Party Train

Often in the modern discourse, one hears alot of twaddle about the chaos theory and the so-called butterfly model of reality, in which small tiny things (like the flapping of a Butterfly's wings in Hong Kong) will result in huge aggregate systemic effects. (a tornado in the Midwest). However, when asked to point to a direct, real-life, identifiable example of this that was not intentional (that is, not a product or something intentionally put out there to snowball into a huge effect), most people can't give you a solid, immediate example.

To resolve the problem, I recently encountered a situation that might be handy to referencing when spuriously presenting the Chaos Theory in other aguments(and is a mildly interesting ancedote in terms of personal history)

So I started this summer with no real intention of running into anyone really new. In fact, I had started the summer almost completely bummed, since many people I knew would be out of the country for awhile, out in other places, and alot of my friends from college were all staying in Cambridge. (I had originally applied to join up with the Boston Lawyers group plan). Quite improbably, Tracy invited me to her graduation party. (This is the butterfly flapping)

Even even MORE improbably, these continuing encounters resulted in running into a coincidential confluence of events that had Megan staying with Clancy during the exact timeframe that Clancy and I hung out. This led to the ultimate invitation to go on a semi-ridiculous roadtrip deep into the suburbs of CT and then to RI to go thrift shopping.

Which brings me to the odd history of the song "Party Train" in getting to me. Originally popularized by Sam Berlin, this song had made its way into the iPod of Clancy Flynn, which, if you know is pretty all over the place in terms of having complete catalogs of anything. I mean, she doesn't even really know what's on there half of the time. Though that's great, the point here is that a completely separate and unique storyline had brought this song into Clancy's car on the trip. It was eventually given to me by Sam, and put on my laptop, where it was sporadically played and then forgotten for a few weeks while I moved back to school.

Now, on the complete other side of my existence, in the land of long-standing relationships, is the Epstein family. E and I dated for sometime, and as a result was that I'm pretty friendly with her siblings. Ellie, if you know her, is a real spirited go getter: she's the president of the student council. Now it just so happened that on that day she was trying to find a clean, dance-able song that would be good to pep people up for all the school spirit events happening throughout Spirit Week. And she just happened to talk to me for suggestions -- just then, iTunes shuffled cued Party Train, and I suggested it. She loved it, and now it's the song that's going to be basically the theme for the week.

And so, now "Party Train" will be played to hundreds and hundreds of NA students throughout Spirit Week. (this is the hurricane destroying San Francisco).

And so there -- three complete separate storylines had to converge. Most notably, three completely unrelated events to the song itself had to occur -- I had to have decided to visit Clancy on that day (to be on the car to be exposed to Party Train), I had to have dated E starting a number of years ago (to know Ellie), and Clancy had to have loaded the song onto her iPod. No intentionality. Just completely emergent behavior.

That's pretty crazy.