(1) 8:30am, sitting glumly before a company presentation, turning to a coworker, “So how are the mice doing?” “We’ve only got one good male. I’ve been rotating him with fifteen females.” “Lucky guy.” “No kidding.”

(2) 9:15am in the lab talking with Dave, a senior scientist when Rehka, a cute and smiley lab technician pops up and asks, “so are you free today?” Dave, “What? Are you asking him out? Haha should I leave?” Rehka smiles and turns away with unmistakable body language.

(3) Late afternoon, chit chatting with a temp who works in the lab and plays semi-pro football on the side. Receive an invite to his football team booze cruise. The unlikeliness meter rockets off the scale due to obvious personality mismatch, and potential for unintentional comedy.

(4) After work, at grocery store before night class. Trader Joe’s, natural and organic shopping. Motown on the speakers makes me smile. Eye contact with apple lady. Innocent smile lewdly returned with a head to toe look. Left feeling like vulnerable school boy. Proceeding on to get my spinach, James Brown starts playing. Young woman blurts out, “Gettin funky now.” Starts almost-dancing and smiles. Another stupid grin on face, another returned smile near the wine. Checking out. The name tag says Aly. She’s nerdy and cute. ID’d for the wine! Whip out the beautiful Ontario license. Flirty conversation precipitated.

(5) At night class. About to be split into groups that are stuck with each other for the next 12 weeks or so. Names are put on the overhead. Walk over to my team table near the front of the class. Six women sit down around me. Well dressed, professional, scientific, intelligent, and very attractive .Turn and look around at the rest of the class. All the other groups are mostly male. Turn back, make eye contact with the TA. She smiles and shrugs. Give out cute minicards that have beautiful wildlife pictures completely taking up on side, contact info on the other side. Agree to weekly meetings in Cambridge. Prof says, “Ok, now let’s take group pictures. Group one, come on.”

Can’t wait to see the expression on my face in that picture.

It’s a string of events like this that make it hard to remain a firm agnostic. I imagine a dialogue between benevolent but mischievous entities along the lines of: “Hey look what’s going on with *****! He FINALLY broke up with ******!!” “But he’s not doing anything to meet anyone new!” “Hey, yeah! He definitely needs a push!” “Let’s hit him so that he’s got enough to suspect something is going on, but just not enough to believe that it couldn’t be due to coincidence.” “Hahahaha. yes! This’ll be a blast! I love the way this guy reacts to this stuff.”

It was only with end of the day hindsight that I saw all the little threads wind together at the end of an exhausting Tuesday. Seemingly minor events seemed so significant. This happens too often! It ties me in knots and makes me giddy. I apologize if I’m throwing extra meaning into the mundane.