where I don’t quote The Police. At all.

Man Meets Wife Via Message in a Bottle

I love random things like the above; seriously, what are the odds of meeting somebody really nifty via a message in a bottle? Or, for that matter, via a Post-It Note left on a sidewalk? Or, if you want to be superrandom, how about a wrong phone number, where you never intended to meet anybody new at all? I had a dream two nights ago where I misdialed a number, and a guy at the other end answered, "Hello, how may I help you on this maddening and splendid evening?" I don't remember much else beyond that, sadly, but it reinforced my sense of fun about chance meetings. Also, I will now answer the phone that way after dark, no matter who calls. You can test me on this.

Also also, I remember that I got a phone call during my freshman year at Michigan from a random guy, who said he lived in Ann Arbor and was just dialing around because he was bored and looking for fun people to talk to. I was in a rush at the time, so I didn't stop to chat, but afterward he apparently worked his way through my entire dorm (South Quad, for you nosybodies), ultimately talking for an hour or so with my friend Marla, who lived a floor below me. And whom I just saw last night for the first time in six years. Which is what got me started thinking about random connectivity in the first place.

This reminds me, I've always had a bit of an obsession with dreaming about a conversation with a friend, and then continuing that conversation with the same friend after waking up and seeing them in reality. The key here is that the friend has to have had the identical dream, so I know We Shared Something. I even did a little photo class project about this in my final year at Michigan, which turned out splendidly, thank you very much.

Back to random connectivity: you gotta love a mistyped e-mail address. About a month before New Orleans was hit by Katrina, I received an e-mail from the Chemistry department at Tulane University. The woman who wrote the e-mail told me that my paycheck was ready to be picked up or mailed, whichever I preferred, and it was clearly not a spam hoax. After noodling around on Google for a bit, I realized that there is a Dr. Astrid Phillips in the field of chemistry, and clearly she must have done a little academic song and dance over at Tulane. Ethical person that I am, it never occurred to me to say, "Sure, send me the moolah pronto!" Instead, I informed the lady of her error , and she apologized, saying she had left off a single letter from the e-mail address, and she thanked me for my patience.

Which reminds me, I may start an Astrid Phillips club. You can only be a member if your name is Astrid Phillips, and I already know (thanks to Google) that there will definitely be more than just a couple of members, difficult as that may be to believe. We will get together every once in a while, drinking tea and discussing highbrow matters. Maybe we'll even get manicures, and then go rob a bank. That would be awesome.

And hey, let's not overlook random Googling, as in the phenomenal case of Rory Blyth. Call me a romantic, or call me a person in need of serious therapy, but this really warms the cockles of my heart. And I'm sure we all know that a cockle is an edible, burrowing bivalve mollusk with a strong ribbed shell (thank you, Oxford American Dictionary OSX widget), so you know I'm serious.

Getting back to Marla, because it always comes back to Marla: I finally got to see her (and her charming man) last night, and I find it fascinating how comfortable it all was. I mean, I hadn't seen her in about six years, and when we grabbed dinner last night, it was like the intervening years had never happened. Amazing what a comfy friendship fit can do. We had met during freshman orientation, where we shared an instant bond because we both loved "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," and there you are. She just took the bar exam a couple of weeks ago, and now she's at Disneyland.

I haven't done anything random today yet, but let's see what I can cook up.