You know how it is when you have a particular tune running through your head, over and over in a loop, stuck inside your mind without your even being aware? It plays itself out all day, barely causing a ripple in your consciousness... just a pleasant sense of something different about the day. You go about your work, letting your mind dance to a different tune. You drive home listening to the radio, but as you drive, the tune starts taking over, making itself heard over everything else until, by the time you reach home, you've turned off the radio, and you're humming it. Almost on auto-pilot, still not entirely aware of it.
You walk up the stairs, dump your bags and coat on the floor as you walk in, take a shower, make some hot tea with ginger and look out the window at the first snow of the season. Still humming. Still unaware.
And suddenly, the tune goes into Dolby stereo mode, with full Technicolour effects, and you sit up, half delighted, half nostalgic, and start humming it, na-na-NA-na-na-na, and remembering others that went "with" it.
There are times I've had awful tunes stuck inside my head - like that awful song, "no life without wife" from that awful movie, "Bridge and Prejudice" (yes, yes, I AM prejudiced). But for the last few days, it's been Chopin. Conjuring up a storm inside my head with a Prelude I can no longer identify, though my fingers, through some form of mystical physical memory (perhaps we're all made of memory foam?) remember the ebb and flow of it.
I went through a whole day of routine without noticing its sudden presence. It was only that night, reading in a yellow glow, that it came crashing through the fog and accosted me. Distracted me. Disarmed me. Twisted me around a corner and whirled me into the sounds.
And now, I can't get it out of my head. I've been googling desparately for a couple of days, trying to find some free downloads of Chopin's Preludes and Etudes. No success. Perhaps I should just get a piano and the score and start teaching myself all over again. Meanwhile, the tune goes na-na-NA-na-na-na - if you can identify which Prelude it is, please let me know.
5 comments:
Smell cinnamon (or was it cloves?) to get rid of the stuck-song-syndrome. It won't let you remember the tune, but it is supposed to make it go away. But I guess you wouldn't want that. But keep it in mind when something you don't like is stuck in ;-)
:) such a lovely post. you are very brave to mention the annoying song too. i wouldn't dare do that, it might make it come back.
argh, there it is. dammit, carl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
Kraz.
ouch. the other day I had- OH MY GOD) 'nach baliye' stuck in my head. that pointless song from Bunty aur Bubli
Thanks, ubergeek. I've always known cinnamon has properties that help toothache, but for this? Oh well, any excuse, really, to smell cinnamon.
D, ummm... it did. :(
N: hola, aloha and all that. And ewww!
Kraz, thanks for the link - I notice there's a site in there that promises to make you forget the annoying song in your head by putting an even more annoying song in your head.
akr, I'm wondering whose earworm is worse, your's or mine!
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