Certainly many activities that we do have inherent within them a selection bias. It is not unusual to find chai drinkers at Starbucks, readers at the bookstore, knitters at knitting group. But sometimes within these group you find more overlapping circles. My swap buddy for the Football along swap (where it was to be expected that we would both be football watching knitters) turned out to also be Unitarian Universalist and teaching the Our Whole Lives course, which I taught two years ago (admittedly she is teaching middle schoolers and I worked with senior high kids).
I was reminded of this at Starbucks this weekend. This particular Starbucks is not my normal Starbucks. It is near my church and in a strip mall with a grocery store, drug store and bank branch but is otherwise outside of my normal range. So, while I have been there several times, it is not quite my normal haunt. And yet I have several times had such great conversations with strangers there.
Yesterday was that kind of day. I snagged a cushy chair and settled in with my tea and my book. Someone had given me a copy of Jennifer Crusie's Strange Bedpersons - it's one of her Harlequins and I think I may have read it before, but long enough ago that I was able to enjoy (possibly anew) all those details and funny bits.
I hit one such funny bit and giggled attracting the attention of the lady in the other cushy chair who laughed and said it was so nice to see people laughing at their books. So, I told her a bit about the book, and we just kept talking. We talked about books, about writing, about social justice. She was reading This I Believe which I've been meaning to pick up a copy of, we discovered that she works in religious education at a progressive synagogue which she compared to being similar to Unitarians and I mentioned that I worked with youth at a UU church. It was an amazing conversation and we both left thrilled that happenstance had created this synergy. We were even drinking the same drink.
Rants About New (and old) Things
