The Catalyst — brittanyvinh

ALTERNATIVELY TITLED: I'M EMOTIONAL & GRADUATING

I'm a very nostalgic person. That's not a surprise to anyone who knows me. I've spent the past three weeks reminiscing on my time here in Santa Barbara, so you already know there's a series of sappy blog posts coming your way. This one's about effects.

When Dani and I both decided to go to SB, we weren't set on living together. Everyone warns you not to, you know? You have to branch out from your high school friends and all that. But we had spent almost every day of the past 6 years at each other's houses, so it kind of just made sense. We put Manzanita as our first choice (can you believe that? LOL). But then we got our room assignment email. Dani and I were so mad. Santa Catalina was our last choice dorm, and a triple? We felt scammed.

You never think much about how little things that happen in your life can drastically affect others. It’s hard to know what decisions will lead to what outcomes, and how things will turn out in the end. I do believe that this world is smaller than we think, and so many things are connected, somehow, in ways we may not think of. Take, for example, that one first email from UCSB housing.

I ended up living on the fourth floor of San Cat South Tower right across the hall from my RA. There’s a tweet out there somewhere from me on that Move-In Day, publicly announcing my disbelief that we got so unlucky.

Luckily, I ended up becoming friends with my RA that year. He never wrote us up, even when we definitely deserved it. Dani and I would bother him at the front desk sometimes, when he was on duty. And that was how I met Danny and Brock.

I’ve always been a night owl, so I’d always wander down to the desk on nights where i didn’t want to sleep, pull up a chair across from Danny and Brock when they were working graveyard shifts as front desk attendants. I don’t remember anything we talked about, just that we talked a lot. When we weren’t talking, I would make posters or watch the Digiknow slides scroll by on the television behind the front desk.

And that’s how i got my first college job, as a Customer Service & Marketing Assistant for UCSB Housing: a Digiknow slide with pretty ugly typography. I stayed with Housing for three years, almost to the date. March 2015 - March 2018. (Don’t you love when chapters of your life close so perfectly like that? I do)

I'm always going to look back on freshman year fondly. Bouncing from room to room to avoid RA's, filling up condom water balloons in the lounge, mobbing down to Portola with a group of twenty. It's all very young and dumb, but that's what makes it so special. It makes sense that people usually end up living with their friends from freshman year. They are your first friends in college, after all. So flash forward two years later and Kelly, Louise, and I have our own apartment, a cat, and a lot of glitter. It's cute. And then we’re sorting out housing for senior year, and that’s a mess and we work through about ten different situations before the dust settles and it ends with the three of us and Kelly’s Starbucks friends - Alex, Spencer, and Derek - signing a lease for an apartment on 67 DP.

Then Kelly decides to move downtown, so I convince Anna, my pbro, to move in with us. Then July comes, we move in, and Derek just doesn’t pay rent. There’s a lot of angry text messages and then we replace Derek with Thomas, a University of Manchester student who would be studying abroad at UCSB for a year.

The point. I'm getting to it. It's a weird thought that had Dani and I not been assigned that specific room freshman year, everything would be completely different. I would have never met Kelly or Louise, and then I wouldn’t have met Alex, Spencer, and Derek. Then Derek would never have been able to screw us over, so Thomas wouldn’t have lived with us. It’s wild, that his experience at UCSB would have been completely different, had Louise, Kelly, and I never met.

Chaos theory. A butterfly in one hemisphere causes a hurricane in another. An email sent to a girl in California affects a boy in England, three years later.

It goes without saying that there are so many more parts to this story. (Because, as stories usually go, this story, my story, is made up of many other stories). So there’s the fact that Kelly and Louise were assigned suite mates, which played a huge part in why they became friends. There’s the fact that Kelly got hired at Starbucks before Blenders, though she had applied for both, which led to her meeting Alex, Spencer, and Derek. There’s that Thomas had originally planned to study abroad in Vancouver, when randomly, a spot opened up at UCSB, and he decided to come here instead.

For each of us, there is a starting point. My starting point was that email, the one that I cursed with Dani for days on end. In retrospect, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I wish I had known that it would be a catalyst for so many good things to come. Even though I don’t believe in “everything happens for a reason," I do believe that this outcome was the best possible one. I’m beyond glad that it all happened the way it did.

So this is my thank you to UCSB Housing. Thank you for not placing me where I wanted to live, because Manzi maybe would have been the worst. I ended up exactly where I needed to be, with people that I'm so happy to know.

And to everyone who came into my life because of this one first email, and to those who will inevitably come in later on — maybe there’s a reality where none of our paths cross like they have in this one. I love the multiverse theory, so there is a part of me that would like to believe that one exists. But even if that is true, I’ll never know, and I’m glad I live in this one, because I’m glad I met you all.

*As I was writing this post in my Notes app at 3 AM the Saturday before finals week, Kelly texts me this. Life is weird.*