Cure, Culters & Classmates

According to the somewhat spaced-out psychologist C. G. Jung we occasionally experience coincidences which have to arise from something more than just coincidences. This phenomenon he refers to as "synchronicity".

Yesterday I was at the record shop and came across a Greatest Hits collection with The Cure (consisting of a double CD and a DVD) for just a few bucks. An offer no music lover can turn down.

At the underground right afterwards I was sitting opposite three teenage girls with a style I sort of liked. Black clothes, black mascara and big black hair. Mini versions of Robert Smith, all of them. Maybe they're called emos today, but for me they were reincarnations of the little nine-graders dressed in black (then called "culters") hanging outside the local record shop in the mid-80s.

As I walked down the main avenue a bit later, I - much to my surprise - bumped into an old classmate visiting Oslo (now she's got vampire teeth and tattoos all over her body; a reminder that the most exciting people are those I'd probably never even get to know today).

From The Cure, via the "culters" of my youth, to an unexpected encounter with my old classmate. Could this be caused by pure coincidences? Or was this some kind of Jungian synchronicity?

On the other hand: In a rare whim of humility Freud once admitted that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". Maybe his colleague Jung on his part would agree that "coincidences sometimes are just coincidences"?

Well, no matter what I had a nice Saturday afternoon.