I would give anything to read a list of all the strange coincidences I have experienced during the course of my life. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of them to the depths of time. Which is why I have finally started to write them down when they happen. Though I must recall the sad truth that I have forgotten so many mind-blowingly unlikely coincidences, at least I can take some comfort in knowing that recording a few is better than not recording any. Today comes the second installment in the series.
By day I am a teacher, as you can see from the Education section, and these days I’m doing a lot of tutoring. My oldest student is a Vietnamese man in his 40s. Teaching him is easy because he prepares everything that he wants to be taught and I just have to go in and help him with pronunciation. For the first few lessons, he had me teaching him how to sing English language songs from the 70s and 80s, like disco group Boney M and pop single “You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul“. Lately, he has really been trying to get all the phonemes of English down, focusing on mastering the sounds that aren’t found in Vietnamese, like j, p, th, and z. It was the lesson he had prepared for today that was the coincidence.
After studying animals for a while, he took out another vocabulary list, one with the names of fruit. It was a list of all the fruits in Vietnamese translated into English. In the margin of the paper I read where he had printed out the list from. Interopia.com. I realized I had never told this particular student about my site. He had just randomly found my Encyclopedia of Vietnamese Fruit, printed it out and brought it to class without ever realizing he was showing it to the very creator of that list and owner of that site.
I’d call that a coincidence.
interopia 