Meet and Re-meet

If you can step back from your day-to-day life and reflect, it's truly fascinating to think about the people who cross your path from time to time. On the East Coast trip, we encountered a particularly interesting person at The Tombs in DC. We were just hanging out, having a few beers and plotting the next day of our vacation when we encountered this person. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University named Chris Hull.

A little background before we continue: On our South Bend trip last fall, and driving down the Pennsylvania Turnpike between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, we got to talking about the mechanics of Presidential elections, from primaries and caucuses to whether the Electoral College is still necessary. My stance is that primaries are preferable to caucuses and that the Electoral College should not be junked. My travelling buddies tend to disagree. At some point, I may explain my view on this here.

Anyway, as soon as we found out what Mr. Hull did, we started talking to him about our prior discussions. He tended to side with me on the Electoral College, but not on caucuses, although my primary argument for primaries is that there is no peer pressure in a voting booth, but groupthink can definitely take hold in a caucus. Hull actually seemed pretty impressed with the three of us as far as our intelligence level. I ended up educating Hull about the Progressive movement that was prevalent in Wisconsin which led to Wisconsin being one of the first states to have primary elections. So, I thought that was a fascinating sequence of events.

The story above happened on the night we arrived in DC. Two days later, we went up to Baltimore to see the Orioles at Camden Yards. The Yankees were in town for the opening series, and two of us had never been to Camden Yards. Baseball fans know Oriole Park at Camden Yards as the first of the new ballparks to go for the retro look, so it was interesting to see the original park that started it. It is a great ballpark, although other parks that followed definitely improved on the concept. The crowd was somewhat bipartisan, so that was an interesting dynamic. As for the game, the Orioles jumped out to a big lead. The Yanks made it interesting in the 9th, but the Os ultimately prevailed. As for Baltimore itself, the Inner Harbor area looked cool, but the rest of Baltimore (at least what I saw) was not terribly impressive.

OK, so at the game I reunited with a friend from college whom I hadn't seen in years. She lives in Baltimore and works for Johns Hopkins University. We sat together and basically laughed with each other for most of the game...which was pretty much where we left off when we were both in school back here in Minnesota. She was great to be around, and it was definitely good to see her. So, there is a lesson here...Facebook gets results! This would not have happened if it wasn't for Facebook. I was pretty skeptical about Facebook, but seeing my friend in Baltimore is one of a few rekindled relationships I have as a result of setting up a profile.

Like I said at the beginning, the people who cross your path can be fascinating. Even if you only meet someone once, they can teach you a thing or two, or vice-versa. Also, they can prove to be people that turn out to be great friends, even if you don't see them all that often.

There are probably a couple more DC-trip related posts I can squeeze out of this, so hang tight.