As you probably already noted from Thursday night’s Pulitzer-worthy limerick (which is not actually a haiku, regardless of what I happened to call it on facebook), a coworker was blessed with an earworm this week and took it upon herself to share with all the rest of us purely out of the goodness of her heart.
Such generosity, right?
What’s worse is that the song that was stuck in her head, which she subsequently chose to inflicted upon me, was “Kumbaya”. Now, I’m going to completely honest with you. Up until I googled it and found it’s Wikipedia entry linked abover, the most I knew about that song was that it goes, “Kum-bah-yah, my Lord, Kum-bah-yah”, and then, um, well, I guess you repeat that indefinitely. Or at least, that’s what happens in my brain.
I was understandably less than thrilled that my colleague shared her torment with me. And because I can be petty, spiteful, and readily willing to demonstrate the maturity of a 5th-grader at the playground, retaliation was a moral imperative. So I cursed her and whatever offspring she might eventually produce to be stricken with unending, die-hard, fan worship of David Hasselhoff. While still patting myself on the back for that piece of nastiness, I decided to follow it up with a little earworm of my own and dropped a couple of lines from “Copacabana”. Yes, out loud. A capella, even.
That’s right. You mess with the bull, you get the horns.
The thing is, I have issues with earworms. I don’t know if it’s part of me being severely musically challenged, or what, but my head is like that trash compactor from Star Wars. Once something gets shot out in there, in bounces and ricochets around until either everyone’s buried in trash or somebody finally gets shot. And I’ve got some kind of magic delayed reaction with those kinds of catchy tunes too. I might hear a few notes of something on Monday and then walk out of a meeting late Thursday afternoon and suddenly find myself humming it.
What’s worse is that I don’t really even have to know the song. One sunny, cold day this past winter, I stood up from my desk and announced to the person in the office next door that I had a song stuck in my head and didn’t know what it was. She asked me if I knew any of the words. I stood there with a blank look on my face. I looked like Homer Simpson when Marge attempts to explain how he could be a better husband.
Words? Crap, I didn’t know if the song even had words. I certainly didn’t know them if it did. All I had was about 13 seconds of instrumentation circling the drain in my head. It was rather frustrating, because usually I can’t get rid of an earworm until I know what it is I’m being tormented with. All I could recall was that I’d heard it on a TV show in one of those 15-second transition scenes, and knew it was kind of pop-y.
Yep, that’s what we had to work with.
After an extensive search of the entire catalog of K$sha, which surprisingly didn’t take very long, I gave up and suffered with it for the rest of day. It wasn’t until much later that I found out I had been harpooned with “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga.
Just one more reason not to like her, if you ask me. I might have forgiven her the meat dress. I mean, it’s meat, after all. But I’m afraid given me an unidentifiable earworm is Just. Plain. Unforgiveable.
I wouldn’t feel to bad for her. I’m pretty sure she could buy Rhode Island at the moment. My lack of devotion probably isn’t a big issue for her.
Also, guess who has “Poker Face” in his head right now?
Oh well, at least it’s not The New Kids.
Pud’n
Puddintopia 