Can you triangulate your position, Howard?

Sometimes the connections between things are hidden, and we can only see them indirectly.*  I think Freud wrote about something like this in On Dreams, but I'm not sure, and I guess it's also related to what I was saying about 1:1 correspondence and poetry.  Anyway, these sideways connections or, rather, the fact of them has serious relevance to our human experience and the search for meaning—but instead of focusing on that, I'm just going to share a couple of personal examples with you.  (For whatever reason, every last one has to do with women I dated; if there's any significance in that, I suspect you'll find it "sideways" as well.)

(1) I was watching Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous with my girlfriend in whatever year that was (2000—thank you, IMDb**) and she kept leaning over and whispering, "She looks just like Goldie Hawn!"  And I had no idea why she was saying that, and I didn't even really particularly see it.  But then, afterwards, when she told me that Kate Hudson was Goldie Hawn's daughter, which I hadn't known, I was like, "Whoa," because Hudson had reminded me of a friend of mine whose mother had always reminded me of Goldie Hawn! 

(2) Sometimes you hear that people keep dating the same person over and over again (not literally).  But so I had two exgirlfriends, and they seemed so totally different to me (although in hindsight at least one connection is pretty obvious) that I figured I must be immune to that kind of patterning.  Not so: it hit me all of a sudden one day that Diane Keaton in Annie Hall reminded me of one of these two girlfriends and Diane Keaton in Manhattan reminded me of the other.  And of course in both movies, Keaton is playing a role created and written by Woody Allen, who had a real-life relationship with her and reportedly based these characters at least in part upon that relationship!!

(3) Sometimes, too, you hear that men are inclined to date their mothers and that women are inclined to date their fathers (again, not literally).  But so this one girlfriend of mine seemed to be nothing at all like my mother, until I realized that my girlfriend's mother was rather a lot like my mother's mother, in certain key respects!!!

(4) This one time, I was totally doing it with Milla Jovovich, and she was like, "[Short Round], I'm yours," and I was like, "Milla, I know, but you've got to go back to your fiancé Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator); think of your child," and she argued at first but then finally she was like, "You're right...but I'll never forget you."  And she left me her underwear.  That's not strictly relevant, but it was totally awesome!!!!!!!

* Sort of the way that cloaking device (SBE, I think it was called) worked in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: as I recall, you could only see this one spaceship if you weren't really paying attention to it.

** Fuck you, too, because just as cell phones have created a world in which we no longer know all our friends' phone numbers, the IMDb has helped create a world in which my friends and I were able to spend practically 30 minutes last night trying and failing to remember the name of the actor who was in The Ice Storm and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and who played Frodo in The Lord of the Rings ("I wrote it down sho I wouldn't have to remember!") until finally we had to crawl back to the IMDb like addicts in withdrawal...although, actually, on second thought, that was some pretty good fun, so...  But still, fuck the internet.