Obsessive Compulsive

One of the glories, and problems, of modern technology is that it allows us to completely throw ourselves into whatever happens to strike our fancy at the moment. For example, this song:



Now, I love a minor-key dance tune, particularly one that is about past or present misery and suffering, and this one fits my brief so perfectly that I have listened to hardly anything else for the last three days. See? (You may have to click on this to be able to read it.)

Date added: Thursday, November 18th. Number of plays 31. And that doesn't count the number of times I watched the video.

I was at the gym this morning and had "Indestructible" on repeat-play, and after four or five repetitions, I thought, "Well, I should probably listen to something else," and then I thought--and I am absolutely not making this up, and yes, I know how crazy this sounds--"But then I wouldn't be listening to 'Indestructible'." So I kept listening to it nearly the whole I time I was there, and on the way home, too. (The "nearly" was when I turned it off to watch on one of the gym's many TVs the last twenty-five minutes of an episode of "Canada's Worst Driver 6", which was hilarious, while on a cardio machine: then it was right back to the song.)

I'll get sick of it sooner or later, or at least it will cease to have the same magnetic attraction, and will simply fall into my usual rotation of classical music, stuff from the eighties and nineties that I remember fondly, and beat-heavy trance (like another minor-key dance tune I adore, Erasure's Breath of Life). And then it will be on to the next new thing.

So in case you were wondering, "obsession" is from the Latin, "ob-", "against", plus "sedere", "to sit", because the word in that language originally meant "to besiege": less than half a century after its introduction into English, it had taken on a subsidiary but closely related meaning, "to haunt" (as in "I am being obsessed by evil spirits"), and from then it was a very, very short step to the modern sense in which one might be obsessed by a person, an idea, or a really excellent pop song.