I don't know if I've ever really noticed that it's such a small world, but this is probably because I keep meeting new people and I find the whole process almost endlessly upsetting. I'm quite a nervous, private person underneath the brash exterior. I grew up in the middle of nowhere reading books in my room and listening to the radio. I prefer small groups of good friends to wide groups of strangers. If an extrovert is someone who feels invigorated after spending time with large groups of strangers, then I'm pretty much as introverted as you can get. I cover it up relatively well, I suppose. Dunno.
Anyway, my point is that the world is continually upsetting me about how large it is, rather than how small - but I suppose even I can point to a few weird anomalous coincidences. The other day I was on a train to my parents, for example, and there was a woman on the train I hadn't seen in ages. And I'm forever getting on planes back and forth from the US and bumping into people I know on them. I went to Seattle a few weeks ago and discovered Bobbie Johnson from the Guardian was returning from a completely different event on the same plane. If we weren't both completely exhausted we'd probably have talked more.
Times when I've been recognised seem to be the weblogger equivalent of small world syndrome (reading Derek's comment and Haughey's). I'm not sure that's really particularly good evidence for a general small world syndrome thing, but it's nice to talk about.
Buying things in shops is my favourite. I bought something from Square store in London and the guy behind the counter recognised me. I took a picture of him and put it on my site to punish him for embarrassing me in public, but I don't think he realised it was supposed to be embarrassing. I remember a particular experience when I got an e-mail from a guy whose weblog I read saying that he'd seen me on Oxford street with my mum tying up my shoelace. That was interesting...
So there are a couple of songs at the moment that put me in a good mood no matter what - one is Number 1 by Goldfrapp and the other is the Jacque Lu Cont remix of The Killer's Mr Brightside. I think particularly the second one, because there's this bit near the end where great big pounding bunches of bass just appear from nowhere and it actually has some kind of weird euphoric biochemical response because every time I nearly feel like crying. But you know like happy crying. Like >sobsob<
Anyway, this misses the point a bit, because what I actually wanted to talk about was how I came to write this post. There's a 'Question of the Day' box on my Vox homepage and is framed with the question, "What song puts you in a happy mood no matter what?" So the first time I answered it, I just put in the name of the song. I then go and look at my Vox page and it's just got a completely non-post there. Just a question and an answer. I hadn't realised that I was supposed to be more explanatory around it. I suppose that could be a consequence of the question, but hey.
Here's how I'd do it. I'd ask questions that have simple one line answers that actually might be correlatable against some kind of external database. So I'd answer the happy song question, and then I'd click continue and it would go and try and find the song against something like Yahoo Audio Searche's APIs (not flogging Yahoo here particularly - just can't think of another good one for songs). Then I'd ask people if it was the song they'd mentioned and suggest that they talk a bit about how they feel about said song. Then I'd post that to their sites, and in the background you'd have a complete database of interesting responses to songs - so you could start joining people together who liked the same songs and all kinds of neat things. That's what I'd do.
On the one hand, this is great because I never bloody write anything personal on my site any more because too many people can bloody read it and it creeps me out when they know how sad I'm feeling about one thing or another or how happy I am that something else happened and the like etcetera.
So I could do that here except that exactly the same people that I work with are the ones who would end up reading this, so it's not like I could just sit here and say, "You know who sucks? The people I work with" or "Wow is company X the shittiest bunch of no hopers you ever met"
I shouldn't really be this ranty, but I feel a bit like I haven't had an outlet for my less focused thinking and this might end up being the closest thing I've got to such a place. Cross cross cross. Tired tired tired. Stupid stupid stupid. Wrong wrong wrong.
