Looks like I’m doing a PhD then. Details need ironing out but hey, I got that scholarship. I guess it’s a good thing I graduated on Monday then, huh? And I remembered when to doff the hat and where to look and how to get off the stage. We took lots of pictures, some of which Ameel has put on his blog, and only realized afterwards that I had the hat on backwards for a lot of them.

We move in four days so, naturally, I’ve only sorted about one set of shelves. But that’s because I’ve been doing something far, far more important: making a playlist. I don’t think I can stress the importance of the playlist in moving enough. Sorting, packing, cleaning, moving heavy things around – all must be done to music. And not just any old music, either. The right kind of music.

For me, that means Springsteen. Oh yes. From Dancing in the Dark – which I danced around to in our half-empty living room in Geneva – to the gorgeous Radio Nowhere which I have on repeat at the moment and pretty much everything in between. It’s probably because I’ve been listening to him my whole life that I associate Springsteen with moving, but there’s also something about the songs. Think of Badlands, Thunder Road, Born to Run, Brilliant Disguise, Murder Inc., Glory Days, Human Touch, Lonesome Day, Worlds Apart, and most of the other songs like them – don’t they seem to require some kind of movement? You can’t just sit there, and it’s not just happy dancey music either. You need to be doing something, preferably something that involves lifting heavy things and traveling.

There are others, of course. Some, like We Built this City by Starship (or were they still Jefferson Starship back then?), Fleetwood Mac and Foreigner seem to always have been there. But over the years the playlist has expanded to include Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty, Cher’s Walking in Memphis, The Passenger (both Iggy Pop’s original and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ cover), Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper and Burning for You, Leonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan and, of course, Everybody Knows, Melissa Etheridge’s Bring Me Some Water, the Indigo Girls’ Galileo, Least Complicated, Closer to Fine and Hammer and Nail, pretty much everything by the Police, and the La’s There She Goes. Currently, they’re all sitting lined up with Sisters of Mercy’s This Corrosion, Placebo’s Bitter End, Gin Blossoms’ Hey Jealousy and Found Out About You (gotta love the intro), Dallas Crane’s Curiosity, the Cars’ Magic, the Stone Roses’ Waterfall and She Bangs the Drums, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ Royal Oil  and The Impression that I Get, and Something with Numbers’ Apple of the Eye.

I’m still looking for the old Sponge and Killing Joke songs I used to listen to but haven’t had much luck so far. Found the video for Plowed which I loved listening to while flying. There’s some videos of Millennium here and there as well, which is encouraging. But these are simpler songs more suited to actual traveling. With sorting and packing, you need – I need – a good, strong beat first of all, but then lots of instruments doing something else entirely. I’m not a fan of lead guitar – I’d rather a great bass line and lots of piano and horns instead.

So there you go. The actual playlist has many many more songs in it, but these are (or look like they’re going to become) staples. I’m still mining my mp3 folders for songs with that something extra going on in them and will hopefully have an even longer list by the time I’m done. In the mean time, suggestions are welcome.

Oosp. Things aren’t actually upside-down yet, but they’re about to be. Starting right after this post, actually. But anyway, this time next week we shall be unpacking boxes and officially moved in to our new place. Oh and I graduate on Monday. I’d be excited but I really hate ceremonies and I don’t know anybody I’m graduating with so it’s a bit of a pain. Ameel and some friends of ours will be there, but frankly I’m a little sorry to put them through the 2.5 hours of watching people walk across a stage. I’m a bit sorry about putting myself through it too. Bah, humbug.

But to make up for somehow missing Thursday, here’s that iPod advert song:

And since you’re going to want to sing along, here are the lyrics.

It’s a twofer this week. Two fantastic women and kinda sorta dedicated to two other fantastic women, Penni and Jen.

Ani DiFranco:

and Jill Sobule:

As the post title might have told you, we’re moving! We just did the requisite signing and I’m about to book the movers and then the sorting shall begin. I’m really excited. I absolutely love moving (and yes, I have been told I’m not right in the head already, thank you). How much do I love moving? When I was about 17 months old and made my first move from Sri Lanka to Islamabad, I apparently packed myself into one of the boxes the movers had brought over. Panic and drama ensued, but I missed it all because I was napping. My second move, from Islamabad to Geneva, happened when I was 4 and I remember being constantly underfoot (and being stepped on as a result) because I wanted to ‘help’ by packing all my toys myself. Since my parents didn’t want to tell me that they’d dumped my toys, I was told they’d got lost on the way. Bad idea. I was 7 when we moved again and I made bloody sure every last toy got packed and sent off properly. Of course then we put them into storage and rats ate them, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I love moving because it gives me a chance to review where I’ve been, pick and choose what I want to take with me, and discard the rest. It’s a clean slate, a fresh start and all that. Even when it’s a tiny suburb-to-suburb move like this one, it’s still a good way of clearing out the stuff I invariably accumulate when I’m in one place for any length of time. It’s as if things – papers particularly -  get sucked into my orbit and I can’t shake them loose – a bit like the way staticky cellophane just won’t come off – unless I do something drastic like move house. And as I discard physical objects, I often end up discarding a lot of baggage of the other kind as well. I decide again and again whether something I’ve carried with me for years and years is really really really worth keeping and sometimes, even though I’ve always thought I couldn’t possibly be without it, the time comes to let it go. It’s always a bit of a surprise, but it happens. Some things I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of, like my two Sri Lankan good luck devils or the little amethyst ring my mother got when I was born, or ticket stubs from the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey, or the other random little things that it makes me happy to look at because they remind me of where I’ve been – that I’ve really been there and I didn’t imagine it all.

What I certainly haven’t imagined is the deadline we’re working to now. It’s not that bad really – we’ve packed and moved a six-bedroom house in a day so this little shoebox and its contents shouldn’t be a problem. At least in theory. What actually happens remains to be seen.

Sunday’s edition of Australian newspaper the Age carried this story about how early Sesame Street shows dating from 1974 and earlier are too un-PC for today’s child. Apparently Oscar, the Cookie Monster, and even Big Bird are inappropriate role models since they are unhygienic and antisocial, gluttonous, and delusional (remember when Snuffy was imaginary?), respectively, and therefore unfit for children to watch because, you know, children are little simpletons who might think that all these things that all these strange looking puppets do are somehow ok in the real world.

Say what?

There are a couple of assumptions here that I have a problem with:

1. Children are too stupid to distinguish fantasy from reality and will therefore ape any kind of behavior they see on tv.
2. Children must be protected and ushered through their childhoods with as little contact with reality because it might scar them for life.

First of all, children are not that stupid. Even the children of the delusional, gluttonous and socially retarded members of my generation are not that stupid. Their parents, on the other hand, I can’t vouch for. But I do know that most children are able to separate make-believe from reality, even when they don’t want to, which is why fantasy, particularly for children, has always had a place in human culture. One of the first things we’re taught is limits; what we can and can’t do is spelled out for us constantly as we grow up. It is important, therefore, to be able to escape into a world with no (or different) limits so that we may exercise our imaginations safe in the knowledge that what we are doing is imaginary.

It seems to me that it isn’t children who confuse fantasy with reality but their parents. Witness the rising tide of emotionalism and deliberate Oprah-style renunciation of rationality in exchange for touchy-feely “you’re all special because you think you’re special” nonsense. Yes, for the price of one DVD, you too can have the secret to untold wealth, happiness, success and good teeth.
Which takes me to the second issue: reality. Reality means the stuff in the real actual world. You know, the one out there, that comes packed with grouches, hedonists, delusional people, and a whole lot more. Given that you’re going to have to deal with them anyway, mightn’t it be a good idea to have a practice run or two? Or maybe just the exposure so that when you come across someone who doesn’t think you’re the specialest special little thing in the whole wide world, you can actually cope?

The article also quotes the head of children’s programming at the ABC (that’s Australian Broadcasting Corporation) as saying that even if a tiny minority of children mimic the behaviors they see on screen, the program in question should not be shown. By that logic, children shouldn’t be shown anything at all or allowed to read or speak or play or think because you never know when exposure to something as radical as scarfing down a plate of cookies could do serious damage to their psyches. And if we stunt an entire generation of children in the process, so what? At least they’ll all be svelte and clean and utterly unimaginative.

I am not a parent (and things like this make me even more glad that I never need to be), but I certainly was a child and I seem to remember the biggest lessons coming from those two people who had the job of raising me, not the silly images I saw on the telly. I wonder, in all our analysis of the effect of anything and everything on the fragile psyches of children, have we forgotten entirely about the role of parents?