) … but fortunately, this potential synchronicity remained unrealized.)
synchronicity
[…] March, I stopped by the blog I wrote about in “Poison Ivy& the Mandelbrot Set” and read this post: Gardener’s Factoid of the […]
Cedar-Apple Rust Galls synchronicity (March 2008) « teapots happen
September 29th, 2009 at 10:51 pmpermalink
Wow. You know I totally forgot all about this! Where were we when you got poison ivy?
Mandy
July 13th, 2010 at 3:14 pmpermalink
actually I can’t remember now … I remember getting poison ivy the previous time at the Punchbowl waterfall in River Falls, but can’t remember where I got it this time.
teapots happen
July 13th, 2010 at 3:21 pmpermalink