Skip to main content

Out Of Earworm Hell

For the better part of two years now, I had an earworm stuck in my head. It lodged itself while I was sitting in N's living room chatting with her and her Mom over a cup of Chai. They had Zee-TV playing on the box that we were not mindful of for the most part. N's toddler G was watched the colorful moving images with intermittent interest as he ran amuck the living room with his many toys.

All at once a young male voice caught my attention. It was an ad for an upcoming music show. He was one of the contestants. One bar of the song and he was off air. The tune stuck but I had not paid attention to the lyrics. Needless to say his voice was terrific - obviously a rising star in the musical firmament. Over the next few days that I was at N's, the same ad spot came up several times and each time, the tune worked deeper into me. I managed to catch three words of the lyrics but wasn't sure I had heard right.

Each time, I told myself I should check with N or her mom, they would likely know what song it was. Each time something distracted my attention from that thought.

I left N's place to restart my life alone in America. The challenges were so numerous that a stray earworm did not merit much attention. Every once in a while I would Google the three words that I thought that I had heard but it did not yield much.

I did call N many months later to check if she knew and she wasn't even able to recollect what contest or show I was talking about. I had resigned myself to living with my worm for as long as it took for oblivion to overcome it. There was more than a tinge of regret.

-----------------------------------------------------------

My relationship with M lasted all of four weeks. The pace was fast and furious and the end came quite suddenly and with a whimper. About week two, he gave me access to his paid e-music account. I thought was a very nice gesture. I did a key word search on my earworm lyrics as I had heard it.

I found the song ! I can't and don't want to believe that M came to my life two years after that stuck sound-byte with the express purpose of delivering me from earworm hell and just that. In the complex cause effect continuum for our lives such amazing coincidences abound. Makes me wonder if the four week roller-coaster was not too much to go through for getting a tune out of my head. Maybe it all evens out in the end.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...