almost friends for all these years

today i had one of the most delightful, hilarious, surreal experiences in quite some time: lunch with my "new employee" buddy. part of the orientation at santa clara university is being paired up at the end of orientation with an employee buddy who takes you out to lunch (on scu's dime, too! how cool is that?! i love scu!) my buddy, vid, and i couldn't meet for lunch that day as he had a meeting and i had new faculty orientation, so we finally went to lunch today. in the meantime we'd met, since vid's office (he's the assistant director of the study abroad program) and mine are across the way from one another at cesar chavez commons. cesar chavez commons are trailers, a and b, with a big deck between them, and while i like it just fine i hope that maybe some day a cool building can be built there. maybe it's just me, but i'd like cesar to have something more, well, impressive, than two trailers and a deck. but who knows? he was by all accounts a humble man, so maybe he'd like it the way it is.

but i digress...

so vid and i go out to lunch and it starts. i live in santa cruz, and guess what? he lives on this side of the mountain, too. he mentions his wedding anniversary is coming up, and i mention mine is too. damn, but you kids are sharp as tacks! we have the same wedding anniversary; he and his wife have a year on me and drew. i ask about what he went to school for his masters for and he mentions he was a jesuit for about ten years and went to the jesuit school of theology at berkeley (jstb), which is a graduate theological union school just like my school, starr king school for the ministry. yep, right again - he was there the same time i was! in addition to the fact that we may have even had a class together without knowing it, i found out that the nickname at jstb for starr king is starfish, which i thought was pretty hilarious. i think my other starr king pals will think so, too. and last but not least, we both went to the newman center - holy spirit chapel in berkeley. heck, probably the 10 pm mass, too. talk about a small world that it took us only ten years to finally meet in. all in all it was a really fun, hilarious lunch with tons of (as my 18 and dateless friends used to say) simple chronic hilarity. and my hat is off to whoever it is in hr who did my background check, because dang! they were mighty thorough! :)

i also had a very cool evening, but it's after eleven and i have to get up early, so you'll have to wait for the next installment. try not to let the suspense get to you. ;)