Because we're all in this together.

I don't understand what brings us together in place so huge. It's like when you see that friend you've been trying to edge out of your life due to her sporadic bouts of insanity on the train and you try to ignore her but she inevitably sees you have you have no choice by to say "Jennifer! Hey!" when all you can really think about is that in a city with 8 million people were you really bound to run into each other at some point? (What luck!)

And as fate would have it, it’s always the people you don't want to see that you do, and the people you'd absolutely fall over to meet (dear gawker stalker, thanks for teasing me with those John Krasinski posts) you never ever do.

So when I was downtown at a bar with friends on Saturday night and noticed upon our exiting a belligerent guy in the street being held back by the bouncers, that while certainly being a bad night for him, I recognized him immediately as someone I didn't want to see.

Apparently, "dude grabbed me by the neck, man!" is what happened inside, and now this mussed up guy with his shirt half-tucked in is out on the street for merely "defending" himself. "Bro," he said pleading to one of the two tall body guards who wanted nothing more than to continue on with their mellow night of checking i.d's, so they told him they were sorry, but he really did need to leave. The drunken guy fell back on the sidewalk and I noticed it because like everyone else who happened to be out there at that exact moment, we all couldn't turn away. "C'mon man!" he said, floundering.

Walking away I was hoping I wouldn’t see one more thing I didn’t want to see, until we turned the corner and found someone's blackberry in a leaf-covered puddle. "Just leave it," someone said. However, being a true believer in karma, I took it with me determined to contact someone in this blackberry to perhaps finally reverse my never-see-anyone-I-want-to curse for good (John?!).

The key pad was water-logged, and after reading some recent emails I was able to determine that a Sam was the owner and it was, in fact, his birthday. (What bad luck!)

His friends were of course all too drunk to pick up their phones and so I took the blackberry home with me (determined!) and made a call to a friend the next morning. Sam ended up coming to my building to pick up his lost device which contained all sorts of well-wishing messages about his just having turned 28.

When Sam approached I realized that perhaps there is no such thing as karma, because dude-grabbed-me-by-the-neck,-man was indeed Sam. I don't know how he ended up losing his phone around the corner in a puddle while in the throes of being kicked out of a bar on his birthday in front of all his friends, but he did.

I know he didn't know what I knew, which was that I’d seen how much of a mess he really was. However now, in the light of day (and slightly more sober) he could have fooled me. Sam said, "thank you so much," and then handed me a $25 Starbucks card as my reward - and anyone who knows me, knows that there really is no better gift.

So in the end maybe karma isn't worth all that much, but $25 of free coffee, surely is.