Selective Memory

If you’ve been here before, especially lately, you might be aware that I seem to be hostage to severe mood fluctuations lately. Or maybe you have been here before and you’re just not very insightful. Either way, Jake’s had to work a lot lately due to some major changes in his job setup, so I’ve been having a lot of time to myself. Which, considering the aforementioned shifts in emotion, is not a particularly healthy thing.

So today, in an attempt to keep my mind busy, I went through the mp3 archives on my machine and clicked on random songs. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a tune must be worth a thousand memories. With the fist few notes of each song, I was transported somewhere in my past.

During high school, I spent a good three months desperately trying to memorize the dates of the wars the Ottoman Empire won and the agreements that resulted from these bloody messes. While I failed that class twice, I can easily recite you every word of every song I listened to back then. Not just the Turkish ones, either. I can spew out English, Italian, French and any other language, anything but the dates or names of those stupid agreements.

Not only can I remember the words to the songs but I also have specific scenes attached to each and every song. Even the ones I hated. The ones with painful memories. The ones that still make me cry. The ones that make me want to pick up the phone and call a friend with whom I should have kept in touch. (Ironically, I also remember all the phone numbers.) I can tell you where I was when I listened to it. Who I was with and how I felt.

So I decided to conduct an experiment. In an attempt to prove I’m not the only freak who remembers lyrics over historical dates and also to have some fun, I’m collecting evidence. If you care to entertain me and maybe help out restore some of my sanity, send me the title and singer of a song that, within the first ten or twenty seconds, causes scenes to replay before your eyes. I also want to know something about the memory. The amount of detail you choose to share is totally up to you. I’ll put up a page with everyone’s replies, so if you have a web page, make sure to list it in your mail so that I can link to it.

What are you waiting for? Tell me!

Previously? Destruction.