Day 48: Earworms

I see that Facebook has presented us with another feeling we’re allowed to express. I’ve long thought its existing repertoire of emoticons—like, love, ha-ha, wow, sad, and angry—was insufficient. In this Trump era, I often find myself wanting one that expresses “scared.” Instead, they’ve given us this, a concept that isn’t working for me:

I bought the fourth and final season of the thoroughly delightful comedy, The Good Place, and only minutes into it I reached a scene I had to replay a few times, it made me so happy. I won’t be able to capture it in words, but I’ll try: The head demon in Hell (whose name is Shawn, of course) gathers his minions about him, explains his evil plan, and concludes his presentation with, “So let’s kick things off with our official Bad Place song.” This is what they all joined in singing. I actually laughed out loud (a rarity). What better song from Hell?

Ever since, the jingle has been cycling through my unhappy head in an endless loop. I sang it to myself all the way to the farmers market, where I walked this sunny morning just to get out of the house, though I didn’t need anything.  My favorite vendor is just the nicest young man, so I always buy strawberries from him. The only other thing I got was asparagus. As if you ever cared.

Let’s discuss earworms (also technically known as the stuck-song syndrome) a little more, for what else is there to talk about? It’s reported in the British publication The Journal of Experimental Psychology that chewing gum right after hearing a catchy tune keeps it from sticking in your brain. (That’s assuming you have some gum always at the ready, just in case.) The earworm phenomenon is even explored on WebMD, which I always considered a respectable web resource. It says that that it happens more to woman and musicians than others. I hope that, if you are a woman or a musician, you don’t have my problem with the Kars-4-Kids ditty. If you do, it’s all my fault.

Today was the Allison girls’ weekly Zoom video chat. Here are my Chico grandchildren, careening toward ten and six, though they look younger in this screen grab.

Before Molly joined us online, Eleni, Ember, Jesse and I spent several minutes trying to see who could be the ugliest. All of us were strong contenders and there were no clear winners. Mostly we just tucked our chins to our chests to make lots of additional chins, opened our mouths wide and bugged our eyes. Later, the three adults tried to answer a challenging question: what was the most memorable moment from the past week? It almost stumped us, because of the dearth of activity and the blurriness between days. In the end, I decided my own highlight was taking those decent pictures of the squirrel eating an acorn. That sounds tiny, but it also might prove to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I hope there were memorable moments of the best kind in your week as well.