This morning I was driving to yoga and at a certain spot on the highway my brain just shouted ACCIDENT!! I slowed down because, you know, I listen to my brain* and its weird little nudgings. When it tells me to switch shampoos, I switch shampoos. When it tells me to go to Trader Joe's and buy two bags of kettle corn, by god that's what I do. And when I write a part in a short story where a guy hears footsteps running up behind him, and then the next day I get a call from a friend who was unlocking his door the night before when he heard footsteps running up behind him AND THEN HE GOT MUGGED, that's when I start to believe in string theory.
*Jack is guffawing right now. "Brain? My wife has a brain? I thought she just had an impulse-based Scrabble-response system."
So, no, I didn't get into an accident this morning, but when I got Jackson to school later a whole bunch of kids stumbled in late and they were all, "Wow! Did you see the ACCIDENT?! That took place in the same spot where your mom's crazy brain shouted at her three hours ago???"
And then, not twenty minutes ago, I was taking out the recycling and thinking about someone and when I got back inside there was an e-mail waiting for me FROM THAT PERSON**.
**Remarkably, it turns out that e-mailing someone to ask them a question is also a fairly reliable way to get them to e-mail you back, whether you're continually holding them in your mind of them or not. Thus it is that having a person pop into your mind at the exact moment they are replying to your e-mail becomes merely SERENDIPITOUS.
BUT NOW, now what I'm wondering is, if I close my eyes and hold, oh I don't know, let's say John Cusack -- or maybe Joan Cusack -- everso gently in my mind's eye, will he/she suddenly be all, "Hmm, maybe I should do my next movie about a guy/gal who decides s/he wants to update his/her blog every day for a month but s/he doesn't want to do it alone! So s/he drives up the coast from L.A. until s/he finds the one woman who can help him/her achieve his/her dream! And then they sync their iPods and drive around talking about how great Liz Phair Jeremy Piven Dan Ackroyd used to be."
Yesterday I was driving Jackson back home from school and he got all serious in the back seat and said, "You know, Mom, I can see the future." And I was all, "Oh, reeeaally? And how do you do that?" And he goes, "I see it in my dreams." Well, we eventually worked out that he'd developed a sense of deja vu, which is kind of exciting and mysterious and mindblowing when you're seven years old. And I was glad because not everyone gets it -- to the end of his days my dad claimed that he'd never had that weird, familiar feeling of knowing exactly what's coming next. I certainly wasn't prepared to explain the intricacies to Jackson (though this Wikipedia article goes so far as to break it down into three distinct types), so we just talked about our mysterious brains for a little while until our conversation turned, as it always does, to Pokemon.