I spent a whole goddamn week with Billy Joel stuck in my head.

I blame Aer Lingus.

You see, my noise cancelling headphones work better if there’s some other sound coming through them, so I was listening to music on my flight over to Ireland a couple of weeks back, and one of the albums on the channel was some classic Billy Joel.

Including the incredibly catchy earworm of a song, “Moving Out.” Which is all about working yourself to death in order to preserve the illusion of being middle class. Which was then stuck in my head the entire time my spouse and I were driving around rural Ireland, on the left side of the road (when the roads even had sides: some of them are one-lane and dual-direction, and posted for 80 kph that way!) a bare fingerwidth from a three-meter-tall hedge, with tour buses whizzing past.

It was constant white-knuckling for both of us, because being a passenger is even scarier than being a driver under those conditions, it turns out, because MY GOD THE STONE WALL IS RIGHT THERE WATCH OUT FOR THAT TREE.