Eat, Drink, Sing, Wipe – Fiction

Eat, Drink, Sing, Wipe

by Rich Mackin

Today, I caught myself singing “If you get caught between the moon and New York City…” from the Arthur movie soundtrack, a song I don’t think I’ve heard for 15 years. It’s certainly not the song of choice for a guy who regrets shaving off his foot-tall mohawk. Actually, that isn’t the oddest song I’ve caught myself singing – once I sang, in its entirety, an OB tampon commercial.

I found myself doing this at work the first time I got a job where there was no background noise – I’d normally had music of some sort on, a movie playing at the video store, or I was outside with street sounds forming a constant background score. It was as if my brain was so used to having background noise, it didn’t know what to do without it and needed to compensate. Ever see footage of the Eastern European orphanages where the children have no human interaction, so they just stand there and rock against their cribs? I think it’s the same neuron at work here, but in this case, it’s being stupid.

Sometimes people would ask me why I sang stupid songs I had no earthly reason to sing at work, and I’d explain the compensation theory. So far everyone’s gotten what I mean, because they all also understand the concept of songs getting stuck in your head. But how and when did that become a universal thing? Everyone I know knows the feeling of getting a song trapped in your head, so I can assume this is inherent to human thought, but at the same time, being exposed to recorded pop music is not at all part of human biology. As omnipresent as it seems, recorded music is fairly new on the human timeline, so I wonder if songs getting “stuck in my head” is a new phenomenon, or just an update of something which already existed. Do Inuit indians say “Hey, remember the throat song game that we played last Tuesday? Got it stuck in my head again!” Or perhaps in caveman times: “Grak, me get bluebird mating call stuck in head again.” And Grak, having found himself absently humming bluebird songs to himself, understands.

I’m not sure which is weirder, that we get songs stuck in our heads, or that we allow weird things like getting songs stuck in our heads to happen all the time without questioning why. A similar and, as mentioned, probably related theme is that many of us like to have music on “in the background,” or a TV on just for noise, especially while doing chores around the house. Why? Is it simply because we’re so used to constant sound stimulation? When did we get used to it? Why do we crave sound all the time, why aren’t we happy to get a chance to be in silence? Do stores and elevators need music playing? Is it just that we’re so used to hearing constant noise that we feel like we want it? Or have we confused our need to communicate with general chatter and, thus, as long as we have chatter, we feel our craving to communicate is being filled?

And speaking of being filled, consider food. Much of what passes for food in the modern “American” diet isn’t really FOOD at all. We eat consciously because we’re hungry, and we allow taste to influence what we eat to some extent, but the REASON that we eat is to put nutrients into our body to fuel it. We’re designed to eat to take in vitamins, but all too often we pick chemical mixtures over actual food. Which is more popular, Twinkies or carrots? Doctors tell us to add fruits and vegetables to our diets, as if they aren’t part of our diets. Well, if stuff like that isn’t part of our diet, what is our diet composed of? Junk. Junk that we think tastes good. It might sound nice to put ball bearings in our car gas tanks, because they’d bounce around and make nice little ping noises, but they wouldn’t fuel the car at all.

The first food many of us consume is breast milk from mom. For this purpose, human females have breasts that make milk. They’re also considered nice-looking. In fact, the fact that they’re nice-looking has become the main thing we seem to think about them, and since baby formula can be bought in stores, aesthetics seem to have become their primary function. To help them fulfill this function, some women get implants to make their breasts look even nicer, but this makes them less able to make the food that they were put there for. It’s like in that episode of Little House on The Prairie (I think) in which there was a rocking horse that looked really pretty, but when someone sat on it, it turned to sawdust. We put appearance over function so much, sometimes we don’t care if something functions.

We also get milk from cows. But we don’t make fake cows that look better than natural cows do, even though we use cows to serve a similar purpose to breasts. But breasts were initially where we got milk. When did our ancestors decide to start drinking cow milk? (You know, I think it may have been a pretty gross situation that led to it…) Why cow milk? Why not giraffe milk, or dog milk? In one episode of The Simpsons they had rat milk, which was gross. But why exactly is that grosser than cow milk? In one Friends episode (okay, okay, I watch lots of TV. I’m ashamed, sorry) there was a discussion of how gross it is for grownups to drink human breast milk. And it is, it really is. Eeew. But why is it gross to drink what we were all meant to drink at some point, but perfectly fine to drink from a hoofed animal that would otherwise have no real interaction with any of us?

A recent study from Kimberly-Clark, makers of toilet paper and numerous similar products, stated that most people would list toilet paper as one of the most important (if not THE most important) thing to have if stranded on a desert island. Why? You’d be surrounded by water, right? You want to wash your hands afterwards anyway, right? But we’re so conditioned to our current habits that we never question what we’d do without commodities. At one point in time, there was no toilet paper, and yet there were human beings, and they still pooped. What did they do?

In a related story, consider the way we see cultures that are not our own. In certain cultures, you eat only with the right hand. Eating with your left hand is considered horribly rude. The high school teacher who brought this up one day in class did not refer to the fact that these are the same cultures that don’t have toilet paper or even plumbing like we do. So they wipe with their hands. (I guess, and hope, that they wash afterwards.) The left hand is designated as the wiping hand, and the right is the eating and social hand (which hand do you shake hands with?). Feel free to explore connections of different meanings of the word “right” and the fact that “sinister” which is mean and diabolic and bad, originally meant “left-handed” (see, The Simpsons is educational!). The point is, people do stuff that you might not understand, because you don’t have all the facts. That doesn’t make it worse than what you do, just different.