Small World

  It really is a small world. Three examples immediately come to my mind when I think of a small world, and two of them are tied in with Facebook.

            The most recent example is another experience of mine tied in with my a cappella group. We were asked to sing at a benefit show for awareness of domestic violence and were asked to sing “a contemporary R&B song with a positive female message.” We did not have a song that fit this mold already, and did not have time to arrange one, so we bought an arrangement online from a girl that none of us new. Our president found her on a website. The arrangement was of “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars. When we went to learn the song, we discovered that the arrangement was, well, terrible.  It did not sound good, or even remotely like the original song. In our frustration, one of our members decided to look this girl up on Facebook. He found that he had one mutual friend with her, and that mutual friend was the girl he was dating.

            My second small world example happened last semester. I was procrastinating on Facebook and suddenly the words “is now friends with Tyler Seguin” showed up on my minifeed. I am a huge Bruins fan, so I immediately needed to check this out. Sure enough it was him, and he had four mutual friends. Two of them I was not very surprised to find out about; one girl is the daughter of one of the Bruins assistant coaches and went to my high school, another was a girl from my high school rumored to have been asked by Seguin for her number. The third I could see a connection to as well, as a girl who graduated from my high school a few years before me was a Celtics cheerleader. The fourth however, I can see no connection other than that she is a hockey player. Still, I find it pretty cool to be only two degrees from Tyler Seguin in a few different ways.

            The last example involves a history teacher of mine. I went to high school in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. My dad used to be the hockey coach at Salem High School in Salem before I was born. My freshman year history teacher, who was from Iowa, is married to one of my dad’s former goalies.