Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

10 Sep 2006, 9:56 a.m.

MC Masala on Surprise

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2006 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

My laptop got dropped and now I'm getting the "invalid key length" hard drive error. Surprise! My finance class has more work than I'd expected. Surprise! I got into Columbia, a bunch of my friends came to my birthday party, I got an Apress button at LinuxWorldExpo that says "Come back when you can pass a Turing test." Surprise, surprise, surprise!

We talked about a theme of pleasant surprise that runs through TMBG's more spiritual songs. In "She's an Angel," the narrator has a new girlfriend whom he suspects of being an angel:

"How should I react?
"These things happen to other people.
"They don't happen at all, in fact."

We steel ourselves against bad news, but does that even help? And does it stop us from happiness when joy comes to our door?

In related news, I used to think that Birdhouse In Your Soul was about grace, but Leonard and the BiYS video convinced me that it's about fundamentalist Christianity.