Earworm

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was falling asleep on the couch while my dad watched the Tonight Show. I always knew that soon after that unmistakable theme song and opening monologue my dad would carry me upstairs to bed. To this day I love going to sleep with the TV on. But because I often have a kid or kids in my bed, I usually watch TV muted with the closed captioning on.

If you don't ever use closed captioning, don't start. I find it addictive. In fact, for me it's hard to watch the actual show, I'm so entranced by the captioning. But if you want to watch Kill Bill or Hurt Locker when there's a sleepy kid in your bed, captions are the way to go.

But just the other night I was watching a horror movie - I don't even know what one - with the captioning and something 'happened' in the movie that I can't get out of my head. If I had been watching it with sound it probably wouldn't bother me. But in this particular scene, the captioning described the sound of the actions in the movie as "squelching."

And God help me, I can't get that word out of my mind. Squelching. It creates a gory, vivid scene in my head (that has nothing to do with the movie, mind you) and, as Abby would say, I don't like it anymore.

Just last night after all the kids were in bed, Sam came into the bedroom and said his loose front tooth was really bothering him - did I think Bryon could yank it out like the last loose tooth? So we went downstairs, towel in hand, ready to pull that tooth. And with all that twisting and yanking all I could hear was SQUELCH, SQUELCH, SQUELCH. I had to leave the room.

A few minutes later, Sam came back upstairs, head hanging low. "Mom, we couldn't get it. It's going to bother me all night long, " he said. Then he lifted his head. And the tooth was gone.

Now if I can just stop hearing SQUELCH.