Stop Me If You've Heard

Have you ever had this happen to you before? Imagine a certain topic - perhaps a name from your childhood, a song, a celebrity, a saying - that you haven't thought about in years, when all of a sudden it resurfaces into your life in rapid succession. What's even more odd is that it's usually sparked by other people.

I guess the most recent example from my own life is the word "ruckus." I might have read it somewhere being used in a phrase like "let's cause a ruckus" or something. I'm not sure, but over the last couple of weeks, it's just come naturally to me as a slang word to use, three or four times. Before then, I can't imagine ever really having used the word more than sporadically.

In past years, it's been things like video games, like Street Fighter II for example, that two or three people I know end up talking about, in separate conversations, over the course of two or three days. Most of the time, the items fade back into obscurity and dusty memory, but other times they can make a serious comeback, for better or for worse - like my role in our eighth grade production of Grease or various mistakes I've made over the last few years.

Funny how life keeps these things in a shuffle playlist for you, waiting for a random time to bring them up, isn't it? I wonder if there's a term for this that matches the idea I'm talking about? It might be worth the research.