Life is full of strange coincidences sometimes. Check this series out. I had a crush on this guy in my screenwriting class in February. Screenwriting Marina hottie boy, my nickname for him, ends up writing a screenplay about a giy who used to play football at Marshall University in West Virginia. I don't think the Screenwriitng Marina hottie boy played football there though, but played for some school in his home state of Pennsylvania.

In July I went to West Virginia for two weeks on vacation wtih a friend, whose family is from there. While blogging one night in West Virginia, I received an email from someone who used to live there. That person is now a blog friend, and I have her blog linked on my blog. This new blog friend just happened to have gone to Marshall University, the school screenwriting marina hottie boy talked about in his screenplay.

This new blog friend lives in Columbus, Ohio now. Ohio is where Paul, my boyfriend who died in May of this year, was born and is now buried somewhere in Dayton. Ohio is also where my first love, who I've been thinking about since April, went to school after he transferred from my college in Grinnell, Iowa. I wonder if Oberlin College is anywhere near Columbus or Dayton?

Screenwriting marina hottie boy is originally from Pittsburgh, PA. He looks almost exactly like my first love, only he's taller, bigger, played college football, isn't as articulate, doesn't play the violin and bass guitar, and isn't jewish. Pittsburgh, PA has largest museum dedicated to just Andy Warhol. I went to LA to see the Andy Warhol exhibit.

And last but not least. The VP, who I'm meeting with on Monday, works out of his home in Pittsburgh, PA.

Signs was all about coincidences and how they might or might not all mean something, depending on whether you have faith and believe in God. I grew up catholic, and I believe in signs from god. In fact, I crave signs from god. I ask for signs, coincidences, sychronistic events, and you know most of the time, I get an answer. It's a spooking thing. I'm not sure what all these coincidences I've written about mean for my life right now, but they're interesting to note. They also make me curious to know what other coincidences are coming next, and what they might mean for my future.

This song keeps popping into my head at odd moments. I like the words; they lift me out of the melancholy mood I've been in these last few days.

The Middle
Written by Jimmy Eats World

Hey, don't write yourself off yet
It's only in your head
You feel left out or looked down on
Just try your best, try everything you can
And don't you worry what they tell themselves
When you're away

It just takes some time, little girl
You're in the middle of the ride
Everything, everything will be just fine
Everything, everything will be all right, all right

Hey, you know they're all the same
You know you're doing better on your own
So don't buy in, live right now
Yeah, just be yourself
It doesn't matter if that's good enough for someone else

It just takes some time, little girl
You're in the middle of the ride
Everything, everything will be just fine
Everything, everything will be all right, all right

It just takes some time, little girl
You're in the middle of the ride
Everything, everything will be just fine
Everything, everything will be all right, all right

There was a full moon on Thursday August 22 in the sign of Aquarius, my sun sign. My favorite astrologer wrote, on her website, that this Aquarius moon will be about looking at the past rather than the future. This may explanation why I have been on a major nostalgia trip since Thursday.

The movie Sliding Doors is about how a seemingly random event changes the course of one person's life. In one life, the main character catches her subway train. In the second parallel life, the main character misses the train. The simple act of either catching or missing the train lead the main character two completely different futures.

In one of my favorite episodes of Red Dwarf, that hilarious Brit scifi show, Rimmer the hologram meets one of his selves. What' s interesting is the new Rimmer is the polar opposite of the hologram Rimmer. The new Rimmer says that every decision you make in life, creates another reality, a whole other you living a completely different future, in a different dimension. all stemming from the outcome of that one decision.

As look back on my past, as I have been doing these past few days, I saw three possible lives for me since 1999.

Life # 1 - Instead of freaking out and running away from the guy who is "the one that got away", I didn't freak out and I stayed. In that life, we followed the normal course of romance, got married and I'm a house wife on the Peninsula raising my one year old little boy. I am in love, but it's a comfortable and companionable love, which makes me feel very secure. Sometimes I have visions of him, this son that I know is alive and well in another dimension. He looks like his father with his strawberry blonde hair and hazel green brown eyes. I would have stopped writing, so there would be no writing group, no screenwriting group, no novel started, no short stories written, no screenplay, and definitely no blog. I think I am happy in that other life, because I have the child I always wanted, but I think a part of me is sad because the writing got left behind. I try to write, but with a husband and child to care for, writing is the last thing on my mind. I'm a mommy now. I have a comfortable, luxurious and secure life. My husband is a bit of workaholic, and travels two weeks out of every month. When he's not traveling, he's playing golf. He is kind and he loves me, but he's a little boring. His job always comes first, but he is a good provider and good father to my child, when he's there.

Life # 2 - Instead of being cautious and safe, I threw caution to the wind and moved to Texas to be with "the one I let go". I had a vision of myself living somewhere in some small town Texas. I am in love, and it is a wild, crazy and passionate love, which is exciting but stressful too. I saw myself happy, because I was with the man I loved, but I also sensed that I was lonely and sad. I left the city I loved, the ocean I need to feel comfortable and all of my friends. I am landlocked and living in a small town, which I swore I would never do again. I do not have a child, because the man I love doesn't want any more children, and this is a sore point between us. My husband is a workaholic, so I spend alot of time on my own. I write, because the man I love encourages me in my writing as he is a fellow writter himself when he's not working, but I feel like a fish out of water and there is no inspiration to write. I miss the ocean, I miss my friends, I miss city life, and most of all I miss the energy and creativity that comes from living in a place where breaking with tradition is a way of life. I love my husband, but he is a typical Texas guy and it's either his way or the highway, and he will not abide agreeing to disagree. It's too exhaustive to fight with him, so most of the time I give in. His early words of advise come back to haunt me. He told me, "Never move for love, only move for more money."

Life # 3 - My current life I lead. I am exploring my writing so I've written 7 short stories, started a novel and wrote 120 pages of it, finished a screenplay, am in a writing and screenwriting group, and I have a blog. I am happy 95% of the time and I still feel like I have all my options open and my whole future ahead of me. I am comfortable and secure, and I make enough money so I feel quite comfortable living in the most expensive city in the country.

While writing this I just got the following insight. The man who I dubbed, "the one that got away", would have preferred that I loved him in a wild and crazy way. The man who I dubbed, "the one I let go", would have preferred that the love I felt for him be comfortable, soothing and companionable. This may be why these two relationships never worked, and why there were subtle red flags from the get go both times. A politically inclined friend said that the two relationships would have also never worked, because well, they were both republicans and I'm a middle of the road democrat. I'm not sure I agree with him on this one, since deep down my values were similar to both men on the important things like family, money and religion.

I know I made the right decision in choosing life # 3, and that I was meant to make the choices I made. But, this aquarius moon has me wondering sometimes what life # 1 and life # 2 would have been like. I loved both men, although in very different ways, and it still hurts that I'm not with either of them. For "the one who I let go", I just miss him alot. He was a good friend too, a fellow writer, and I miss his discipline and his intelligence. For "the one that got away", I cannot help but look back at our time with more than a tinge of regret. I felt so comfortable with that man, so secure, and yes, I admit it, a little bored. But, what's a little boredom when you have an overabundance of security and love.

I cannot wait for this aquarius moon to end. I am tired of looking back into my past. I guess I want more confirmation that I did the right thing, that I made the right decision, that following my creative impulse was the best decision to make, is always the best decision to make, that a life without creativity is a half lived life, a sad life, that in the end it always works out for the best, it may not look like it at the time, but everything always works out for the best, all the time, like it was planned that way all along.

Tough day at work today. Client requests for information from reports I did a year ago. I hate looking at work I did in the past. It's like, OH MY GOD, did I actually do this? This client was the first client we did these particular type of reports for, and since they were the first, they were the guinea pigs. The reports have come along way since then, so it's painful for me to see these dinosaurs.

Looking at old programming coded, even my own, is scary. It's like looking into someone's brain and how they think, how their logic works, how they process information or don't process information. I'm sure if a fellow programmer looked at my code, they'd freak out. I'm looking at my own programming code I wrote a year ago, and freaking out.

The client is requesting detailed information from this old report, and because the report is a year old, the information has already been deleting due to space limitations on the server. I've been spending the whole day trying to recreate the report to get back to the same numbers I had a year ago. What a pain! I'm finding so many mistakes, mistakes that we corrected later for other clients and their reports. I hate this. How do you go back to a client and tell them? It's not that the information is that far off, I just can't get back to my original numbers. However you look at it, it just looks like one big damn mistake.

I'm like so stressed out. I would get killed in an audit, and I'm bummed because I've always been so good about making my work audit proof. You should always be able to get back to your original numbers, no matter how many years later you go back and rerun the job. Stress, stress, stress. Thank god, it's Friday!