I was working on a drawing for one of my art classes at Ohio State. It was a portrait of Peggy Lee. One of my roommates had some people over, and one of them came over and watched me draw. It turned out, she was the layout editor of the university’s yearbook, and was looking for someone to help her choose and crop photos. I told her I had never done that, but she wanted me anyway.
The following year, I was the layout editor, and had the freedom to do anything I wanted for the intro section. This was 1967, and I did a series of psychodelic collages, that you really had to be high to understand.
Shortly thereafter, I moved to NYC, and those pages were the closest thing I had to an artist’s portfolio. On my first day in the city, I showed them to one person, and he hired me on the spot. This was the beginning of my career as a graphic artist.
Now, 45 years later, I’m a self-employed artist. Blame Peggy Lee.
We had random dorm assignments, and with my usual luck I got assigned to the least wanted one. I was standing on line waiting for a room assignment when two guys came, asking if anyone wanted to trade for rooms in the most desired dorm. One guy said yes. I figured it was a scam of some kind, but had that dorm on the top of my list, so I figured what the hell, and volunteered. Turned out to be real.
So, the physics tutor for the section where I lived freshman and sophomore years also ran the Judo club, a member of which was a woman who used to drop in, who brought people on her floor of the girls dorm sophomore year, one of whom was visited by someone she knew in band camp years before, who I met and married.
It was also a great dorm with a great bunch of people.
When my dad was 18, he wanted to leave Michigan. He walked to the Navy recruitment office with the intention to join the Navy and see the world. However he didn’t bring his birth certificate. So he had to go back home and get it. On the way home he got a lift from a guy. That guy was an Air Force recruiter. Dad joined the USAF instead of the USN.
Much later one of his Air Force buddies was dating a woman and that guy talked his girlfriend into setting a double date for his friend Larry,(my dad) who had just been stationed there. That woman was my Aunt, she brought her younger sister to be the double date and that’s how my parents met.
My friend Brad lent me a CD mix of current new music (the monthly CMJ)
I really fell in love with one of the bands
A boy chatted me up online and told me how his mom was friends with some of the people in the band. We started dating (turns out she really was friends with them, and I became friends with them too. And I’m still friends with her)
He was a horrible awful person and we broke up spectacularly, turning me to a spiral of anger and hate.
I decided the only thing that would make me feel better was to get a golden retriever puppy. I did. It worked, I felt better. She was the most wonderful thing to ever happen in my life.
Here’s my second-best one: by early 1998, my wife and I were dissatisfied with our college teaching jobs in NE Tennessee, but didn’t know what we could do instead. Shortly after the semester ended, I was looking up some data on a government website when a banner scrolled across the bottom saying they were looking for mathematicians, statisticians, and computer programmers. I clicked the banner, submitted an application online, and a few months later, my wife and I moved to the DC area, and started working for that agency, where we still are.
When I was 16 my neighbor picked me up from home and took me and her daughter to the neighborhood dept store where another neighbor worked with the intent of getting us both jobs. The neighbor working there guided me over to the manager in the art dept and the neighbor’s daughter over to the toy dept. To make a long story short, that 50/50 choice resulted in introductions that eventually resulted in a 30+ year career at a major research institution. I haven’t won a 50/50 choice since.
The most significant even though it is far from the most dramatic might have been about 1 year after I married and my wife bought me a german shorthaired pointer for Christmas. I trained the dog, took up bird hunting and joined some groups. It was the first time in my life I had followed through on anything and really became involved in something. I did very well at it and was very wellaccepted by my peers.
I only stayed with that for about 10 years but it paved the way for other things I got involved in that I took to a very high level.
Another big one was after my marriage of 20 years ended at age 40. I think that was when I became a man.
In 1988, me and a mate were out on the piss and pub crawling around North London. It was about 10:45pm and in order to grab a final couple of pints before the bell, we fell into this pub in Muswell Hill. In there we met two American girls on an abroad program.
One the girls and I hit it off and I moved to the US in 1989 and have been here even since.
In 2006 I did some work as a volunteer editor for the Open Directory, went at random to a directory category, came across a listing for a hiking group’s web site that had automatically been unlisted because the site had been temporarily down. I checked the site, found it was up again, re-listed it, looked at the site and enrolled in the group’s mailing list. I participated in the weekly hikes since, made the acquaintance of one lady; after four years I asked her out; after half a year we became a couple and we have been together for four years now. That’s by far the best thing that happened to me in my life, and it happened because a web server was down temporarily.
One day at college, I was feeling ambivalent about my future there. As I was walking across campus to the building where my classes were, I looked up to see a large flock of birds had perched on the roof of the building. A voice in my head told me, “This place is for the birds!” So, I left.
I was in college, when I met a girl who was a friend of a guy who was a friend of a good friend of mine. I had probably spoken a couple dozen words to her as we all walked between classes on a couple occasions, when one day as I was walking through campus, she called out and said “Hi SP!” to me from across the quad. I hadn’t even noticed her there, talking to a friend.
Hey! She remembered my name! And she singled me out for special attention! She must like me!
So, knowing what building her Econ class was in, and remembering that she had mentioned she had her final at a particular date & time, I was able to go to the Econ department, look at the finals schedule, figure out which classroom her final was in, wait out in the hallway for her to finish her test, talk to her to get her number and to discover that she had no plans for New Year’s Eve, call and ask her out…and so **Rhiannon8404 **and I are still together nearly 25 years later.
It was only quite some time after the fact that I realized she seemed to know every third person on campus, and was always stopping to say Hi to someone, and that I was really nothing more than “some guy she knew” that afternoon…
I decided pretty much at the last minute to ditch my college plans (which I was ambivalent about) and follow my friend to a different and closer school. While there, I decided to join a gaming club (which was odd for me, since I’m not usually social and had next to no gaming experience), and then decided to join a particular game. In that game I met several of my best friends (we’re still good friends to this day, 30 years later) and met the guy I’d end up marrying and have been married to for 25 years.
He also got me my first job in what ended up being a career that’s lasted since 1989 (he saw an opening at his company and sent it to me because he knew I was unhappy at what I was doing–I didn’t have the major for it, but I managed to convince the manager to take a chance on me), and my interest in gaming has led to a second job as a freelancer and my very first novel contract.
Who knows how much of that would have happened if I’d gone to the original school? Probably none of it. So it worked out well for me.
My mom was 18 in 1963 and dying to get away from her crappy family life. She had been accepted to Berkely, but she was broke and the scholarship she needed to attend fell through. So she married the first guy she could find, my dad. A few months later the scholarship money was re-offered to her, but she was already married and pregnant and living in Seattle. No college for her.
If the scholarship money she needed hadn’t been unavailable, I would never have existed, and my mom would have went to Berkley and graduated in 1967 or 1968 and god knows what she’d have ended up doing but she wouldn’t have been a stay at home mom with three kids by the time she was 22.
Right out of college I moved to a new town and was getting an apartment set up. In those days you had to establish a telephone by going to the AT&T office and talk to a real person. While waiting I struck up a conversation with the cute girl next to me, who was also getting her first phone. Although I “saw” her phone number I didn’t think it appropriate to call her out of the blue.
A few days later I was back downtown, kind of hoping to run into her, but looking for the post office. Who comes walking down the street in my direction? It’s her! We took that as fate, had a date the next night, and eventually got married and it’s been marital bliss ever since.
When I was 12, I went to a church thing where the older sister of a kid I knew talked about her experience as an exchange student. “I wanna do that!” I thought.
I spent my junior year abroad, because I’d heard of it from her.
I got into a prestigious college, because I had spent a year abroad and was from a podunk town (not because my grades and scores stood out at all–it was the year abroad that got me in).
I met my husband at college, not to mention meeting a lot of other important people in my life. If you spend most of your youth in a podunk town with a really high level of crazy, Berkeley is quite the broadening experience. (There are people who like to read, did you know that??)
As far as I can tell, I owe my entire adult life to a talk given by a teenage girl named Heidi.
My university studies, career, location, spouse (and daughters) were all more or less directly determined by a single choice I made back in the spring of 1990.
Ever since I was I child, I wanted to be a scientist. I was first interested in astronomy then biology and chemistry. At the end of my 4th year in secondary school (age 16), I received a form which listed all the programmes that the school offered for the last 2 years. It was an important choice because unlike the ones that we had made before, it couldn’t be changed. Past the first few weeks of 5th year, you were stuck with your programme until the end of the 6th year. Moreover, those two years were meant to prepare us for university i.e. if you wanted to start scientific studies at university, you were supposed to pick the “science program” in the last two years of school. That’s what I did. Unfortunately, my Physics teacher turned out to be a psychopathic robot. My classmates were intelligent enough to shut their mouths and do what he expected of them. I was confrontational and started a two-year conflict that I could only lose.
By the time I graduated, I was totally disgusted with anything that had to do with Physics. I gave up my dreams of science studies and turned to something completely different (linguistics). That forced me to go to a different university than the one I originally had in mind, settle down in a different city where I ultimately met my wife and had my daughters.
I was walking down Boylston Street in Boston and passed a group of people. I instantly realized that they were science fiction fans. I don’t know how I knew this – there were no outward signs, like someone wearing a costume, or a propeller beanie, or a plethora of witty buttons. They looked like normal people in a group. But it reminded me that there was supposed to be a science fiction convention nearby. I wasn’t following these closely at the time, because otherwise there was no way I wouldn’t have been keenly anticipating not only a science fiction convention, but the World SF convention, making one of its rare appearances in Boston. In fact, it was the 50th anniversary of the first one, and therefore a Very Big Deal.
I walked to the Hynes Auditorium and signed up for the whole weekend. At the opening festivities, I met Pepper Mill and her sister. I told them that if they watched my backpack, I’d brave my way through the crowds and bring back three pieces of the anniversary cake for us. I did. I then kept running into Pepper Mill all weekend, purely by chance. There were people I knew at the convention who I never saw, and others I saw only once, but I kept running into Pepper over and over. We exchanged contact info, and on the last night of the Con, as I got into the cab to go home, she kissed me “so I’d remember her”. I did. We got married less than four years later.
Butterfly effect:
Because I bought a motorcycle I got married
Bought a motorcycle
Got speeding ticket
Went to court and they let me take traffic school
Went to the school
Saw a girl that I met once that was a friend of a co-worker
Sat with girl, had lunch with her (pizza and beer)
Finished traffic school
Same girl started coming by work to chat with her friend (found out later was coming by to see me)
One night girl was in car waiting for me by my motorcycle after work
When I walked up to bike after work, 4 girls came out of the car
Went out for drinks with the 4 girls
Ended up dating future wife (not girl from traffic school)
Got married
Future wife was long time friend and next door neighbor of girl from traffic school
Apparently this caused issues and the first girl didn’t talk to my future wife for a very long time
This all happened 31 years ago now.
