Ifthis thread has taught me anything, it’s that some of you folks are at least as strange as I am. So… here’s the poll:
Am I the only person here who enjoys playing music and dancing to it while cleaning? Loud music, an empty house, a broom or mop(oh hell, even washing the counters)…it’s time to dance! Or maybe it’s just me. If you do dance while cleaning, do you have to be alone? I rarely do this when there’s an audience
Also, what do you dance to, if you’re so inclined? Econoline Crush’s “Brand New History” is the most “danceable” thing I’ve been playing recently, but Nickleback and Placebo are good too.
Either Minor Threat’s Compleat Discography or Frank Black and the Catholics’ Dog in the Sand is what I clean to.
For housecleaning, I like something extemely high-energy, high-anger, with a side of extra thrash to it. Otherwise I’ll get all distracted when I find that New Yorker I never got around to reading (the one with the Adam Gopnik piece on Willie Nelson that looked really interesting) at the bottom of the pile of crossword puzzles, flyers for local restaurants, bills I should have paid two years ago, beer cans, remote controls (why do I have so many remote controls?), packets of photos, unanswered important correspondence, slips of paper with addresses on them, receipts from visits to the veterinarian (I hate my vet, but the mutt loves her), J. P. Donleavy novels I’ve read seven times, unidentifiable electronic things that have lots of wires that snake through the entire mess, equally unidentifiable electronic adapters which presumably adapt one unidentifiable electronic thing to another unidentifiable electronic thing, old pens that may or may not write anymore, slips of paper with strange quotes I don’t remember writing down (I got my sig from one of those), shopping lists that say things like “batteries soap Bob Log III,” phone numbers and business cards from people I don’t know from Adam (har har), and sample packets of things like ketchup and hair conditioner.
This thread was about cleaning the coffee table, right?
For some reason, I use cleaning time as an opportunity to pull out the music I listened to as a pre-teen. Usually The Romantics or Men Without Hats. I like cheery music to counterbalance the drudgery of housework I’m guessing. Early Beatles works great, too.
Abba sounds like fun whiterabbit, my Mom used to jam to Jesus Christ Superstar and Alleluia! when I was still living at home. Sharing war stories about our parents’ cleaning music, who’da thunk it?
I like The Offspring or Foo Fighters when I clean. For some reason they just get me moving. I dance and sing along, and my family generally thinks I’m crazy.
When I’m doing dusting or some other kind of cleaning that involves a lot of moving about, I put in a cd of swing music, but I usually set it to only play “Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)” as performed by Benny Goodman and his orchestra, on constant repeat. For washing the dishes I like to put in something with a lot of banjo.
I need musical tunes for those extra flourishes of the mop/broom. Usually I’ll go with Les Misérables, mostly concentrating on the revolutionary songs while I do battle with dust.
I don’t dance, per se, but if I’m going to get anything accomplished while cleaning (rather than wandering around aimlessly and maybe shuffling a bunch of papers into different piles and making the bed), I need energetic, possibly angry music (Rammstein, System of a Down, some Nine Inch Nails, and a whole crapload of other stuff), and it has to be LOUD.
This is why I rarely clean. I’m rarely home by myself at a time when I can blast music without my neighbours calling the cops.
See the film East Is East in which they clean up while dancing (mops and buckets part of the choreography) to the tune of Inhi Logom Ne sung by Lata Mangeshkar.
