Column: Serendipity: Not just a bad movie
Oct. 12, 2007
At the start of every week, at least five of my friends ask me what I'm going to write my column about. By Wednesday, the response they get is a roaring "I don't know!" accompanied by a slammed door and a mostly withering look. This week, I've been telling people that I intend to write about unexpected twists of happy fate, bon chance, about life suddenly looking up. The conversation usually goes like this.
"What are you going to write your column about?"
"Oh, you know. The usual. Serendipity, maybe."
"... Seriously?"
And what the hell is wrong with serendipity? When I mentioned it to a friend of mine, an English Ph.D. student, she scoffed and her eyes rolled skyward. "Whatever. Don't write about serendipity."
In the beginning of this decade, John Cusack, unable to get a hold of himself after taking part in the greatness that is High Fidelity, made a string of syrupy romantic comedies. One of them, unsuitably named Serendipity, featured him opposite the very pretty but rather two-dimensional Kate Beckinsale. The premise of the movie is something about finding the one you've always yearned for in an unexpected place, and then seeing that person again years later in an equally random, implausible way.
In the context of that movie, the reactions that my column idea garnered are more than appropriate. It's just unfortunate that the kind of serendipity I mean, true serendipity, now is dogged with such a stigma for being cheap.
Serendipity as a concept aside, I've recently discovered an unexpected boon, a turn of luck in my own life that defies explanation or reason. It's just, well, serendipitous.
A few months into my freshman year, after scouring the town and Facebook.com for something to do during the weekend, I got ridiculous at a party and made some poor decisions with another reporter who later turned out to be an awful human being and disliked by virtually every mutual acquaintance of ours.
I was down on myself for weeks about it, after the act itself and then later, when I had to reject him. I chalked it up to be another in a string of unnecessary actions I took that first semester and thought nothing more of it, a silly decision that I would learn from later. But we've kept in touch, and as strange as it is to say it, have become something akin to friends. Nothing to write home about, really.
I know what you're thinking. A friendship that blossomed out of a drunken misadventure with the opposite sex isn't anything uncommon, much less serendipitous. Here's where it gets lucky.
Yesterday, I walked out of Gannett Hall with one of the Missouri Honor Medal winners for this year, talking about The Maneater and life at MU. The funny thing is, I'd met him before, a brief encounter in Chicago where my aforementioned poor decision introduced us.
The serendipitous thing about this, the part where the meaning gets revealed and skeptical readers are lured back from the John Cusack side of the fence, is that the MHM winner isn't the first interesting person I've been able to talk to as a result of that less-than-fateful night last October. He's one in a string of interesting people and amazing opportunities that have cropped up, randomly, luckily, somehow related to this kid and force themselves into my life as well.
It's unbelievable, this unexpected swish of fate, and this confirmation of serendipity's existence outside of fiction. Almost like something you'd see in a movie. Oh. Well, fuck.
pbyrmf@mizzou.edu
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