Say Someday Somehow

It's not often I find a song I really like--usually you can tell what songs I like, if you happen to be incredibly nondescript and stalkerific, because I usually occupy the time I spend walking singing (under my breath! I do not contribute to noise pollution) whatever song happens to be on my mind, and it's probably this habit that leads to me having a pretty good command of the lyrics of any song I listen and like enough--also possibly due to me, when I'm paying attention to a song, almost always singing along. Crazy Scary quite possibly (by now) is sick of my playlist, because even when I've got the headset on I still sing along--and probably louder than usual since I can't hear myself that way.

Perhaps it's just me, but I usually choke up a little bit at one of the lines from Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey. It's basically a sad, sweet song about a site programmer (hence the "code monkey" of the title) who has a pretty rotten life that he puts up with because one of his coworkers happens to have a "soft, pretty face". (Everything in inverted commas is a direct quote--in case you didn't know already!) So the first stanza talks about how his job sucks, and the second about how the coworker (she's actually the receptionist) ignores him, and then the final stanza goes "Code Monkey's just waiting for now/ Code Monkey says someday, somehow" and maybe it's the effect of the Code Monkey Dance--brilliant bit of swaying really, you should go YouTube it!--but at that point I always feel this huge wave of pity for the title character who's up against his life and somehow managing to still optimistically think it'll all work out in the end.

Call me sentimental, but it's just... so very very sad and still sweet, somehow; it's like... let's see... it's like watching the prince in his shining armour on his shining white horse pick up the princess from whatever tower and set out for home, but not knowing that aliens have just landed and abducted everybody: you the watcher (or reader) know that the past 300-odd pages of heroic effort have all been wasted and their hopes are about to be terribly dashed to pieces, but they don't yet, and so there's this strange mixture of I-hope-they-make-it clashing against But-they-won't.

On the other hand, there's songs like Chumbawumba's Bella Ciao, where (apparently) some person is telling some other person, presumably of the opposite gender, that they're setting out to tell people to take the price tag off of sunshine, and "next time you see me, I will be smiling... I'll be in prison/ or on the TV" (though in the current state of affairs the two states can easily coexist), and I like this one because it's so similar to Code Monkey except that in there's an overwhelming sense of futility in the efforts; in Bella Ciao, at least, there's a sort of defiance and spirit running through the whole thing: I want the sunshine to be free and I jolly well am going to shout about it; in Code Monkey it's just a vague "someday, somehow"--a sort of pathetic hopefulness that tells you that the character's not about to do anything about it except keep on hoping.

Very sad, but very sweet. I don't know whether it's disturbing that I find sweetness in people hoping for impossible things...

Anyway! The responsibility I was complaining about in the previous post has been taken off my hands, thank God--apparently they decided I'm too much of a words guy to be allowed anywhere near graphics and suchlike, and so they took the code and revamped it, in the process throwing out whatever contribution to it I've ever made. Instead of creating one site with five or six displays (which is what they wanted from me previously), they've also made it easier by creating three sites and just linking them all together and putting essentially the same decorations on them all--in fact if the address didn't give it away, you'd never know the three sites are separate pages. So far looking at the new sites gives me a pain in the eye, though; some bright spark thought it'd be a good idea to make the site entirely white-on-black and then have hot pink text somewhere splashed on, and then for the links to be flashing white strobes. If it were a TV episode, epilepsy cases would already be sprouting all over the place.

It's not at all the kind of thing I'd envision, but--maybe fortunately--my kinds of visions are shared by very few people, thus subjecting the world to that much less Walls of Text. Then again, if everybody was like me, they'd love reading those Walls of Text and then workplaces would grind to a slow halt as people began maniacally reading, and reading, and reading.

I spent half of Saturday out with the Gobbler and the... what shall I call her? I'm settling on the Interrupter, because that's what she keeps on apologising for doing. Right then, some background on this... I have family in Fifth Hun, who attend a church; the fact that they have five children makes them something of a minor celebrity in a country where most kids are single children. Now, the Interrupter is also from Fifth Hun, and attended the church maybe once or twice--I'm not sure because I've never seen her before. But apparently sometime before coming to Spore, she contacted my mom and my mom helpfully gave her my and the Gobbler's phone numbers saying "Oh they'll be terribly helpful and show you around and so on!"

So she did: she first called me on Tuesday night (if I remember aright) and on Thursday, the Gobbler contacted me to say he'd arranged a meeting on Saturday for lunch. So we got together for lunch, and then wound up at a little table in Starbucks although we never did buy anything from them for the next four hours or so, translating her homework and commisserating about life here as opposed to life somewhere else. We finally parted ways around 5, with many apologies from her about taking up so much of our time--maybe she was being polite, but here I have to side with Lewis about preferring a person who takes up a lot of stuff but talks about a lot of things, over a person who tries not to inconvenience you and gives up a lot and so on but can't seem to stop talking about their efforts to not inconvenience you, etc.

In any case I really should get back to my Taylors series...