Thursday, January 04, 2007

How Small is Ottawa

New Year’s Day, I walked into Blockbuster as a last attempt to find the final two discs of the third season of The Wire.* There were Rolf and Stephanie, looking through the used DVDs. I stopped and we chatted for a moment.

The next person through the door knew Rolf too. That’s not very surprising, because Rolf knows a lot of people. This new person stopped to chat as well, and remained nameless until Rolf realized that the new person was really new to both Stephanie and I. It’s easy to assume that all the people you know know all the people you know. But introductions were done and Rolf asked Jay what he’d done for New Year’s.

"Well, we finally got our kitchen finished, so we had a little party."
"Oh," Rolf said, "Sam told me about that."

Sam? Jay?

I turned to this stranger. "Are you Jay as in Martha and Jay?"
His eyebrows shot up. "Uh, yeah." He maybe looked a little creeped out.
"I’m a friend of Sam’s." Sam and Steph bought the duplex with Martha and Jay.
Jay relaxed. "Oh! You know Sam."
"You know Sam?!" Rolf said.
"There are .5 degrees of separation in this city," said Jay.

And Stephanie looked bemused.

*Unless Invisible Cinema, which was closed on the 1st, has it, I am not going to get to see it, because nobody in Centretown has it. Anyone have a copy they want to lend me?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And me, I was babysitting for Lisa and Richard so they could attend the party at Jay's house. Ha!

Asteroidea Press said...

jesus! i think that takes it down to .25, eh?

susie said...

That was a flashback. Rolf can't scatch his butt without running into someone he knows. We were at Pitchfork in Chicago and he was getting stopped by people there.

Also, I think I ran into you a few times at Rogers myself. It's quite the social hub.

Asteroidea Press said...

Jesus, Mike was the same way. Is still, I imagine. Probably the times you ran into me in Rogers, I was standing around waiting for him to finish talking to people.

Those couple blocks on Bank are pretty killer if you want to get anything done quickly. But I do appreciate them.