Coincidence

Besides my marriage... I haven't written any stories of my life in the past years. Maybe cause nothing worth mentioning was happening. So I'd like to share a little story. Every morning on my work commute I listen to this american life in my car.
Last weeks episode was about coincidences. A very cool episode and definitely worth listening to!

So I was talking to my co-worker about our own coincidence experiences. I couldn't remember any "crazy" ones that happened to me. But the following day, I actually remembered one coincidence that is actually pretty cool. So here we go!

It all started when I was living in Germany. It must have been around 2006 when I first got interested in the dance style popping. Among my friends dancing was not a big topic so it was hard for me finding people to practice with. Youtube was already popular at that time and I looked for good popping tutorial videos. Out of all videos I watched I found one exceptionally helpful which is the following.

I remember watching it several times and whenever I had some time to kill whether it was in the car or when I was standing in line for the movies etc, I would always practice the "hits".
 In the next two years I got pretty good at hitting my forearms but that was about it. Since I had nobody to practice with my progress was very slow. It got to a point where I didn't practice dance at all for a couple of months.
Two years later I got hired at Dreamworks in the Bay Area. On my first day at work I'm met a bunch of people I knew from art forums like cgtalk and sijun. Erwin Madrid was one of them. We quickly became friends and started going to conventions and art events such as sketchcrawl. I believe it was the 25th world wide sketchcrawl when the artists were gathering at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and Erwin recognized a school friend Joe Hayama. The funny part is that he recognized him because he did a crazy dance move while talking to other people and he remembered that Joe was passionate about dancing back in college when they first met.
So that's how I got introduced to Joe Hayama.

I believe it was the same day Joe took us to a party at the Minna Gallery in San Francisco. By the time we arrived there was already a pretty long line outside of the building. I notice a guy at the end of the line who is popping to the music that was leaking out of the club. And of course Joe happens to know him. His name was Assad. We get introduced and we start chatting. As I mention that I just moved from Germany to the States he starts speaking German to me. I was very surprised and couldn't really say anything for a few seconds!? That was the last thing I expected. Apparently his grandma was German and taught him how to speak....crazy. Anyway, he turns out to be a popper and at the end of the night he tells me to check out his youtube channel for some popping videos. He goes by "inventfmc". As I got home I looked him up on youtube. And guess what video I see....of course...!

I didn't know what to say....I watch a random popping tutorial video in Germany, two years later I move to the states and I happen to run into the guy who I was learning from on youtube? That's pretty darn awesome. Anyway I tell him in excitement but I don't meet him for a while. In 2008 I started taking dance classes at citydance in SF. After a year or so learning from Boy Wonder (see video below), Assad takes over the popping class.

Now I'm learning popping from that random guy that I saw on youtube. I still think it's pretty crazy. One day Assad asks me if I could help him out filming his online lessons he's planning to sell on his new site learntopop.com. So we meet up at cellspace to shoot the promotional video and the lessons. You can buy the lessons at the above mentioned link. And here is the promo video I edited.

Assad moved to LA last year haven't seen him ever since but I have no doubt that sometime in the future we will cross paths again.