Flynn’srecent description of the Five Questions people ask eachother upon meeting reminded me of my recent trip to visit a law school.
Visiting a school is always an interesting experience because there you are with about a million other people…well, maybe more like a hundred, but either way it’s a fair amount. Of course, I’m not sure what an unfair amount would be. Maybe like 13 ’cause it’s evil? But I digress.
These visits are interesting because no one knows eachother, so, as Flynn discussed, they must ask Small Talk Questions to get through the day.
In one instance, I met a fellow prospective student who had gone to Amherst College. For those of you who don’t know of Amherst, it’s a small school in Massachusetts. I think each class has about 6 students, so there are like 24 in the whole school. So when I said: “Hey, I knew one person at Amherst. Think you’d know him?” There was a pretty good chance my small talk compatriot would.
And so I says to the guy, I says “Ben Mathes.”
And he says “Are you kidding?”
And I reply “Yes, I made that name up off the top of my head.”
I didn’t, and as it turns out Ben was this guy’s sophomore year roommate. Now, I haven’t seen or talked to Ben in a few years, so that was pretty much the end of the line there, but, hell, we knew a guy in common. Maybe this was a sign that we were at the right law school. Or maybe Amherst is just really small.
Either way, Ben, if you’re out there reading this website I met your sophomore year roommate, so yeah. There you have it.
My second anecdote from this law school visit has very little to do with the first except that it happened on the same day. It’s not even really related to Flynn’s Questions, but I found it funny. Or more accurately, my friend Lisa found it funny, and I thought it might be time to write a longer Thought, so I could avoid that whole being transported to another dimension thing that’s been messing up the site.
So here goes:
I ran into a second year student who graduated from Duke in 1998, so our time there overlapped. She looked really familiar, but I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t figure out how I knew her, and there were some scenarios in which it would’ve been bad to have forgotten her like if we had been lab partners or she was my roommate’s girlfriend or she was my girlfriend, that kind of thing, so I didn’t say anything about it.
However, I ran into her again later in the day, and at this point she says to me:
“Did you have a brother at Duke?”
I replied: “I have a younger brother who’s there now.”
“Younger? No. Huh. You weren’t…you weren’t in a singing group, were you?”
“Actually, I was. Yes.”
“So, you are you.”
“Yes I am.”
“You don’t look like you.”
“Well, I’m fatter now.”
So the moral here is if you haven’t seen someone in four years they might think that you’re your own older brother. You may bear some family resemblance to yourself, but you’ve changed. You’re probably fatter. You should go to the gym more.
But despite all of that, never forget that you are, indeed, you…