It IS a Small World, Afterall

From the get go of blogging, I have been amazed at the vast web that stretches across and connects all of us. Every so often, it seems I notice a connection between myself and others that I was previously unaware of. As it's been an amusing phenomenon from the beginning, I'm going to start there.

I usually credit my good friend, Jenny, as the person responsible for my exposure to blogging, but that's not entirely true. Around the same time, my sister, Emily, was talking to me about blogging and encouraging me to start one. Prior to this, we had established that one of her online friends, Shelah, from a message board, was someone I had met at BYU. You know that bizarre name game, when someone asks you if you knew so and so from BYU and you want to scream, "There's 40,000 people there! Probably not!" but when Emily mentioned that her friend's husband was a microbiology major and told me his name, I actually did know who he was. Funnier yet, I had gone on a group date with both he and Shelah my freshman year of college.

She sent me the link to her blog, Hitting the Ground Running, and I throughly enjoyed Shelah's writing. How bizarre to suddenly know the ins and outs of someone's days who I kind of, sort of knew almost 15 years previously.

Once I began my own blog, the world got smaller. Dana, of Charmed Designs fame, recognized me from our first BYU married ward. She also once posted a picture on her blog of one of her bridesmaids, a picture of a girl named Jennifer, who also happened to be a friend of mine at BYU, albeit independent of Dana. We had originally met because she was cousins with my freshman roommate, Michelle and then she and her husband, Ryan, ended up in Jay's and my ward and we joined the Mapleton Chorale when Ryan was the conductor. The Mapleton Chorale, by itself, has been a constant "I-know-someone-too" or "I'm from Mapleton" topic of conversation. Kari mentioned in one of her posts how someone in her ward had influenced her weight loss journey, who just happened to be my sister-in-law, Bekki. Ana turned out to be a different sister-in-law's counselor in a young women's presidency. Misty, (another online friend of my sister's) moved into my ward. Rachel, who I met at the blog party, is the sister-in-law of my sister's good friend, Donna, and Crystalyn, who I also met at the blog party, turned out to once be the roommate of one of my friends, Elisa, whose husband was a radiology resident in the same program as my husband.

Just a little while ago, Susan and I discovered that we had actually met in real life, as she is the sister-in-law of my dear former visiting teaching companion....the one I just went through the temple with a few months ago. And she's real life friends with Neighbor Jane Payne. Almost eerie. But great fun.

I love how each new person I meet adds another strand to the web. Follow the strand to see if intersects somehow with another strand I've already woven.

Such were a few of the strands I added on this last trip. First, while on a walk with my sister, Jennifer, we stopped afterwards to let our kids play. At the park were two girls who were in my sister's ward. We started to talk, and in politeness, Hailey, one of the girls, asked about my trip. I told her that after my stay with my sister, I'd be heading up to Spokane to visit my old friends. She smiled, and then said that she had a good friend who had lived in Spokane, but only for a year and now they were back on the east coast doing a residency. I sort of smiled and asked if it happened to be Alisa, a good friend of mine last year. Her eyes got all big at my guess and we laughed about the small world. As she was explaining how she knew her, she mentioned a mixture of Medical and Dental student wives in Iowa and I ventured another guess to see if she knew the sister of KariAnn, Betsy, whose husband I knew was a Dental student there. That brought on an almost squeal as they happen to be dear friends.

I mentioned this story to KariAnn, who has been my great friend these past five years, which got us talking about Betsy and her quickly improving photography skills. KariAnn showed me Betsy's blog, which is filled with adorable pictures of her kids, and I told KariAnn, who has an eye and talent for photography herself, about Amy M.'s blog, whose photography I admire. As soon as KariAnn had seen a picture of Amy, she recognized her as someone she already knew from her freshman year at BYU. Sure enough, her scrapbook confirmed it and the world grew smaller still.

I have a feeling there are even more discoveries to make. It makes me even more motivated to meet new people and find out how we actually already know each other:)

What connections have you made through blogging? Do you think the world is small too?