cos | perfect timing

Earlier this week, NStar notified me by phone that they would be doing maintenance work in our neighborhood on Thursday night, and power would be shut off for some time between 1am-4am. No problem, I thought, it would be a good excuse to get to sleep "early" for a change, and I wouldn't notice the outage. But this evening, working late at the campaign office, I forgot. I headed home shortly after 1am, and only remembered when I was two blocks away and saw that both blocks were completely dark. Yuck, I thought, I'm going to have to use my flashlight to get around, find some food, put stuff away, and go to sleep.

Our building has emergency lighting in the stairwell that goes on when power is out, which is really nice. I got upstairs, unlocked the door, and propped it open with my bag to let some light into the front hall. Then I stepped across the threshhold, into the apartment... and right then, power returned.

It got me thinking back to other incidents of coincidental timing I remember, that were just too perfect...

One day, years ago, I was driving up to Brandeis to do my afternoon bluegrass show on WBRS 100.1 FM, cutting it a bit too close and afraid I might be late. As I drove to campus I had the radio turned on, and a few minutes before I got there, the previous DJ put on his second to last song. Which coincidentally had a chorus of "He's on time!". I got to campus, still listening to this song, found a parking space, and pulled in at 12:58pm, just barely in time to run into the station and stick a CD on for my 1pm show. As I pulled my car into the spot, I could hear the final refrain, "Heeeeeee'ssss onnnnnn tiiiiiiime!!!" and right as it ended, I was stopped and turned off my car. Just before I got out, I noticed that my trip odometer had just hit 100.1 miles since my last reset.
Several years before that, WBRS had Groovasaurus play an outdoor concert during orientation. It was wonderful, and after they did their 2-song encore and got off "stage" again, people applauded enough to bring them back for another encore. They had nothing planned so they conferred among themselves while students yelled out requests. I wanted to hear my favorite Groovasaurus song, Accident, but I stayed quiet, until there was a lull in the yelling of requests. I yelled "Accident!" and just as I ended the word, there was a very loud screeeeech! from a car slamming on its brakes on the campus road about 50 feet away. We all shared a moment of stunned silence, then the band started playing my request with no further debate.
Some friends who went to Grinnell told me of an incident which I did not witness: One of their classmates, a guy named John but who at the time was calling himself Rwanda, was being his usual flaming self, hanging out with friends in one of the dorms. He said, "I'm so flaming, I set off the fire alarm", making a hand gesture along with this statement that ended with one of his hands pointing to the side, where coincidentally there was a window. Coincidentally, out that window was another dorm. Coincidentally, at that very moment, the fire alarm in that other dorm went off.

What incidents of coincidentally perfect timing do you remember?

[ wow! I just spent a whole 15 minutes of waking time doing something other than working on the campaign. As penance, I must ask you to think of anyone you know in Cambridge, MA, and email them to ask them to vote for Jesse Gordon this Tuesday. ]

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First a somewhat trivial example, then my explanation of why I don't think it means anything.

Joy and I are in bed, reading, on a Friday night. The only light in the room is on a timer.
Joy: When is the timer going to go off today?
Goljerp: Oh, about now.
TIMER GOES OFF

But I don't think it means anything, because there are many weeks when Joy asks the same question, I give the same answer (or "soon" or whatever) and nothing special happens. I just don't remember those weeks. Similarly, I'm sure there were times when you said or did something and wouldn't it be coincidental if something else happened, but it didn't, so I have to say vague things like this, instead.

jeez. this happens to me all the time with the radio and the music i'm listening to, but it's much more low key than these examples.

my favorite that really freaked me out, and was the first time i started paying attention to such things, was when i was about 15, i had my radio plugged into my light switch in my bedroom. so whenever i went into my room and turned the light on the radio would come on right away. one afternoon i went into my room and flipped the switch on to get something, and the radio screamed "turn it off!!!" i immediately did and went back to the kitchen.

Interesting how many of these stories ended up involving the radio, like my first story... but all the others are about what was on the radio at the moment of turning it on, and mine is the opposite.

I think the best one I have is from when I was 15 and on the high school tennis team. It was a perfectly sunny afternoon and I desperately didn't want to play for some reason or another. On the ride over to the other school, I thought, "Oh, how I wish it would rain....just enought to cancel the game."

As we pulled into the parking lot, lo, the skies did open and the rain did pour. The coaches waited for about 15 minutes, then called the game. Blithely, the rain then stopped and the sun came out. However, the game had already been called. Mwa ha ha ha ha, I thought.

Here's a Marlboro one for you: when I was a freshman, I was watching some kind of action movie in the Happy Valley common room. The TV screen was showing a tight close-up of the hero's face as he tried to finish something or other before the villain found him. Just outside the window, one of the peacocks went nyaaaalp! -- and at the same moment, the hero -- presumably in response to an onscreen noise we couldn't hear -- looked with an expression of terror in the peacock's direction.

I've been at many rehearsals where an actor was late and we decided to start without them--and they walked through the door of the rehearsal space at the exact moment of their entrance into the scene. However, this can often be ascribed to their having got there a moment or two before and stood outside the door listening for the right moment to show up. :)

My first wife and I are in bed, on a lazy Sunday afternoon. There's a "Jazz at Lincoln Center" thing on the TV that we're kind of half-watching. At some point, somebody nuzzles somebody else, and then there's caressing, and kissing, and soon enough, nature takes its course.

Up until this point, it could have been the same experience that any happy couple had on any lazy Sunday afternoon. But then, the music got louder and more passionate, and so did we, and the music got stronger and more free, and so did we, and the music was building up to something, and so were we, and just a little more, and more, and-

...now, I should mention that simultaneous orgasms are always nice by themselves, but having them, immediately followed by the crowd roaring and giving us a one-minute standing ovation?

Thank you. Thank you very much. You've been great. Thank you for coming. Good night.

Holy shit! This does not really happen. It sounds like a scene from a movie or something.

It sounds like a scene from a movie

... this coming from someone who's about to be a scene in a movie :)

What incidents of coincidentally perfect timing do you remember?

I once got into my car in the morning in my usual groggy state, and turned the ignition. I immediately heard a voice call out "Justin? Are you there, Justin?"

To say the least, I was a bit surprised.

It turned out that the voice was Christopher Lyden's. I often leave my car radio on WBUR, and at just that moment in The Connection there was a caller named Justin that had dropped offline unexpectedly.

When I was fifteen, my family took a vacation out West. Our flights were to and from Los Angeles. The day that we left, we had to get up at 4AM to make the flight. At the appointed time, my alarm clock went off in the pause between a commercial and the next song, which then started

Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner
Sometimes I feel like my only friend
Is the city I live in
The city of Angels.....

Cos-topher,
You seem to have forgotten another example, which was one of the scariest events in my life.

We were driving in NY late-ish at night. We were listening to . . . can't remeber the name of their band, simon and my friends bonnie and Matt. The song said something to the extent of "driving not watching the road you can't even see" I looked up, having noticed an odd expression on your face, just in time to watch the SUV in front of us roll over and over and over

You are so right! I'm going to add it to the post.

I try to arrange my own perfect timing, though sitting on the couch at Vince's NYE party years ago was quite fortunate. ;) I miss you. Sorry I'm so incessantly absent.

I have a feeling even if you hadn't sat down there right then, as long as you didn't leave the party, we would have met & connected. I can clearly remember "What's your name??" ... though I can't quite remember whatever was between that and being in your lap a minute (or 5 minutes? or 30 seconds?) later :)

I miss you! Write me back? Or call?

thanks for the invite to the party! hope you got my text message saying we are being lazy shut-ins tonight, though. :>

I did, alas. You could've been happy lazy shut-ins at the party :) But now I'll send you an email.

perfect timing

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