From Coast to Coast

You are extremely not like me if you:

Have a real job (and therefore make money)
Do not live in the midwest (Ohio is not the midwest)
Sit at a desk all day
Order fancy bottles of alcohol with dinner

So imagine my delight when a friend of mine from college (let's call her Steve) shot me an email about six months ago and said she has a job (a real desk job, where she makes money!) and does not live in the midwest anymore. Whoa! She has a COOL job, working for the government bossing people around and making sure they follow all their own environmental laws. Steve recently married an equally interesting guy, lets call him Jane, who is in LAW school at STANFORD. Whoa, WHOA!! You know what I always say: Lawyer friends are GOOD friends. We went out to eat, they ordered a fancy bottle of alcohol with dinner, I gawked for a while at them and then drank some of their alcohol. It turns out Steve met Jane when they were on the other coast, in DC, just after Steve and I graduated from college. Since Steve is originally from the midwest, and Jane is originally from the coast, they had really interesting perspectives on where they've lived and where they want to live. The most amazing thing, though, was that even though they seem way different from us, we have all this stuff in common with them: we also just got married and are still renting, we are all going to move again in a year, and we all love snow, Lord of the Rings and iTunes, and drinking alcohol with dinner.

I think Steve and Jane are our alter-ego reverse selves that live opposite lives. It's a really good thing Steve and I met in college, otherwise the Universe may have imploded. Also, coincidentally and kind of unrelated, Steve looks uncannily similar to an esteemed colleague of mine that is now working at Princeton (who also has a real job and makes real money, but his job isn't a desk job). It's possible that Steve is his alter-ego reverse self also, implying that it's possible to live more than one opposite life at once. If that's true, then I must have at least one other alter-ego reverse self as well. I vow to find and destroy all of my alter-ego reverse selves, except Steve and Jane because they're pretty fun.