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24 June, 1998
I didn't do jack shit today. Wow. I think that's the first time I've actually typed in a full swear-word here. But frankly, that's the only turn of phrase which is sounding right today, for some reason. Actually I lied. My working day was very customary and routine. I did an upload of the web site that I work for, as I always do, every Wednesday morning between 7am and 8am. Yes that is an obscenely early hour for a confirmed night owl who routinely goes to bed between midnight and 1am at the earliest. So my day wsa pathetically normal really. But I'm supposed to be coding up the super-duper Perl script to end all Perl scripts. The one which will neatly and tidily end all of our production woes and finally bring at least OUR end of weekly production of the on-line paper, fully into the 20th century, not to mention the 21st. So I spent today in a nirvana of web-surfing, poking around in corners of the Web I hadn't formerly visited and generally seeing a lot of pretty terrible sites. If you hadn't figured it out already from the music I was obsessed with (and still am) two days ago, I'm a Deep Forest fan. They write the kind of music that I can trip out to. They write my own version of drugs for me. "While the Earth Sleeps" isn't the only piece of theirs that I have been addicted to. "Sweet Lullabye" got me while I was in Geneva and "Night Bird" which was in The Island of Dr. Moreau. So I went looking for site about them and their lyrics and finally got around to ordering all three of their albums so that I can stop wearing poor Maggy's RealAudio server to pieces by listening to "While the Earth Sleeps" over and over again on repeat play. Like many fan sites, most of the batch on Deep Forest are pretty terrible. The link I gave above and one other, outside of their "official" site were the best of the bunch. And the official one doesn't work really well on small monitors. However, I got the information I wanted. Which is that the lyrics in "While the Earth Sleeps" are Macedonian. Macedonian. I have only known one Macedonian person in my life. Her name is Amy and her family immigrated to this country at some point, so that she is more American than anything else. According to some of the sites I was reading on Macedonia though, I actually knew one other Macedonian: my roommate in Geneva, Tasios, who is from Thessaloniki in the northern part of Greece. He never said anything much about Macedonia though. My other roommate, Arben, who is Albanian did though. But he had a lot of very strong political opinions, while Tasios was just concentrating on being a doctor. So I've really been stuck in Macedonia all day and listening very closely to those lyrics to hear what Macedonian sounds like and then singing along with it and wondering if this is a language I might want to learn. I totally ignored the Perl scripts and kept my fingers only lightly on the pulse of duty by keeping a close eye on the help e-mail box. I'm a terrible, terrible person I tell you. Can't keep my mind focused on the important stuff (mostly in this case, because I ran out of the short burst of inspiration which gripped me last week and I'm now debugging which is, at best, tedious work and at worst enough to make you want to leap out of the closest 7th story window), too easy to distract with fluff like the history of Macedonia and it's political struggles. But today was nirvana. |
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