Life is like an analogy...

So before I moved to Southern California in August 2007 to attend a graduate creative writing program at Chapman University, I worked for a few months as a reporter for a very small weekly county newspaper based near my hometown in Washington State. I had to write six stories a week: three on events happening in Everett, Washington and three on events happening in Mukilteo, Washington. Everett is the fourth-biggest city in the state and Mukilteo sits just west of Everett.

I had focused on features, reviews, and commentaries when I worked for The Daily Evergreen, the student newspaper at Washington State University, so the hard news stories I had to write for this county newspaper were much different and not always easy (that's why it's called hard news! ba-dum-ching). Specifically, when you write features, everyone wants to talk to you about their local business/charity event/art exhibit/performance/social gathering/etc. because they want the publicity. When you write hard news, people sometimes don't want to talk to you because they don't want the publicity if they're being asshats. This was...interesting for me, mostly because I hate cold-calling people and like it even less when I have a sneaking suspicion the person I'm cold-calling will yell at me and/or hang up on me.

What can I say? Some people are great journalists who can sense intriguing stories, have really thick skins, and possess a drive to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" -- and some of us are people-pleasers who just want to write about the museum photography exhibits and not get bitched at by some corporate slime or doze off at 8 a.m. city council meetings about road paving or tear up along with a distraught person crying over the phone and talking about how she's been evicted and/or has cancer and/or is suing the state MY GOD THIS IS THE WORST JOB EVER.....

Thankfully, I was accepted into the Chapman graduate program so I quit working for the newspaper, packed up my car and drove 1200 miles to Orange, California in the heart of Orange County. I lived blissfully in Orange for two years, soaking up the weather, writing to my heart's content, meeting my husband, and eating In-N-Out burgers at least once a week with the occasional Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles trip to Hollywood. After we graduated, my husband and I moved to Irvine, just south of Orange.


Last night, I was trying to find someone's profile on Facebook using the person's email address, and I decided to try the Friend Finder thingie that Facebook promotes ad nauseum on the right-hand side of everyone's homepage. I have the former newspaper job listed in my profile and one of the options with the Friend Finder is to search for people who work or have worked at your previous place of employment.

Since Facebook wasn't letting me find the person I wanted to find with the email address, I clicked the link for finding other employees at the county newspaper out of curiosity. The newspaper staff was very small, so I was surprised when two people popped up in the search results, both of whom are currently reporters.

So here's the existential freaky part:

There are two reporters -- one male and one female. I could see some information on both their profiles, given their privacy settings. The female reporter went to Washington State University, like I did, and now lives in the next town over from my hometown in Washington State. That seems reasonable and expected, given that the newspaper is written for my home county.

What does not seem reasonable, expected, or even freakishly possible is that the female reporter's hometown is Orange, California -- exactly where I moved when I left the newspaper to go to graduate school. Orange is not a huge city: the population is under 150,000 and it's next to the much larger cities of Anaheim and Santa Ana (both with populations over 300,000). In fact, Orange County is such a gerrymandering mess, that it's often difficult to tell which city you're actually in without a mailing address.

Seriously, what are the chances that:

• I would leave this tiny local newspaper to move to her hometown -- and now live essentially next door to it while...
• She would leave Orange, only to end up working at the same tiny local newspaper and living essentially next door to my hometown?


I have this weird feeling that Elton John is going to bust into my apartment at any moment, singing songs from The Lion King. It certainly wouldn't be any weirder than this coincidence.

Labels: articles, bizarro, grad school, technology, the internets, words