There are two kinds of people in this world: those that get songs stuck in their heads, and those that don’t. I am most certainly in the former category. It doesn’t take much for some vintage tune to lodge itself firmly between my ears. I wish I knew what made me so susceptible to that kind of suggestion.
The songs are almost always deplorable, like “Guantanamera”, “Don’t Stop Believing”, or The Diff’rent Strokes theme. Sometimes the origin is simple: seeing John Mayer accompany Dave Chapelle on his show resurrected the sitcom theme. The Journey classic is a preferred method of torment used by herself. The old folk tune is my form of reciprocity.
I think the worst part of any of these songs is that I only know the chorus, let alone the whole melody or all of the worlds. With “Guantanamera”, I don’t even know that — I have to fake it. Thus it makes it almost impossible for me to get any kind of closure organically. I either have to be completely distracted so that part of my brain can quiesce, or I have to hear the song.
The same phenomenon happens with food, too. If someone else says, “I had a yummy doughnut for breakfast,” I’m probably going to start salivating and want a yummy doughnut, too. While getting a fried dough craving at the drop of a hat isn’t convenient, that can’t compete with when someone mentions they had some inaccessible regional delicacy that I can’t get here. I’m not sure if that’s a by-product of my suggestible nature, or if it’s a symptom of my rarely in remission wanderlust, though.