so, i know your sister through my primary school friend's brother's girlfriend

In my favourite book, "He Died with a Felafel in his Hand", John Birmingham said:

"The thing about Brisbane is that everyone knows you or knows about you. In small world theory, there's only six points of separation between any two individuals, but you can trim down the numbers in Brisbane. Everyone's stories intersect, crossing over and through each other like sticky strands of destiny and DNA."

As it's becoming easier and easier to find people on social networking sites like myspace and facebook, I'm starting to see how scarily accurate this quote is. The instances of 6 degrees of separation - or in this instance, two or three - are becoming ridiculously frequent.

For example, let's look at Dan, my boyfriend, as a case study. I met Dan fairly randomly - not through friends. He used to work with a fellow called Jay. Jay's best friend is Amy, a girl I've known since grade 9. Another person Dan has worked with, Sandra, knows my good friend Rob. One of Dan's friends is good mates with a fellow that I partied with back in high school.

How? Why?

And wait til you see the local music scene. It's completely incestuous. Let's look at my friend, Ash, who reviews metal bands for various publications. A few of the people who drink at the pub I work at are in local metal bands that Ash has reviewed. One band, Dead Letter Opener, is playing a gig with a band called Screaming Dawn, who I helped make a film documentary about for uni. Ash is friends with a fellow from a band called Phalanx, which plays with a band called Into the Ocean. My friend Callum, who lives in Toowoomba, is friends with a few members of the band.

I find that all metalheads know each other. The Brisbane metal scene is pretty small, I guess. If you haven't met someone at Phoenix, then you've seen them at the Step Inn. That's about it really.

In person? It's hard to walk into the city or uni without bumping into someone you know, or someone who you drunkenly talked to at the pub from a few years ago, or the sister of the girl you went to school with. And they show up in weird places too. A friend of mine from way back that I hadn't seen for years suddenly turned up on TV for diving in the Commonwealth Games. He's off to the Olympics soon. Gosh.

I don't know if this extended family thing is a good thing or a bad thing. It's nice that Brisbane is sort of a community where everybody knows each other. It could be a bad thing if everybody knows that you slept with that girl's ex-boyfriend or was mean to the friend of a friend or something. I'm waiting for the day when all my fuck-ups suddenly become public and I will be forced to skip town. I think that's why heaps of Brisbane people move to Melbourne.

According to facebook, Dan's ex-workmate Churv is friends with the older sister of a boy I dated four years ago. Total and utter coincedence. I told said ex-boyfriend about this bizarre connection, to which he simply replied, "That's Brisbane for you."


edit:
Oh oh it gets better!
Today I was at work and talking to some friends of Chris (my manager). Upon finding out that we went to private schools, we realised we knew the same people. BUT IT GETS EVEN BETTER. One of the fellows I talked to turned out to be, erm, the friend with benefits of a girl I used to be friends with. I'd even talked to him randomly on the phone once when he was on the piss!

Wow. Just wow.