Variations on a Theme

[jennythereader]

Some cosmological theories state that every time an event could have happened in multiple different ways, it does. That is, that new universes are splitting off constantly.

Now, I'm perfectly happy to live in this reality. It's not perfect, but my life is pretty good. Sometimes though I wonder what my life would be like if I or the people around me had made different decisions. I sort of want to meet some of the Jennys from those other universes.

I'm curious about three of them in particular.
- The me who ended up going to Evergreen State College. I suspect she's doing something that gets a lot more respect than boring data entry.
- The me who's mother moved to Ann Arbor rather than Albany. In addition to not ending up in Albany herself (and all the changes which would spring from that), I suspect she has much less ambivalent feelings about her mother. Whether those feelings are more positive or more negative than mine I couldn't even begin to guess.
- The me who's parents stayed happily married. I can't even imagine what sort of effects that would have had on my life or my brothers' lives.

What versions of yourself do you want to meet?

Comments

[belmikey.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question, because, with my job hunt and some of the possibilities that have come out of it, I've been "living" parallel lives in my head for quite a while now. Just in the last three months, I've had opportunities knock that, if they had panned out, would have taken me to Seattle, San Francisco, or Zürich, each of which would have led me to very different places as a person, I think.

Some of the ones I wonder about:
- The me whose parents never left Brooklyn, who actually grows up in Noo Yawk and not in the burbs.
- The me who went to Northwestern instead of Cornell. Except for the fact that I know people in Chicago whom I might have met through geeky circles anyway, almost everyone important in my life would not be part of it at all if I'd done that.
- The me who actually went to school for CS and not Communication. Ironically, I suspect I would NOT be a professional geek today if I'd done that, and it was that suspicion that kept me from going CS in the first place.

[dulcinbradbury.livejournal.com]

I think I'll meme this in my own journal...

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

This is VERY interesting.

The me who did not have asthma. She could be a dancer.

The me who went, after being accepted, to Wayne State's School of the Performing Arts, instead of into a respiratory therapy program.

The me who chose grad school over law school. That may have meant not moving to Ann Arbor, and I don't know what my family would be like or what I would be doing at this point.

The me who clerked for a federal judge after law school rather than jumping right in to litigation. Again, this would be a totally different life. My plan was to move from clerking right into the law professor meat market, and that would be entirely different from litigation.

[nounsandverbs]

Me too.