Ancestral Pile

Something happened this morning which drove all of the blog posts I had been intending to make quite out of my head: I ran into Punk Rob on the Metro.

A brief historical tangent: In college, my roommate Jillian and I knew so very many guys named Rob that we had to give them all adjectives to keep them straight. This practice wound up spreading a bit, and eventually most of the guys we knew had adjectives attached to their names in our casual discussions. My favorite, I think, was Naked Howie.

Anyway. Turns out Punk Rob is working in DC for Media Matters as a research analyst. Neat! After a little creative internet sleuthing when I got to the office, I also found out he's getting married next month. Double neat!

It was really surreal to run into someone from college on the train, though. Yes, I know, I act like college was so long ago, when I actually only graduated in May. But it's still weird. When I go through transitions like that, I tend to lose touch with the people from the previous period in my life (with a very few, very important exceptions, of course). I'd already lost touch with a lot of people-- including Punk Rob and all the other Robs-- when I moved out of the dorms and in with Don, and spent so much less time on campus. And the Baltimore/DC area is big. It's not like my hometown, where my mother once ran into the mother of someone I'd gone to elementary school with, who had heard from the mother of someone I'd gone to high school with that my boyfriend at the time had given me a ring for christmas and so all of a sudden the whole town thought I was getting married and my mother had to do emergency grocery store gossip triage.

It's not like that. It's big. So running into Punk Rob, of all people, was weird. Cool, but weird. We talked about houses. Of course. Not a lot of time for much else-- I'm only on the red line for two stops.

I wonder if I'll run into anyone else? The internet makes it a lot easier; I know, for instance, that even though Jillian hasn't spoken to me in a year and a half at least, that she got married in September and is living in Frederick and working in early childhood education. But completely random freak coincidences like running into Punk Rob on the train because I was an hour late this morning, those aren't really findable on Google.

I was originally going to post about how the cat fell down the stairs for the third time on Sunday, but I'll save that for later.