We’ve all met someone that we end up meeting in another context sometime later. Usually you end up face-to-face with that person and you both have a chuckle about it. The “Oh, fancy meeting you here” sort of thing, even if it’s in the grocery store. Sometimes though, you don’t go out of your way to acknowledge the person and you might even be spotting her without her being aware of it. Or, you think they aren’t aware but maybe they’ve seen you too and are also not acknowledging it. Sometimes you knowingly move in the same circles as someone for a long time and never get the chance to acknowledge it. Sometimes you just hear about somebody again and again, and end up knowing more about them than they know you do. That’s the case with me and the foreign goth girl I’ll call Trina.
Trina is a student at the college where I work. She was a workstudy for another department and had developed a website for them. They needed me to create a space for them to publish the site and help them publish it. So, I worked with Trina several times over the summer to accomplish this.
Later, I saw her at the gay pride parade but didn’t speak with her. I’m not sure she saw me.
Sometime after that, I was at a meeting of the avian-related club I belong to. One of our members is also a member of a local herpetological society. He was telling me the herp society was looking for meeting space and I suggested the school where I work. He’d said another herp society member named Trina who is a student at my school was supposed to be looking into it but asked me to follow up.
More recently, I went to the park to meet and walk dogs with some women I’d met online after I’d advertised for game group members. They were trying to help me think of ways to advertise for more members and one asked if I was a member of a local dyke mailing list. She said “I was going to advise you to join and post an announcement but now that I think about it you might not want to.” She went on to explain that there was a foreign student named Trina on the list who was driving everybody nuts with her posts and gave a few details. There was no mistaking who she was talking about.
So now I’m wondering when and in what context I’ll hear about her next. Weird, huh?