As I stated in my introductory post, I started noticing unusual connections in college – but not until I was at my second school. And in hindsight, that distinction makes sense.

I started my university career with a full-ride Air Force ROTC scholarship to a prestigious private Catholic university. My time there was incredible and enlightening, and after two years I knew, without a doubt:
1. I was not interested in continuing to pursue a degree in computer science
2. I was not cut out for obeying orders in a military setting, regardless of the scholarship.
2. I was too broke to stay at that school without a scholarship.

The only reason I was there in the first place was because my parents coaxed me into it. As the youngest of three, I took my cues from the older siblings, and they had gone the military route to afford college.

I was a tech savvy 90s kid, but I took advanced Lit courses in high school, not higher math.

I ultimately transferred out to a liberal-arts-focused campus of the University of Minnesota system, an hour and a half away from home and two and a half hours from my old university.

That’s when the coincidences started.

The summer that I changed schools was also the summer my big brother got married, and the summer my childhood dog passed away. All of these changes were hard for me to navigate, so when I got to the new school, I signed up to speak with a counselor.

After unburdening myself for several sessions, I discovered that my counselor knew my mom. Not only did he know my mom, he was an Oblate of the Order of St. Benedict with her.

I was placed in the on-campus apartments with a group of three tight-knit, bonafide Mean Girls. They were awful to me, but fortunately having been through standing up for myself and switching colleges, I knew that there were always options.

A couple of weeks into the term, I was at an on-campus event and met a young man who said his roommates were looking for another person to move into their off-campus house.

I spoke with campus housing. The wonderful woman there didn’t hesitate to let me dip out of my situation. She actually said she felt awful about placing me with those girls in the first place.

After I moved in to the new place, I learned that the guy who hooked me up with the room knew several of the girls from my old dorm – specifically on the same floor I’d lived on. He used to drive the two and a half hours down to visit his friends, but the two of us had no memory of ever seeing one another.

The final big one I can recall at the moment is, perhaps, the most painful and strange. In the summer between my junior and senior year, I had a website (not unlike this one) where I posted photos, poetry, and an online journal. A man my age, from the Twin Cities, commented on one of my posts, and we started to correspond.

One thing led to another and we started seeing each other. The hitch was – he had a stalker. And she soon started stalking me.

Of course, NONE OF THIS WAS TRUE. He was dating both of us at the same time and telling each of us that the other was a psycho stalker and dangerous. Eventually we figured it out and started talking.

Turns out, she was originally FROM the town where I was going to college. She was good family friends with the woman who was my work study boss. And she had been telling my boss how nuts I was. My boss had been acting strangely around me for a bit, but after it all came out, she apologized – but that didn’t undo the hurt of being mistrusted.

That was an awful, strange coincidence. Still hurts a bit – not the part about the boy, of course. The part about a woman I saw as a mentor not trusting me because of the twisted lies of the stupid boy.

I’ll end this post here. This sampling of strange coincidences fired off when I was in the place I was SUPPOSED to be, and even if the experiences around them weren’t always the best, the time I spent there jamming an English Lit degree into two years was incredible.

I guess the final odd thing I can mention was when, in the spring of 2000, my choir went on tour along the East coast. On our New York stop, I was walking with some friends near the World Trade Center buildings. They were all headed up to the top floor to look at the view. I parted ways with them there, saying, “Nah, I’m not going up. They tried bombing these buildings before and didn’t get the job done. They’re going to do it again.”

You know – totally normal things for a 20 year old English Lit student to say.