11/29/13 Synchronicity

Yet another instance of word-synchronicity, this one. It started the morning of November 29th, 2013.

I was going through some old short stories I'd had published over the last few years, is what triggered the incident. About a year ago, I pledged to assemble my published stories into collections to be self-published as eBooks, for the hell of it. Now, all these months later, I'm finally getting around to it, which meant combing my archived stories and assembling them into the said collections.

While I was doing this, one story in particular caught my eye: "Borborygmus."

It was a goofy, lighthearted horror story I'd written on a lark and then had published in a low-key anthology some time ago. But on the morning of the 29th, as I encountered it for the first time since I'd dragged the Word file into my computer's "published" directory, I had the thought: Borborgymus -- what a clunky, obnoxious word. The word, which I'll let the reader look-up at their leisure, thus impressed itself upon my mind, enough for me to absently take notice.

Also worth mentioning: it was the first I'd seen the word "borborygmus" since the anthology my story appeared in was published, years ago. And why should I see it? It's a rigid, non-descriptive medical term probably not used outside of a Bible-thick tome of procedural jargon.

I soon finished up perusing my short stories, and then, less than a half-hour after encountering "Borborgymus," I checked my email. And there, in my inbox, I was met by this subject line: "borborygmus: Dictionary.com Word of the Day‏." The email was sent on the 28th, but I hadn't checked my inbox until the morning of the 29th -- so there's no way I could have known it would be there ahead of time.

A classic, synchronistic recurrence: Within the span of minutes, I'd by chance encountered the same rare, obscure word in two different, unconnected places -- after I'd Noticed it specifically in my folder of short stories, and after I'd been putting off going through those stories for a full year. And, let's not forget, after I'd experienced dozens upon dozens of nearly identical incidents, all fitting the same pattern of distinct, precognitive-like recognition and then recurrence.

Being jaded by past experience, I just chuckled and then opened my synchronicity log to make a new entry. "Borborgymus" will be appearing in an upcoming short-story collection, I've decided.