Barcelona has had a much bigger influence on a little farm girl from Indiana than it has any right or expectation to have had. Chance meetings at college 32 years ago shaped interactions in cyberspace yesterday. Time and space continue to amaze me. The subtle and yet formative shifts that propagate from minute happenstance pushes me toward superstitious thinking. Isn't that what women are accused of doing, at least in the olden days? Of not being logical. Not being linear? Well, I'm not linear.
I met Krista at an Anabaptist college in the Midwest U.S. in 1975. I visited her in Barcelona where she was teaching English to med students in August of 1980. We still talk to and write to each other, though not as often as we once did.
A man I met in Second Life® who owned the virtual land on which I first had a freestanding store and I were speaking about what to name his new island. I suggested Barcelona. I like to think that some of his success in the virtual land, mall, and consulting he has today is partially due to a few words spoken in passing in the autumn of 2006. Barcelona de Oeste in SL* was directly influential in the City of Barcelona, Spain, hiring him in real life as a consultant for setting up a virtual presence.
Connections, as in the old TV show of the same name, are so much fun. I am a strange bird, an excellent bird as in Laurie Anderson's song of the same name, and I often wonder about whether universes and tracks of realities that branched off from this one bit of reality (virtuality?) that seems linear and logical to me might be influencing this line of reality by the number of times it bounces into or intersects with this one. Would these realities be completely walled off from each other? Probably not. One theory that is getting a lot of play on cable science and education channels is that what we know as gravity is leaking in from another universe. Surely other influences do too.
There. I've connected Barcelona and String Theory.
