209 - 'Pink Elephants on Parade' from Dumbo

(I did a guest post today on Marcy's blog, Tales of the Kids, if anyone wants to check that out. It's about ice cream and mothers being weird. Maybe you could relate?)

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This segment of Disney's Dumbo always creeps me out. In the film, after accidentally getting drunk, Dumbo (the elephant with gigantic ears), sees pink elephants multiplying, playing their trunks like trumpets, marching, stepping on each other, growing, shrinking, talking, singing(?), morphing into snakes, camels, and different forms of transportation, changing color, figure-skating, floating on water, dancing with electricity, performing salsa, belly-dancing, and generally being weird in every possible way in the strangest sequence Disney's ever put together.

In some ways, I love the scene, sometimes I think it's plain genius. It's so fantastical and everything that is so random works together cohesively in an inexplicable fashion.

But most of the time, I find it really, really, really creepy.

180 - Catchy songs that play in restaurants

There are many times as I'm sitting in a fast-food restaurant, a pub, a bar, a club, or a high-end, fine dining establishment, when a catchy song comes up and plays as you're eating or drinking. You want to sing along, but you're half-hungry, as well. You want to mouth the words of the song, and see if your company is mouthing them, too, but you want to take a sip of your drink at the same time.

You end up doing a sort of half-chanting, half-consuming showcase, where you cut up your food while singing, but at the moment you would normally bring the fork to your mouth, you wait - you wait until one of your favorite lines go by, before you actually perform the act of ingestion.

Then you get tired of this routine. So you try and anticipate the breaks in the song, the intermissions, interludes and instrumental solos, and only guzzle up your food as fast as you can when there are no lyrics - only to find yourself struggling to swallow quick enough in order to make it for when the chorus of the tune comes up again. You want to sing, but food awkwardly dribbles out of your mouth, drinks go up your nose, you look weird, food is not being chewed, the food is ruined, the drink becomes ruined, and the song gets ruined.

It's even worse when you're dancing in a club. How are you meant to drink, and dance, and sing, all at the same time? The body is only capable of so much!

I absolutely hate it when this happens. It makes no sense for a restaurant to do that to its customers. Do you hate it too?

113 - Too many songs named after girls

101 - Singing badly

There's a person in my class who is oblivious to the fact that he is annoying. I preach honesty but I don't have the heart to tell him to his face that he sounds horrible when he sings. I'm absolutely positive he knows I hate his singing. There's no way he can't take the hint. I walk away, push him away, turn to someone else for mercy.

I ignore his singing, I don't join in. I shake my head in irritation, but he seems to think I'm joking, which only gives him greater incentive to sing further because it's apparently funny.

Everyone else in my class can't stand the way he sings randomly around others. They're not songs that everybody knows and they're not songs we typically listen to. He's tone deaf, and he can't keep the rhythm or the beat. He's off key, and can't remember the lyrics or how the tune goes sometimes. He tries to create instrumental noises with his mouth and thinks his whole performance sounds good.

I used to think I sounded good, until someone told me to record my own singing on a tape. Boy, I sounded bad, and I never thought I would sing again. In the past year or so, though, I have a new-found confidence in singing. I believe I can join in with the gang at the karaoke place if I don't lose complete control of myself. Singing is fun, at the karaoke place, if you know you sound okay. But it's not good to sing at school, for Heaven's sake. It's not good to sing when you don't sound good.

The person in my class also has boundary issues, verbally and physically, a whole range of them. When he sings, he sticks his head closer to yours to maximize amplitude, moves his chair closer to you to offer a greater acoustical advantage. Every time he starts singing, I feel my guts twisting because I want to be bold and tell him to shut up, but wow, I have a bigger heart than I initially thought I had.

Do you know anyone like this? Do you hate it too?