Webs of Chance

I recently had a series of incredibly serendipitous moments.
Let me lay this out for you.

I got up late Sunday morning because its the Sabbath and thats what you do. Also because me, Kris, and a collection of assorted roomates hit the Fleetwood at around 2 am. As I write this I am suffering the direct results of eggs and hashbrowns with black coffee at that hour of the morning.
By 9am I was jerked awake after a particularly troubling dream centered in suburbia where I found myself equipped with a floating cellphone that I gripped from below which I used to avoid huge spiders in floating, complicated, three-dimensional orb-webs.
I couldn't float very high with the cellphone - I attribute this to the fact that my phone hasn't been working lately - and I hit one of these balloon webs. When I hit the web an asian grandmother-type figure appeared and took the hit for me. 'Ah! It pinches my butt!' She cried, and I was awake.
I always find it best to rejoin reality after particularly deep sleep by way of internet. I had unfolded my laptop and propped myself up in bed for about an hour or so, pointing and clicking my way to useful consciousness. By 10am I was set up at my desk, using all of my eSkill and iAwesomeness to find and use anything to avoid having to work on my final papers, which are many and manifest. This of course lead me to my podcasts.
As much as I am loathe to admit my participation in something as Trendy.com as PodCasting, I have to accept that you are reading this on (one of) my blog(s) so there is obviously little hope for me. It's too late. Don't cry for me, I'm already dead.
I do listen to a few podcasts, though. Only one now, though. The first ever was Ze Frank's the now concluded 'The Show.' His talent has been expressed in several other more frequented and lucrative forums than this, so we'll move ahead. The second is the weekly podcast of NPR's This American Life.¹ I love this show, and have for some time. The almost droning monotone of Ira Glass is so zen, so buddhist monk, and the stories successfully stretch me across an unbelievable expanse of temporal, geographical, and emotional locales that I can't help but love it.³
I listened to a show.
It was great.
It was the end of one of their live shows I had started listening to a few days earlier called "What I learned from Television."⁴ Awesome. Completely awesome. Sheer bliss. There I am, surfing the internet looking for wonderful little April Fools being left by site managers while listening to This American Life. I am so happy with listening that when the show ends I let it just roll into another one. Great! Huzzah! "The Allure of the Mean Friend!"⁵
At some point, during this procrastanotory NPR love-fest, Ira mentions that the This American Life website has been redone and revamped, likely a tie-in with their new TV show⁶ which I am too poor to afford to watch. I meandered, or as well as one can "meander" on the internet, on over now listening to the end of another episode which I had started weeks earlier⁷. The website is really something, with great colors and cool curvey things and Im just having a ball clicking around. Then my eyes fell upon something familiar and I stop.
What I see is a panel from Chris Ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It's being used as part of the blurb about the show I was just listening to.
Normally, I wouldn't have stopped. But, if you can recall, this whole thing is about serendipity and something cool is about to happen. It's going to happen right here: because just this past thursday I was discussing that very book in my Graphic Narrative⁸ course at the Univeristy.
I'll give you all a second to inhale dramatically for me.

Alright, I'll be the first to admit that finding that, in and of itself is only moderately cool. A 2.3 on the Cool Vibrations scale.
But trust me, it gets better.
It is at this point that I must reveal that I was in fact looking at many websites at the same time, thanks to the magical gnome rats-in-hats of the internet. You see, there's not a lot of things I can do while listening to This Life. Im pretty much limited to playing video games (the most complex of which cannot exceed Zelda: Oracle of Seasons), and light reading material. It just so happens that I had Wikipedia'd⁹ Ira Glass right before this amazing moment of recognition with Jimmy Corrigan. I do this from time to time with celebrities that I enjoy or particularly admire. I like to chart my progress against them, and then judge my life accordingly.¹⁰
I hope you're all very ready for another cool thing, because it's about to slam you in the face when I tell you that at the very bottom of Ira's wikipedia page, there is a note that he dated popular cartoonist Lynda Barry¹¹ and that details of this relationship are chronicled in her graphic work One! Hundred! Demons!
You should all inhale sharply again because this is another book off the curriculum for my Graphic Narrative course! (Now at a Cool Vibration of 3.8!)

Meanwhile, in WebBrowser window number 8, my search for more information regarding the new This American Life television program (namely where I can watch it without paying for it) yields another reference to Chris Ware. Apparently he animated a brief section of a This American Life TV show. I was very excited at finding this. Chris Ware has a Cool Vibrations rating of at least 8.8 (which is actually so high on the Cool Vibrations scale that I should report it in Von Hugenstein's Awesomeness unit: The Viking), or 5.4vks. At this point, my searching was reaching a fevered pitch. The link at slate.com isn't working!¹² Oh no! Quick: cut to YouTube.
YouTube must have it - they have everything!

It doesn't take long to watch, and thoroughly enjoy, the short piece. The animation is smooth, and looks like it was done in Flash. But that doesn't matter, because it lends itself so well to Ware's style. I watch it at least twice.
After that, Im ready to finish up the episode of This Life that I was listening to way back when this whole thing started. You know, the one about "my brilliant plan?" Its about three or five billion lines of text above this exact spot, so go back, take a look and buy me a smoothie if you're lost.
I flipped iTunes back into drive and, again, get puzzled and have to stop what I am doing. I pause the show, and re-start the animation. And then I run both at the same time.

They have exactly the same theme music playing.

What? What's that?
No gasp? Nothing? Hold on just a second. The animation that I am watching on YouTube, that I found by chance surfing around killing time, has the exact same music in the background music as the show (which I had started listening to 9 weeks ago) I am listening to as I find the animation and you don't think that is completely amazing?!
Don't you see what just happened? I just wandered through a whole network of connections and coincidences, and got hit in the face by it. I just rode my low-flying cellphone right into the complex 3D structure of life's coincidences, while at the same time subtly drawing a comparison between the connection of people and things in life and the way things are connected and expressed on the internet, while simultaneously demonstrating how circular narratives carry a sense of completion which is greater than most!

It's a perfect 5.0 on the Cool Vibes meter.


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1². A few days ago I, along with the entire class, received a stern 'talking to' about the correct expression things like books (My Special Hemroid), Poems ('The Last Of The Great Goiters'), quotes ("The road turned and I didn't." (period inside the quotation marks)), and the like. I have no idea how a radio show is meant to be presented. I am also to lazy to look it up. Look, people. Look upon this blog and despair: the internet is degrading our beloved conventions. Tremble, mortals, at the misuse of the italics! The semi-colon! The hyphen!

2. Another strike against Journler - it has not built in superscript function. I had to use the 'Special Characters Palette' where, interestingly, "⁵" is located on line 2710 and "¹" is located on line 230.

3. The other great thing about it is that I can let them collect on my computer and, well, you all know about me and collecting things.

4. Episode 328. I likely used the incorrect expression, or citation or whatever. I'll see you in hell, MLA.

5. Episode 245, rerun.

6. On Showtime, apparently all the time.

7. Episode 324, "My Brilliant Plan." If one was willing, one could actually go through and plot exactly how much time I spent on all this through the subtle clues hidden throughout.

8. English 417, professored by the amazing E. S. Rabkin

9. "Photoshopped" and "Googled" are now acceptable terms, so it's only a matter of time.

10. This is, in fact, a very healthy activity. If you knew what some of your favorite personalities had to do when they were young to get where they are, it makes you think twice about your predicament. A friend of mine was recently struggling with some problems related to his band. He quit school very close to graduating to start taking music seriously. I told him to read the Wikipedia entry on Beck Hansen's early career. If you ever feel troubled about your life artistically, read the Beck entry.

11. I just wiki'd her and I feel pretty bad. She has a whole section, about 25-33%, of her bio dedicated to her relationship to Ira Glass. Truly, a measurement of someone's popularity.

12. What is slate.com, anyway? I hear them referenced constantly on NPR nowadays.

13. BONUS FOOTNOTE: This reminds me a lot of the Hypertexts that we are looking at in my Eng 407 class. Totally wiggy.