PLAGUED BY EAR WORMS

I talk to myself......and not silently. Yup! You read correctly; I actually talk to myself. Out loud. Around the house. In the car. While shopping. I'm convinced that this foible of mine dates back to university days when I would study by verbally reciting, to myself, facts I needed to remember. Whatever the origins, this malady carried through to my professional days. Just ask poor Jackie, my long-suffering secretary, who used to jump from her chair asking what I needed only to be met with, "Just talking to myself again, Jake". As I have aged, my affliction has disturbingly increased in intensity. How often, in the grocery store, have I looked up to see questioning eyes watching me. I know immediately that I have been caught talking out loud to myself, mumbling some recipe or other while in search of ingredients.

As if this isn't pathetic enough, I am now plagued with ear worms, that stuck-song syndrome in which the victim is unable to get a tune out of their head. 

"So what," you say. "That happens to the best of us." Ah, but do you sing along to that music continually running through your brain? Apparently, I do, or so I have recently discovered.

In anticipation of our upcoming trip to Italy, I began playing Italian Love Songs, by Dean Martin in my car. As embarrassing as it is to admit that I even own that song collection, it is even more embarrassing to find myself humming Arriverderci Roma all over Uxbridge. Heck! We're not even going to Rome on this visit. And those rolling eyes and glares from passers-by, I have been experiencing, now make me question my sanity. When fellow shoppers began giving me wide berth, I knew that I was in trouble.

To squash this nasty little ear worm, I turned to one of my favourite CD's, The Three Tenors and Mehta. Jim says that I can't carry a tune in a wheelbarrow and so I reasoned that no operatic ear worm would dare wiggle its way into my brain. Oh man, was I ever wrong. 

And so my friends, if you hear a horribly out-of-tune, scratchy female version of O Solo Mio in the next aisle, please ignore it. It's just your afflicted friend unknowingly giving an unwanted concert. Oh, and if you don't see me for a while, it most likely means that I have been taken away to the funny farm.

Non Dimenticare. 🎼