For a few years between 2007 and 2010, I had a strange cosmic entanglement with Vermeer. It started when I visited the Rijksmuseum and was struck by "Girl with a Pearl Earring". I got a print of the painting that hung in my college dorm room in Colorado. When I graduated, I applied for internships with dozens of companies — mostly in the US — and got soundly rejected by all of them, except one, based in Delft, where Vermeer was born and did most of his work. So I moved to Delft and and had a wonderful time there for about 6 months. After that, I came back to the US, and moved to Pasadena. One month in, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena opened a special exhibit to showcase "A Lady Writing" which they had received on loan. Some months later I started my first business and hired my first intern, a student at USC who grew up in Pasadena. I discovered after hiring her that her father was from Delft. At the end of her internship she gifted me a Delft blue coffee mug featuring "Girl with a Pearl Earring" which I still own, and the cosmic entanglement seemed to end.