This is what A-Ha’s Take On Me would sound like if the lyrics actually had anything to do with the video.

In a similar vein, a song where the lyrics are about the lyrics. It’s worth listening to the end.

4. Blend fresh crabmeat with diced avocado, scallions, and a dollop of mayonnaise for a canapé topping so delicious that it will take your guests a full minute to realize that they’re eating it off dog biscuits. Once they catch on, act mortified and stammer that you must have “mixed up the boxes,” until everyone calms down. Then start crying because the biscuits remind you that today marks exactly eight weeks since you had to put down Buster, and you just miss him so much.

…

6. For a taste of the U.K., fry up mini-servings of fish-and-chips. Take it to the next level by wrapping them in small pieces of newspaper, which, oddly enough, all seem to be printed with unfavorable reviews of Jeff ’s novel.

Novelists Strike Fails To Affect Nation Whatsoever

Nor has America’s economy seen any adverse effects whatsoever, as consumers easily adjust to the sudden cessation of any bold new sprawling works of fiction or taut psychological character studies.

“There’s a novelists strike?” Ames, IA consumer Carl Hailes said. “That’s terrible. When is it scheduled to begin?”

The strike kicked off last fall…

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.

My earliest memory is of sounds – my father brushing his teeth, the clatter of crockery when my family had breakfast, more clattering when my grandmother came home from work, the car horn when my father came back from work, the sound that the front door of my grandmother’s house made when someone opened it, the different sounds each ceiling fan in the house made. Layered on top of that are smells – porridge and toast and chocolate milk and laundry and slightly damp clothes being ironed and the smell of the jasmine we’d collect in the evenings to make into garlands. The dominant smell isn’t really a smell though – it’s the dry, slightly grainy smell that seemed to follow the sunshine around. Inside, outside, in cars, in other people’s houses, I could smell it underneath all the other smells. These are all Islamabad smells and sounds though – I don’t have any memory of Sri Lanka that I know of.

The first full thing I remember is the day, when I was about 2 or 3 years old, that I realized adults didn’t always tell you the truth. I’d asked about something – I don’t recall what but, knowing me, it was probably badly-timed and ‘inappropriate’ – and had received some sort of vague, nonsense answer. I was walking up the four steps that linked my parents’ room to the rest of the house and I remember the moment not just because it was when it clicked that the answer I’d got wasn’t true but because it was when I realized that I could tell. I remember also realizing pretty quickly that it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell the grownups that I was on to them. Instead I decided that I needed to learn to read asap so I find out for myself.

I remember my mother being ill and in bed a lot and being kept away from her because of it, which I didn’t mind because the room she was in always smelled metallic and cold. That’s also probably why I have so many memories of my grandparents. One very clear memory is of looking at the Margalla hills from the back windows of the house and being fascinated by the shapes at the very tops of the hills. Trees, as it turned out, but my grandfather saw me looking and told me that they were monkeys who were observing my behavior. I still get a little creeped out when I see them.

I don’t remember what my mix of languages was pre-Geneva, but I do remember not speaking Punjabi because one day my brother and I decided to make an effort to speak it (or rather I decided and since he had nobody else to play with, he had to go along with me). Our parents were very amused and of absolutely no help at all, which was frustrating because I wanted to learn it. Later when we moved to Geneva and the number of languages around us diminished enough for me to pick up on the Turkish my parents spoke, I tried doing the same thing, with the same result. They didn’t want us to learn Turkish either.

I do agree with Penni about first-borns being the memory-keepers of the family. Being older, I naturally remember more than my brother does, but the odd thing is that I often seem to remember more than my parents as well. Actually it’s probably not more overall but just more things specific to our family unit since I didn’t have the ‘noise’ of work and family and friends and all that. On top of that, since we moved around so much, my brother and I were probably a lot more focused on our parents and each other than other children our age.

Hey if anyone decides to do this meme, let me know.

Now the thing is, the way I know for sure that the season’s turned is not the weather forecast as such but my nose and arms. There’s a difference in the way the air smells and feels in each season, just as there is before rainfall. In autumn, the air begins to feel more dense and seems to hit the front of my nose as I breathe. That first whiff of ozone means that winter is setting in. When the air expands enough to carry the smell of grass and flowers, it’s spring. And when it expands so much that it fills not just your nose but your whole mouth with every breath, it’s summer. Which is unfortunate, because summer is also when everything starts to stink.

You know what I’m talking about. Bad smells just don’t seem as bad in winter – either the air is too still to carry them or it’s windy and you’re too busy feeling miserable and cold to register this annoyance at the tip of your nose. But in summer, with every air molecule taking up far more space than is decent, odors invade your consciousness, forcing you not just to smell them but to taste them as well. Even relatively good smells can turn cloying or unpleasant in this kind of weather.

On the train today, for instance, people had clearly taken their cue from the predicted high of 36 degrees Celsius and been extra generous with the deodorant and other nice-smelling stuff. In itself, this is something to be appreciated and encouraged, specially on tightly packed trains and trams. But when you mix that many different smells together in that kind of concentration, they will blend to create an overall scent. Unfortunately for Melburnians, the smell they seem to create when they all huddle together on public transport is: Baygon. And I don’t mean the politely scented bug sprays you get here in the first world, either. I’m talking about the stuff they sell in South Asia: unadulterated poison that can stop a rat-sized daddy-roach in its tracks and half choke you to death in the process.

Still, it was better than that other harbinger of summer: body odor. There is something inherently upsetting about BO, I find – something as invasive and offensive as cigarette smoke in a closed room. Much like cigarette smoke, BO is often also unapologetic. It has no problem with its existence; you’re the one with the problem. Which is why I dread sitting in the aisle seat in trams because sooner or later it will get crowded enough and someone will reach for the strap hanging above my head and, in doing so, will expose their stinky underarms. Being short, standing doesn’t really provide any respite – it can, in fact make it worse if, as often happens, I’m about armpit-height to the (usually male, usually large) offender.

So I have devised a strategy.
It’s simple, really. Carry a can of antiperspirant deodorant and, when confronted with a foul armpit, spray liberally. If the recipient raises a fuss, you can always claim self-defense. Think about it. Rather than waiting it out by burying your nose into the recesses of your handbag or just hand or sleeve or anything else you may have with you that smells better than these atmosphere polluters, DO something about it. And since you can’t very well carry around soap and water to offer them a wash, this is the next best thing. It won’t keep the smell away so much as mask it, but hey, the goal is to make your own life easier, not give hygiene lessons.

Vigilante deodorizing. Give it a try today.