In first-year history class, roughly March 2012, I heard a sprightly light orchestral tune in the background of a documentary about consumerism in 1950s America. It took me until September 2013 to stumble upon it again (not the documentary, but the tune) on a YouTube spiral. It was called “Spending Spree” and it was composed by Harry Rabinowitz and performed by Dolf van der Linden and his orchestra in 1957. I cried tears of joy upon finding it and listened to it on repeat for weeks.

At a dinner over at my aunt’s in late 2014, a disco track carried by jubilant strings caught my ear. I never thought to ask for its name, so it went unidentified for several years. I heard it again in Oakley’s Barber Shop in Westwood in October 2018, but I couldn’t take my phone out to Shazam it under the cape that the barber threw over me and was too shy to ask for its name. I listened to disco playlists for several months before giving up the search. Then in late August 2020, Lake Tahoe in the pandemic, I walked along the beachfront and heard those violins blasting from a family’s stereo. It was “Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention, and it even hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975. I felt divine at that moment.

In 2009 or 2010 or so I was in the back of a van with six or seven other classmates, and we were either headed to a field trip or to a friend’s birthday party at a camp. The guitar intro to a country song came up on the radio, and a grizzled voice related a tale of meeting a stranger and trading a drink for his advice. In those days I knew what I liked, and country music wasn’t it. But this one lodged itself into my head and after searching up fragments of misremembered lyrics on the Internet, I vaguely accepted that this song was lost to time. Come 2018 or 2019, I discovered that this was “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers, a rare country record that crossed over to the pop charts in 1978. Another tune blissfully reunited with its title, and this only took a decade.

Raise a glass to The Collection Of Tunes Whose Names You Don’t Know But You Carry Around Anyway In Your Head Otherwise You’ll Forget Them And It’ll Be As If They Never Existed At All And Wouldn’t That Be A Shame.

There are plenty more I can’t remember. Maybe they’re gone for real.

Another Very-Difficult-To-Remember thing: it takes a lot of mental willpower to remind myself to check carpool (HOV) lane laws. Obviously in order to exit the expressway I have to switch to the rightmost lane, which is also the carpool lane. I’m driving solo, so normally I’m not supposed to be there. How far before my exit am I allowed to merge into that lane?

I can’t set a reminder to look this up, because my full attention is occupied driving on the expressway. I can’t ask anyone to remind me, because I’m driving solo. Thus this is a Very-Difficult-To-Remember thing.

So to-day I merged into the HOV lane about a mile before my exit. I also exert a great deal of effort keeping this on my mind, so that when I finally park I can look up carpool lane laws on Google. It turns out that you’re only supposed to merge after the last intersection before your exit, otherwise you risk getting ticketed by the highway patrol. Oops.

Moving on to things that are very difficult to look up.

I meow occasionally. When I want to convey myself meowing in a text, I will type meow or mrowl. Mrowl sounds closer to my meows, and so that is my preferred feline onomatopoeia.

I did not think mrowl would be very difficult to look up. But when I Google mrowl I get scads of results about MrOwl, a social cloud storage platform! Sadness.