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in issue twelve:
Synchronicity
Scintillations
The Phone Call
Finding Feathers
Did God Land Me
   This Waitress Gig?
Letting Good Happen
Continuous
   Synchronicity
Unexpected Inspiration
Rubber Band Fairy
Bird on My Shoulder
Listen To Your Body
Letters to
   My Younger Self
Books That Changed
   My Life
Moody Girl

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Zack Luchetti: Artwork
Ally Moll: Rock My World
Forrest Norvell:
Traces
Egghead Party Time
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space
Locke Berkebile:
Lightcycle
NY Subway
Produce District

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future issues
Issue 13: Danger
Issue 14: Home
Issue 15: Transitions

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Did God Land Me This Waitressing Gig?
Jennifer Wilson

Synchronicity works like that. You raise your arm to turn the knob of the door, and opportunity comes knocking at the very same time.

Locking the front door behind me, I trudged my way into my bedroom, instantly kicking off my beat up, rubber-bottomed black flats: step on heel, kick; step, kick. It’s a familiar dance. At this point, depending on whether I went braless to work or not, I unhinge the damned thing and throw that on my floor, too. This act of removal, of stripping away the clothes that define my professional identity, always provided me with an inordinate degree of pleasure when I finally unveil the real me. But that pleasure was always interrupted by little stabs of shame.

I was living the butt of a joke. I was the Berkeley grad asking fellow graduates coming in for lunch if they “wanted fries with that,” six days a week. Waitressing for the corporate crowd in midtown New York was lucrative, but it was supposed to only last until I got a fat magazine job and weaseled my way into the jazz singing world. Somehow waitressing had become an exhausting fixture in my life; I had been doing it off and on ever since I got to New York, which was over two years ago.

I needed a change, and soon.

This mew of a thought became a roar when I went to the Abdullah Ibrahim concert at the Blue Note jazz club. Midshow, I had a epiphany: “Hell, if I’m going to be a waitress for now, why don’t I do it here?! Not only could I potentially make some great contacts in the jazz world, but it’d be like being at a frickin’ jazz concert every night---not to mention I could make some fat dough off of unsuspecting Japanese tourists! Owh!”

Channeling the bitchy, no-bullshit essence of Madonna as best I could, I marched up to a man who I correctly assumed was the manager and sassily announced, “I want to work here. How do I get hired?”

He told me to drop off my resume sometime during the day.

Days passed. Days turned into nights. But I didn’t turn in my resume.

I really did have every intention of doing it, but it's just that life can be so darned distracting. How could I find the time to revamp my resume if my kitchen sink needs the 12th scrubbing of the day, or I'm busy daydreaming about Kyle the Bar Guy's purported Prince Albert piercing?

More days passed. I was not unaware of this.

On a certain memorable August afternoon, I was in the midst of writing some letters in the park when my cell phone rang. It’s Ned, a guy I haven’t talked to in over a year and with whom I had a rather nasty falling out. I was wary as to why he was calling me, but he assured me that it was simply a business call and there were no hard feelings. He knew that I was a seasoned waitress, and he just got a gig managing at the Blue Note; did I want a job there?

Well, needless to say, I couldn’t believe my luck. It was as if the Pigeon of Good Fortune had just eaten a 10 enchilada lunch and took a giant crap on my head! I told him I’d come ‘round the next afternoon and drop off my resume. Why, this was all too perfect, I thought to myself.

My excitement radiated off of me in concentric rings of reason: “This will help my career! My life is on an upswing!” But more than that, my real excitement was the synchronicity surrounding the event: I got an idea in my head, an idea that tickles the delight of my inner child and will no doubt get me closer to where I want to be in my life, and now I’m given the perfect means to fulfill it. This didn’t feel like a mere appointment with Ned, no sir…this felt like an appointment with the Universe…and I sure as hell was gonna keep it.

Even before this wondrous chain of events began, synchronicity has intrigued me for years. Why would “opportunities” just happen to crop up, exactly when I needed them? This concept didn’t jibe with my longheld identity as an agnostic, cynical intellectual, even if synchronicities did happen to me. I wasn’t called “Weaver the Disbeliever” by a past New Age-type boyfriend for nothing. I used to shred the evidence of a Higher Power being responsible for powering synchronicity, using the chaos theory as proof: i.e., in a universe full of an infinite number of random events, some of these events HAVE to coincide with each other, just through sheer mathematical probability.

It would be more out of the ordinary, in fact, if synchronous events didn’t happen. Synchronicity, I reasoned, is not bestowed onto us by a living and breathing Universe or Higher Power that cares about us. Instead, it’s human desire to use spirituality to explain the unexplainable and have a comforting answer to existential angst that cause others to color such experiences as “cosmic”.

But perhaps a bit counterintuitively, it was exactly an urgent succession of synchronistic events that forced me to rethink and eventually throw out my soulless identity and adopt a new one---one that believed in a benevolent Higher Power helping me along, or at least some sort of higher order that must have some sort of architect behind it, be that God or otherwise.

First, I stalled my car right before I entered an intersection and missed getting plowed down by a speeding ambulance.

Then, I had a crazy dream about dogs on the freeway and every detail came true the next day, down to nuances in dialogue.

Next, I stumbled upon a random script (that was so bad that I don’t think anyone has ever heard of it) in a used bookshop I had just discussed with my roommates the day before.

Coincidences? Sure, maybe. But if there’s no Higher Power, then why does it feel like someone – something – is definitely looking after me and helping me out? And why, might I add, do these bouts of synchronicity happen when I feel that I am open to attaining my destiny? I know, in my heart of all hearts, that there is a reason to all this. I don’t profess to know what, exactly, that reason IS, but just having faith that there’s an unseen hand guiding me along is enough for me.

In the end, I got the job at Blue Note. Then , as a cherry on top of my synchronicity sundae, Ned, my spurned date-turned-manager, didn’t stick around the Blue Note long enough for me to find out if he was just hiring me so he could stick a corkscrew in the back of my neck! Also, I’ve since become a recruiter for graphics professionals, which is an amazing (albeit humbling) new experience that I’m very excited to sink my teeth into, and I got to quit my day waitressing job. I don’t have to keep the Blue Note job anymore either, if we’re talking simply money. But it’s a job I enjoy, for all the reasons I thought I would. So I’m still wearing down the tread on those black waitressing shoes, but I’m doing it at a place that is part of, rather than far from, my destiny.