Small World

What a waste of a day! 9pm & I've hardly done a thing beyond work on a new Manhattan recipe (muddle some orange slices and sugar, add 1 shot Jim Beam Rye and 1/2 shot of Noilly Prat sweet vermouth, add a dash of orange bitters, and some ice cubes). I think I'll have one now.

I'm into muddling these days ... I've been working on a margarita with muddled limes, like a caipirinha but with Cazadores tequila blanco and Caravella orangecello. That one is almost there.

But I logged on now 'cause I've just had my second trippy "what a small world" experience of the weekend. The first was yesterday. I got a call from Drew, who I met in Montreal, visited in Jersey, and went to Orlando with last year. Turns out his neighbor is Robert D, a friend from Hawai`i who I lost track of when he moved to NYC. They went to Gay Days at some Jersey waterpark this weekend, and a friend of their's brought his nude yoga instructor .... Hollis (which, for the record, we went through a rough patch earlier but it's patched up now).

The next one is even more extreme. Before I went to İstanbul I was talking online with this guy, Salih ...

Yummy, right? But he was in London the weekend I was there, so we never met.

But we stayed in touch, because I'll be back in İstanbul one day! We were chatting online this afternoon, and he had shown my picture to a friend of his, and it turns out that his friend is ...

Hailey, a South African girl who I had met in Fethiye in 2005. We spent a great day hiking along the Lycian trail from the coast into the mountains, to the abandoned Greek village of Karaköy. And now she's staying with Salih for a week!

I love when things like this happen, these strange coincidences that hint that there's some pattern amidst all the chaos and randomness. And it makes me wonder how many other unknown times the lives of people we know have intersected.