My Neuroses’ Playlist
In previous articles, I’ve mentioned how earworms plague me.
There are four flavors of earworm:
- Simple exposure: I hear a song on the radio, in an elevator or restaurant, somewhere in the world.
For example, I watched the end of the movie Kingsman, which features Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love; it stayed in my head for days. In fact, just writing that last sentence brought it back.
- Energy level: fatigued people, bored people, and well-rested states all make it easier for earworms to wriggle into consciousness.
For example, the other morning I was warm and happy in bed and didn’t want to change that. But I had stuff to do, so I told myself, “Bradley, get up!” For the rest of that day I heard Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing, which features “get up get up get up” in the chorus.
- Obvious triggers: somebody wearing a Def Leppard t-shirt will trigger “Pour Some Sugar on Me“ in my head.
I drive a little red Tesla 3 with incredible acceleration, so it’s no surprise when the theme song from the 1980s “Magnum P.I.” starts rolling around my cranium if I hit the little pedal that makes it go fast. (And a slight smile creeps across my face.)
- Proustian madeleines: some trigger, a sound, a smell, a circumstance, will call a song into my head.
This last category frustrates me when I can’t figure out what the trigger is!
Here are four songs that have wriggled into my ears and mind over the last week, refuse to leave, and I have no clue why they arrived, where they came from, or when they’ll wander off.
- “Wannabe” by The Spice Girls (1996)
- “Beautiful World” by Colin Hay (2001)
- The theme song from “Laverne and Shirley” (1976)
- “In the Navy” by The Village People (1979)
The newest of these songs is 25 years old, and the oldest is 50. I don’t know what to make of that.
I wonder whether earworms were as common before music saturated our lives the way it does now. Many years ago, I was hanging out with Marc Teicholz, a phenomenal classical guitarist, and he shared that he felt—because there was so much music just floating around in the world—people couldn’t pay attention to and appreciate music in the same way as in earlier times. That stuck with me.
It also reminds me of a moment in Shakespeare’s The Tempest when Stephano (one of the clownish characters) is planning with Trinculo and Caliban to murder Prospero to take control of the magical island that has music appearing from nowhere. Stephano says, “This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing!”
In Shakespeare’s England, music was hard to come by. We tend to attribute the financial success and cultural preeminence of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, The King’s Men, to the talents of its resident playwright. However, the company also had the best house musicians of any theater in London.
Did Shakespeare ever have an earworm? Probably, and maybe it was this song from Much Ado About Nothing…
On to the second piece…
Another Modest Proposal
In 1729, Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels) wrote what might be the most savage satirical essay in the English language: “A Modest Proposal.” Swift’s unnamed narrator suggests that desperately poor people in Ireland could make ends meet by selling their children as food to the wealthy.
Over the years, I’ve suggested a few modest proposals of my own, earnest rather than satirical, but always with the understanding that they were vanishingly unlikely to happen.
In 2013, as gay marriage was becoming legal, I wrote: A Modest Proposal: just do away with “marriage” as a legal concept altogether. We could and should, I argued, transform all marriages into “domestic partnerships” from a legal standpoint, leaving “marriage” as a purely religious or cultural matter. This would separate church and state. If a church didn’t want to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples, they wouldn’t have to, but a gay couple could find another church or synagogue or mosque or whatever. The trick to the argument was that it would be retroactive. Couples that were already married would become “domestic partners.”
In 2016, shortly before Trump was elected president for the first time, I wrote: A Modest Proposal: Bring Back the Whigs, or… R.I.P. GOP because there was already no political home for traditional conservatives. The original Whigs, I wrote, “were pro-business, pro-market, constitutional conservatives and against tyranny.” That New Whig Party (NWP) wasn’t one that I would want to join myself, but it would have created a refuge for the non-MAGA conservatives.
In 2017 (and this is my favorite), I wrote Email: a modest proposal. My idea was to let everybody with an email address charge a fee to receive email from others. If I was open to lots of email, I could set the fee at a tenth of a cent or less. If I wanted to protect my attention, I could set the fee at a dollar or more. If I were writing this piece today, I would allow for “free access” privileges for senders I designate, like some (but not all) family members.
(LinkedIn has a version of this with paid InMail, where there’s a small fee for me to send a message to somebody with whom I’m unconnected.)
In this happy world, spam would vanish, reckless CYA cc’s and bcc’s would wither away, and attention would be at less of a premium. Of course, and alas, there’s always Slack to manage…
Today’s Modest Proposal
Let’s get rid of urinals.
Whatever side of the identity-politics brouhaha about which restrooms trans people should be able to use (their current gender or their gender at birth), parts of the problem might go away if we were to make all restrooms open to all by removing the urinals where men pee standing side by side.
If there were only stalls and no urinals, then the surprise of seeing somebody’s unexpected private parts—or the surprise of that person seeing yours—would go away.
There are obvious downsides to this:
- Men who sprinkle when they tinkle would need to lift the seat and wipe the rim after. (Men married to women are accustomed to this: it’s not a hardship.)
- Urinals are efficient, particularly at intermissions and at sporting events. Many years ago at a Rams game in L.A., when the pee line was taking longer than usual, a guy halfway back in the line cried out, “Hey! three taps only, fellas. Some of us are desperate.” It got a big laugh, but it didn’t speed things up for the small-bladdered man waiting.
- On the other hand, while stalls-only would slow things down for people with penises, it would speed things up for people who always pee sitting down, since the overall number of stalls would increase and the standers would take less time.
- Sexual assault is always a risk for women, and creating open-to-all restrooms could make women vulnerable.
- It’s already embarrassing to relieve yourself next to other people, and it would be more so if you were to have a noisy evacuation or a big fart next to, say, a first date.
- Where would women disappear to in the middle of a (two mixed-gender couples) double date?
But the upside of taking the drama away from who uses what restroom is big.
There is already a movement away from casual nudity in locker rooms, as this intriguing November article from The Atlantic explains. It’s also generational. At my own gym, the Gen Z and Gen Alpha boys tend to change in the toilet stalls, not out in the locker room. When swim classes for kids are happening when I’m done with my swim, I always take an extra towel to make sure I can stay covered if kids are in the locker area.
Although not traumatic, I don’t have happy high school memories of showering en masse with two dozen other guys in the open shower at my all-boys school gym… and studiously not looking at anything but the tile. Likewise, the Kabuki theater of standing at a urinal next to another guy, each pretending that the other is not there, while staring rigidly at the wall, is something I would not miss. Nor would I mourn the loss of guys striding around nude in the main locker room (i.e., not poolside) at my gym.
This modest proposal does nothing to answer the confounding question about trans people competing in sports. If a trans woman grew up as male, complete with the higher muscle mass of a typical male body, then is it fair to let her compete in sports with women with the typical female muscle mass? I don’t have an answer for that one.
But the restroom thing is a distraction from real problems. Let’s make it go away.
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* Image Prompt: “A comic book style, closeup picture of a human ear with a worm crawling towards the ear hole. The worm is carrying a boom box and musical notes are coming out of the boom box.”
** Image Prompt: “A icon-like picture of a urinal with a red circle and slash superimposed over it.”
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