Today during a faculty meeting, my friend Jamie (from the flux capacitor and garage door "pointless psychic stories") was sitting on my right beside me. I was doodling, as always, and since parallel universes is always a hot topic of conversation with me and Jamie, I began drawing them. I began with a point -- a small dark circle -- and drew two parallel lines coming out from the top of it. I began adding smaller lines coming out from each parallel line so that it started looking sort of like tree branches. Jamie had been listening to the speaker intently. A little bit later, I noticed Jamie had started doodling and I glanced down to see. In the middle of her page, she had drawn a dark circle with two parallel lines coming out the top of it. The picture took up a good part of her page. I laughed and elbowed her. "Is that parallel universes?" She nodded, and I said, "So you saw mine?" and pointed to my doodles. She glanced down at my doodles, which were very small and in my left margin. Then she started cracking up. "No," she said, "I didn't see yours!" Then she started laughing even harder because she noticed I had started with a dark circle as well.
I was more astonished than amused. I know that to anyone who doesn't know Jamie, this story doesn't seem that significant -- as you could assume she was lying or that we had drawn parallel universe diagrams before. But she wasn't and we hadn't. Something that our principal had said had given her the idea for her parallel universe drawing. I had started mine long before for a whole different reason.
