coincidence – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I have talked about my car a couple of times recently, so you may be aware that I drive a green Kia Soul. While I certainly didn’t mind the green, I bought the car used and the color was genuinely the least of my concerns; I like brightly-colored cars, which are less popular right now than they used to be, but the green Soul was inexplicably the most popular color and that was what was available, so that was what I got.

There is a name for the phenomenon I’m about to describe, and my former-psychology-major brain cannot quite produce it, but: you have no doubt noticed that once you, personally, own a certain kind of car you see that kind of car everywhere. And even knowing that, I was not quite prepared for just how many Alien Green Kia Souls there are on the road right now. In the years I’ve been driving the car I’ve been playing a little game with myself: how many Alien Green Kia Souls would I see at a given intersection at the same time? Would I ever actually pull up to a four-way stop and discover that there were Alien Green Kia Souls at all four of the stops?

Until today, my record was three of the four, and I genuinely thought I was never going to get past that. I mean … it’s a popular car, but that’s ridiculous, right?

Until today, when I almost achieved the unachievable. Because on the way home today I stopped at a four-way light, two lanes in every direction, and almost immediately noticed that I had tied my record– there were Alien Green Kia Souls both to my right and to my left. I looked at oncoming traffic, hoping to catch a glimpse of, perhaps, one in the distance approaching the intersection, so that I could count it before the lights changed and the two cars on the road I was crossing drove away.

And then it happened: a fourth Alien Green Kia Soul … pulled up in the lane next to me, driving the same direction I was.

Which I think counts as breaking the record, since this is in fact four cars at the same intersection for that brief moment until the other two started moving, but it does not in fact count for the magic situation I have been waiting for for so long, when there are four of us at each of the four cardinal directions.

And in my head, we always notice what has happened, and get out of our cars, and immediately become the best of friends.

But I guess now there are going to have to be five of us.

This lovely darling was discovered yesterday on the door at OtherJob; he is slightly larger than a quarter and furry. The furry spiders, as you all well know, are the scarier ones. I saw him first and pointed him out to the other person I was working with, who I believe is a high school senior. He is not, unfortunately, the most masculine high school senior I’ve ever met; his reaction was not quite Scooby-Doo windmilling his legs before jumping into Shaggy’s arms, but was close enough. I proceeded to continue horrifying him by rescuing the spider with a plastic putter and, fighting off the urge to chase the kid around the golf course, deposited him safely in a nearby bush.

“He’s gonna come back,” the kid said. “Remember the katydid?”

(I never told you the katydid story because it’s sad. Short, not-sad version: we couldn’t convince a katydid that it was safer outside the clubhouse than inside it.)

“I doubt it,” I said, thinking of the wide expanse of concrete the spider would have to cross in more-or-less broad daylight. “We won’t see him again.”

Fast forward about three hours, when there is a blood-curdling scream from somewhere around course three. I rush outside to discover a female customer in her mid-forties or so jumping up and down, wailing, and waving her arms frantically in front of her face.

Her husband described the spider that had webbed down directly in front of her face as “about the size of a quarter” and said “yup, that’s it” when I showed him the picture I’d taken. His wife was not pleased when I used the word “hilarious” to describe the situation.

Well, no, ma’am, your spine-tingling horror isn’t funny. It’s just that I could have killed that spider a few hours ago and saved you the trouble. I coulda said that. I chose not to.

I’m hoping there are no insect stories today.