Regarding Hyperbole, Coincidence and Obscenity.

I swear too much. Too much for my liking, anyway. I use the nastier words (you'll have to guess which ones, as I intend to hold to my promise never to use a swearyword on this site, though I rarely venture as far as the C-word except in extreme circumstances like banging my funny-bone) as mere sprinklings in my general conversation, even at conversation round the dinner table. As a result, hyperbole is commonplace, and even when I'm not actively swearing I tend to exaggerate, because I think it's funny. Leaving aside the social implications, the main problem with this is that I, personally, feel I have a lack of emphatics to use when they are actually necessary. More refined usage of language would probably bring more effective descriptive powers and maybe better observational ability. Even if that would be a reverse of how you'd expect it to run, things like that often have a certain symbiosis. That's why I refuse to swear here, and believe me if you heard me talk you'd notice the difference, as I want to see if it makes my observations more pertinent.

I'm probably hyperbolising how much I swear. Meta-analysis messes with my head.

Anyway, my ex-girlfriend lives in Aberdeen when she's not in a small town outside Edinburgh. She says the last time she was in Glasgow was in March. Today she was visiting for a day, ferrying her mentally disabled brother to see her other brother who studies here. Heading into town, I sat on the same subway carriage as her. As part of my fatalist/materialist/eventualist beliefs, I don't consider coincidence significant, certainly not as a signifier of anything special - I figure that so much stuff happens in the world that concurrence is bound to happen eventually, and sometimes it just happens to you...

Look, what people call coincidence is just statistics. You're thinking of a tune, you walk into a store and it's playing - yes, great, now compare it to all the times that didn't happen. You encounter a mention of the same obscure book/film/programme two or three times in quick succession - great, but imagine all the other pop culture you were thinking of recently that didn't crop up and you didn't notice because it didn't do anything special and you forgot about it.

But the odds against that are huge. It's not a part of the country she hangs around in a lot, and when she does I sit on the same small subway carriage during the same short journey. And after I'd managed to stop idly fantasising about seeing her hanging round Glasgow as well (yes, I did for a while, but I was bored.) Impressively, I'm not even worried about what impression I made now. Despite the fact I wouldn't be surprised if she disapproves of the tattoo & piercing thing, or would have done at one point.

Yes, this is just a larger, slightly more stastically improbable even than most coincidences. Nevertheless it's hard not to be weirded out when something like that happens to you personally, because, after all, you're only human. Does this indicate hypocrisy? Less dedication to my theory of coincidence than I affect? Who knows. My point is, even if I were to rein in my hyperbolic exaggeratory tendencies, would I be justified in using excessive language on an event like this?