new soulmate

Posted by beth on September 19, 2007

I’m not sure how many soulmates one person is allowed to have, but I have many. And I know most people think of a soulmate in a romantical sense, but mine are all platonic friend-types. I’ve got cross-generational ones, man ones, woman ones, probably even a few animal ones. I think the connection I feel with these people is mostly one of personality or thought, which might not be exactly the soul, but if that Descartes fellow was correct, and I really am because I think, then it would logically follow that if my thoughts agree with those of another, then some part of our very beings are also in agreement. Voila! Soulmates!

There are just a couple of things that lead me to consider someone a soulmate:

1. When I make a joke, you get it and play along. I do the same with you. Whitney is a prime example of this. Our conversations go on and on, tripping delightedly down some colorful, cartoon path of ridiculousness, until we either just dissolve into laughter or we notice that the people around us have grown uncomfortable. We often get accused of having inside jokes and talking about them in front of others. This is rude. We don’t do it. If we have an inside joke, we tell it to you so you can be in on it too. However, there have been many times when we’ve gone down the road to ridiculous, just “on the fly” if you will (she won’t), in front of people, and they thought that we were sharing an inside joke, but really, there hadn’t been a joke before that. It just happened. And that is why we are naming the musical we’re working on Just Now, so when people quote or sing something from it, and other people ask, “What’s that from?” they can reply as we always do, “Just Now,” as in, that just happened. Just now.
2. We harbor the same secret desires, plans and/or preferences. And I mean like in an eerie way. Like we are not sure how it is that we were raised in different household. With different experiences and brains.

And that second point there leads me to my newest soulmate discovery. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Lauren. Lauren, say hi. Lauren and I have recently discovered many things that we have in common, including, but not limited to:

• a secret desire to join a step team
• a special affinity for gospel music, especially when paired with other music genres
• a Plenty of Fish boredom membership
• a crush on Jermaine (of Flight of the Conchords fame)
• a subsequent crushing blow at the discovery that Jermaine’s name is not, in fact, Jermaine, but Jemaine
• a consequent identity crisis at finding out that we are in love with a man named Jemaine when we thought we were in love with a man named Jermaine
• a love of string cheese
• a (possibly disproportionate) loathing of purposefully misspelled words in company names for the sake of what…cuteness? It’s a marketing ploy – I get it. I just hate it. I could go on and on, but she’s already done so. My blood pressure rose just now just thinking about it.

I knew this was the real deal when she sent me an mp3 file of U2 doing a live version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” I started playing it, and I was thinking that it would be good. And then the gospel choir came in, and I IMed her first to say “shut your face,” and then to ask why she felt that I would enjoy this particular recording. She replied, “I don’t know. I just love that version. I love the gospel choir.” Bingo.

On an unrelated (maybe related, depending on how Lauren feels about this) note, I played a modified, educational version of Balderdash with my GED students tonight, and they loved it! Slowly, friends. Slowly, I am winning them over to the nerdy linguistic side.