I would like to thank and blame Ke$ha all at once

So this weekend I was doing a little bit of work at the office, scanning in a survey from one of our client schools.

Scanning is a long, drawn out process whereby each single sheet of the 4-sheet survey that students take must be sent through a Scantron machine in order to be read and recorded.

It is a fun process, because, well, Scantron sheets are kind of 1980's and cool, but there are also "skew errors" and plenty of paper jams along the way, making it a tedious process too.

So when I scan surveys, I put on some mindless dance music, and dance...as I scan.

Usually I listen to Flo Rida, but this week, I chose Ke$ha, having enjoyed her new single on the radio and being ready for a change.

And as I was scanning, a survey about student use of alcohol and other drugs, I started thinking about pop culture trends, and trends in...well, student use of alcohol and other drugs.

Scanning, dancing, thinking, this pretty much sums up my life.

But I began to think about this concept that one of the U.S. national research studies talks about - "generational forgetting." The idea is that kids forget how dangerous the drugs their parents used can be, and parents forget to warn their kids about these kinds of drugs, and then the same types of drugs and drug problems keep re-surfacing over and over in society, in cycles.

Then I thought about how, when I was in high school, everyone was worried about ecstasy, because of our generation's rave culture, and about how we kids didn't use X, because we heard about people dying after awhile.

But then this happened:

And sure, other things happened, lots and lots of other things may have contributed to this:

The resurgence we've seen in dance music - with perhaps the Black Eyed Peas being forerunners, and folks like David Guetta, Flo Rida, Ke$ha and LMFAO taking over - is correlating to today's high schoolers rising use of ecstasy. Fascinating!

So the very music that helps me to scan the survey, to find the trends, to prevent the student use of dangerous substances, may also be contributing to the student use of dangerous substances.

Life is so very intriguing.