Two wonderful things have happened to me in the past two days:
Firstly, I identified a song I have always wanted to know the name of. Two or three times in the 1990s, on the radio, I heard a song that went, "Mexico, Mexicoooooo." That's all I had. So you can see how it would be hard to track down. Any searches on YouTube for "mexico song" would always have the same problem as another song I like,
The Border by America, always used to have: thousands of videos about illegal immigration and absolutely zero groovy nostalgic tunes from my childhood. So for two thirds of my life (perhaps even three quarters of my life), I've been looking for a song about Mexico with no other information than that. Around 2009, my dad inexplicably suggested
The Battle of New Orleans, which barely even mentions Mexico. But yesterday, by pure chance, I was listening to radio from around the world through one of the greatest websites in existence (it's called
radio.garden and you need it in your life), when a radio station played the Mexico song! This was it. My one chance. Fail to identify it now and it would probably be the 2030s before I heard it again. I frantically made a mental note of any lyrics I could make out, and searched for them. And within a minute, after a quarter of a century of fruitless hunting, I knew that I had been looking since primary school for
Mexico, by 1970s German party band the Les Humphries Singers. Which, in the maddest part of this story, does actually use the same lyrics as The Battle of New Orleans, just with added "Mexicoooooo".
They got in trouble for copyright violation and everything. But it feels so good to finally know what that song is. I think I now only have one more song from my childhood I can't identify, which I only heard 30 seconds of once and had no lyrics and I can't even hum. So that's no good, and therefore doesn't belong in this thread. Let's focus on the win.
The other wonderful thing to happen to me was just after work today, as I was walking through freezing weather, in the dark, through the infamously depressing ghetto where I work, when a teenage girl approached me and said, "Hi, I'm making people's day by giving them money. Here you go." I uncomfortably mumbled a refusal, because I bet I'm considerably richer than most people who live round there, but she pressed the coins into my hand anyway, before chirpily walking away to perform a random act of kindness for someone else. It was only 13p that she gave me, about $0.17 if you need that in American money, but that didn't matter. I continued on my way to the supermarket I was going to, thinking, "What a weirdo", but the kindness grew, and my heart was warmed in the icy darkness until long after I got home. Once I had accepted that a stranger really was out there being nice for no reason on purpose, I didn't stop smiling for about two solid hours. All in all, it's a pretty good return for 13 pence. God speed, mysterious teenager. May your positive effects snowball throughout the community, until you are smiling as much as I was, but every day, forever, reaping the joy you have sown today.