# 10 Sep 2006, 09:56AM: MC Masala on Surprise:
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!
"How should I react?
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. 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:
"These things happen to other people.
"They don't happen at all, in fact."
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.