A dark day, musical memories and reading dark Shriver

It's going to be one of those days, when you wake up and you just feel like going straight back to bed and staying there- not eating, not sleeping, not doing, just being. Looks like it's time for a break from work. I've got one coming up in a couple of weeks, but I'll need a tremendous amount of willpower to get through the next few days.

Yesterday, walking past some houses, I overheard someone playing Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" and I was taken back instantly to the first time I heard the song (or maybe it wasn't the first time, just the one time it became etched in my memory). A darkened living room somewhere in the posher sections of Festac Town, a bunch of teenagers trying to feel too cool for school- the boys huddled in conspiratorial groups in various corners; the girls coalescing, laughing loudly- too loud, maybe to hide their nervousness, and then the first notes of this song blare out and the open space in the middle of the dance floor is packed with writhing bodies, and I am in the middle of it all......

Strange how some songs are indelibly associated with certain memories- Sister Sledge's Frankie will always conjure up memories of a "lit day"(Lit coming probably from the fact that these events usually happened under the guise of a Literary and Debating Society Day- though very little literature or debating went on) as our school social events were then called with three girls strutting in unison, rhythmically swaying to the sound. They were from the American styled private school, not far from us and were allowed to wear make up with their school uniforms, which made them seem incredibly sophisticated, and made them the object of hatred for girls from the myriad other schools around......each time I hear the opening bars, I remember those three girls, all respectably married matrons now in far-flung corners of the globe, strutting their stuff, snapping their fingers and swaying ever so slowly to the beat.......

I'm currently stuck in the middle of We Need to Talk About Kevin- Lionel Shriver's Orange Prize 2005 win. It's haunting and disturbing-tracing the life of a teenage mass killer through letters from his mother to his father. I've wanted to read it for a long time, especially because many of my friends who have children said they had found it particularly disturbing. I haven't been able to put it down- but perhaps it's partly to blame for my low mood today....