Stockholm Syndrome, 35 Years Later
It would be incorrect to say I was thrown out of my public high school. I was asked politely not to return - big difference. So I was shipped off to boarding school in upstate New York for 10th grade. I was greatly against the decision at the time, but as it turns out, it was probably the single best decision my parents made (I suppose it was an equally good decision for them to have me in the first place, but I'll leave that up to you).
So if you haven't attended boarding school, and most of you haven't, it's a lot like college. Or prison. You get a room and you get a bed, and the alpha male or female runs the room. I was not the alpha male. My roommate would do a lot of things to torture me, such as staying up until 2 AM throwing almond after almond at me from a huge bag of - you guessed it - almonds, while I tried to sleep. And as a scrawny 15-year old without much self-assuredness, I let it all happen without saying a peep.
However, the worst thing - and I don't believe that he did this to be intentionally malevolent - was to play Pink Floyd's "Animals" at a loud volume while dozing off to sleep. And I would lie there waiting for the album to end so I could go to sleep myself. Ha ha, charade you are, indeed! Every night, Animals - Track 1 - Pigs on the Wing part 1, Track 2 - Dogs, Track 3 - Pigs (Three Different Ones), Track 4 - Sheep, and finally Pigs on the Wing part 2. I grew to loathe that album, as it not only represented hours and hours of miserably failing to fall asleep, but also my relative impotence in the situation.
Subsequently, I was unable to sleep for the next 33 years unless there was absolute silence. Even white noise machines were too much aural input - I had to have complete silence. And then a few years ago, some mysterious cognitive switch flipped and things completely reversed. I was unable to sleep without music. I know, you're starting to suspect where this is going, and you're right, but let me get there properly. So soft music would suffice, relaxing spa kind of music. But then that stopped working. So I shuffled songs from my library and found that Pink Floyd helped me sleep, as long as it was a different album. And that worked for a while too, and then stopped working. And now I cannot sleep without listening to Pink Floyd's Animals. Simply can't do it.
And it's not even that great of an album - the songs are uneven and the lyrics are so aggressively cynical that they are laughable. I wonder if my roommate would remember all the way back to 1985. I'm wondering if he had the same peculiar disorder that I have developed - the inability to sleep without listening to Roger Waters' thinly-veiled attacks on 1970's British society. Likely not.