25 Songs, 25 Days, Day 5: A song that is often stuck in your head.

Welcome to my Month of Music! We're going to talk about one of my biggest muses this month: music. I found this fun little challenge on Facebook, where I will be playing this little game all month on my official author page. Give it a look and play along, and who knows? Maybe you'll get some free books along the way!

A lot of songs get stuck in my head that I don't want to get stuck there, hence the dreaded earworm. It can often depend on the mood of the day, or what my bestie has recently showed me and it's stuck in a loop in my brain. If you've ever shuddered at the phrase, "The cat came back," or "what does the fox say?" you have felt my pain.

And I can't even TALK about the Bird. My sons use this against me. It's not even fair.

But there is a song that is kind of my mental go-to when chaos abounds, and it started way back in the early 1990s. I was a young mother, part of the working poor, paying my dues working at Burger King because it was full-time work that was easy to get and easy to keep. I worked at a restaurant in Fresno that was right in the hub of activity, so the lunch rushes were ridiculous. We'd have a line inside the restaurant that wound all the way out the door, with cars twenty-deep in the drive-thru. Many times I would be at the drive-thru window because I was quick, efficient and could keep the line moving and our drive-thru times down. If I wasn't on the window, I was expediting the orders. It could get very stressful very quickly.

Because I'm a daydreamer, my brain keeps churning no matter what's going on around me. It quickly came to the rescue playing an upbeat song that kept me from losing my mind in the middle of the hectic rushes.



Shiny, Happy People? How could one stress out listening to THAT?

Much later I learned that the song was, in fact, ironic. The title and the slogan were taken from a Chinese propaganda poster, and the timing of the song was a few years after the Tiananmen Square uprising... which is a far, far, FAR cry from a busy afternoon at a Burger King.

It still comes to mind whenever I get stressed and need to center, but in a weird way it also makes me remember that the battles I often fight are miniscule in comparison to many world problems.

Perspective, courtesy of a sugary pop song written in the vein of the Monkees.

Shrewd, REM. Very, very shrewd.