Shut The Folk Up

Most Formula One racers spend about four seconds in the pit stop. I’ve been here for a week.

Like a high-performance automobile, my body has been accelerating through my schoolwork all semester, dodging deadlines, careening between classes, whizzing past my competitors as they choke on the dust I leave behind in my wake. Midterms, homework assignments and practical exams disappear in my rearview mirror like so much unfortunate road kill. I spent most of the semester with my wheels barely touching the tarmac, oblivious to anything but the approaching finish line.

About a week ago, though, the engine started to falter.

I spent my first round of exams at around a thousand RPM (Revision-minutes Per Midterm), fuelling up on bottomless cups of tea and racing through the night. My body, ever the practical machine, knew I was too busy to get sick, and so took the liberty of rescheduling any impending sniffles or colds for sometime in mid-August 2014. Nevertheless, it was evident something didn’t feel quite right, but with Spring break approaching I knew I’d be fine if I kept pushing just a little bit longer.

I had interviews and coursework and more midterms, but I continued to ignore the warning lights that came flashing up, even as the ominous spluttering from under the hood grew ever louder. The little dents and scratches that usually managed to heal themselves began to accumulate, until I realized that my body was just too preoccupied to waste resources healing itself. Just a little further, I told it. Drag me past that chequered flag and we’ll be fine.

Eventually I was forced to see a doctor, whose advice I half-heard as I was flipping through textbooks in her examination room. Blood tests were taken just to be sure, but we all knew the oil was fine. All the engine really needed was a rest.

It came down to the final week. One last barrage of midterms and practicals, and I could put this disintegrating technology to rest. The balding tires, the unwashed grills, the rusting transmission, and at the very heart, a hiccuping engine held together by bubble-gum and the caffeine coursing through its valves.

And then, suddenly, I had finished.

I don’t remember much about packing my suitcase. I don’t remember my girlfriend driving me to the airport in the morning or checking in or taking my shoes off at security (was I even wearing shoes?). I don’t know if I had the aisle or was crammed into the window, or if I asked for extra peanuts.

I do, remember, however, seeing my mother try to sneak behind me at the carousel in an effort to surprise me, and then upon seeing my pale unwashed skin, wrap me up in a bear hug and half carry my luggage and me to the car outside. I do remember her plying me with sandwiches and drinks as my dad drove us home, and I do remember landing on the couch after walking through the door and waking up hours later with a blanket covertly wrapped around my body.

Through the course of my life, I have moved houses innumerable times across Asia, Europe and North America and after a few months at each new location my mum will ask me without fail, does it feel like home yet? And the answer is always yes, because wherever my mother is, be it Singapore, Southern California or Saturn’s rings, I will always feel like I’ve lived there my entire life.

And now, wrapped up each night in fat slabs of indulgent endless sleep, I can feel my body slowly putting itself together again. Each morning, I wake up with the sun streaming in my window, and for a split second I forget where I am. Then I catch the smell of scrambled eggs or porridge or lemon meringue pie wafting up from the kitchen downstairs, the door opens and my mum brings in a cup of tea and tells me what she has planned for the day, and there is no doubt in my mind about where I could possibly be. I am, of course, home.

So, I find myself now, firmly entrenched in a pit stop, changing my tires and cooling my pistons. I know that soon I will have to fly up north again, to return to the tarmac and the distant finish line, and in truth, I can’t wait to get back to burning rubber. But for the moment, you can keep your four seconds. I could easily stay here forever.

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In the spirit of home comforts, I turn back now to possibly my favorite folk artist of all time. Josh Ritter, as some of you may know, has always been very dear to my heart, and when I received the official Josh Ritter Fan Club newsletter recently and learned that he was releasing his new EP ‘Bringing Home the Darlings’, I knew I had no choice but to indulge.

While I’m a little sad to say that most of the songs did not quite stand out for me, one in particular has been constantly repeating itself on my iPod. ‘Why’ has just the right combination of beautiful harmonies and heart-rending lyricism to lodge itself inside your head for weeks. Ritter excels when he is at his most simple, with nothing but an acoustic guitar and his faux-country vocals. Presumably this EP will lead on to a full-fledged album, and I’ll be counting the days.

I think we all like to have a collection of stock stories that we can fall back on at interviews and cocktail parties. These are the old reliable anecdotes that serve as stopgaps between awkward pauses, or warm-ups to more important conversations. Perhaps it seems a little phony for me to say it, but in truth there is something comforting about turning a unpredictable encounter into a quasi-formulaic exchange you’ve had thousands of times before.

Considering that I’ve spent the majority of my life with somewhat of a minority background, it’s easy for me to steer an uneasy conversation into a more familiar arena. “You know you can’t chew gum in Singapore? I know that because I lived there for 8 years. Oh, what I haven’t mentioned that? Well…” There. Easy.

Many friends and acquaintances reading this may be familiar with some of my old favourites. Others may never have met me but may do one day in the future, and at the risk of giving away or spoiling any of the ammunition I might one day use to segue myself into our burgeoning friendship, I won’t spoil any surprises. There is one particular story, however, that has been so heavily used that it may soon need to be retired, and to give it a proper sending-off, allow me to employ it one final time.

When I was 11, my family and I moved to hot, tropical Singapore from temperate, waspy Connecticut. I’d spent most of my important growing-up years at a public elementary school and when I left in the winter of 2001, I didn’t bring any chewing gum or other contraband (except maybe about a million Pokemon cards) but I did manage to import a very strong, very nasal American accent.

There are videos of me when we were still in America alighting from a big yellow school bus, complaining about something my principle at my elementary school had said that afternoon. “Mr Rechi,” I complain to the camera, curling my vowels and tapdancing across consonants. “Mr Rechi didn’t tell the students to have a good weekend.” My siblings find endless joy in this clip. Not in the red, wire-framed glasses. Not in the vibrant bowl haircut, billowing in the wind. Rather, my brother and sisters laugh and laugh and do imitations and generally don’t let me forget, the very strong, very nasal American accent.

I wouldn’t strictly say I was bullied for the way I spoke when I arrived at my new international school in Singapore, not least because my ‘tormentors’ eventually became my best friends (in fact, the same best friends I Skype with now every week). Instead, it was perhaps a form of very influential teasing, that eventually convinced me things would have to change. Carefully, I studied the accents I heard around me. The cafeteria at my school was probably fairly similar to the one at the United Nations, with hundreds of different flavours of English bouncing around ever corner. Anyone who has ever spent time in an ‘expat’ community will know that the effect of all these translated mother tongues, these human filters transmitting Australian and Korean and British and Indian and Kiwi and German intonations and pronunciations, is an amalgamated, universal Overseas Accent.

To the layman ear, it sounds pretty British. But linguistic connoisseurs will detect rhotic consonants and stunted vowels, lazy “t’s” and curvy “er’s”. When I moved to England I was told I was Australian, when I travelled through Melbourne I was told I was South African. At the age of 11, teased for having a voice reminiscent of Spongebob Squarepants, none of this mattered as long as I didn’t sound American.

This is the part of the story where, depending on how much you seem to be enjoying our conversation, I would add that interestingly enough, my twin sister still has an American accent. As long as you didn’t laugh politely and search around the room for somebody more exciting to talk to, I would tell you how my twin, unpressured by spotty adolescents to drop her American pronunciations, talks now like she spent most of her life growing up with a Beverly Hills postcode. Her accent has remained, a relic of her New England childhood, so that when my mother introduces us to her friends at parties she has to quickly chime in to explain that we are in fact twins, though we don’t necessarily sound like we are.

This is usually a good point for me to start telling my story.

Keen readers will notice that for the past year or so, this blog has been written the same way it would have been spoken aloud: Englishly. My “favours” and “neighbours” are stuffed with redundant vowels, I avoid filling my “recognise”s with exciting z’s, I fly “aeroplanes” and put suitcases in the “boot”. However, once again, it seems, the time has come for me to change. Like my 11 year-old self did so many years ago, I am feeling the pressures to amalgamate, to homogenise, to blend in. Now, however, rather than coming from a troupe of boys in a humid South East Asian locker room, the pressure comes from within.

Everyday, I begin my lecture by putting the date in the top right-hand corner of the page. And everyday, a crisis strikes. Today is February 17th, I think to myself. What comes first? The month or the day? In my sociology classes back at university, we would learn about hybridised and multiple identities, British-Asians, for instance, who oscillate between cultural personas, British one minute, Asian the next. When I am deciding whether or not I should put write a 2 or 17 first, a little mini argument erupts in brain. But it always ends the same way.

I travelled 5,000 miles from family, friends and a first-class degree to start all over again in city where nobody, except maybe my sister, knows me. I remind myself of this, and then I then I pick up my pen and majestically write 2/17/12 at the top of my paper. Of course the problem with this particular method of cultural identification is that by the time my internal conflict has been resolved, the class is already three slides deep into the Powerpoint presentation.

Now don’t get me wrong. I haven’t sold my soul and my British heritage for a slice of the American dream. I’m far from becoming an anonymous member of the Greatest Nation on Earth, and in fact I still stick out like a sore thumb at parties. Despite my attempts to blend in, I still ask for the temperature in Celsius and am always momentarily stunned when people tell me they like my ‘pants’. It is more for consistency and convenience that I have decided to slowly Americanize (did you see that?) how I write and type. In the end I’ll never be happy unless I’m just a little bit strange.

And in case you were wondering, I won’t be losing the accent any time soon. It’s way too popular with the ladies.

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So it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and you know what? I’m not gonna apologise! That’s right. I’m not.

Well, okay. Maybe I will. A little.

Okay, okay, I’m really really really sorry. It’s just I’ve had midterms, and coursework, and medicine stuff, and… and to say sorry properly, I’ll provide you with something gorgeous today.

A couple years ago, Deer Tick’s John J. McCauley III, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Delta Spirit’s Matt Vasquez got together and informally formed Middle Brother. Their 2011 self-titled album took a fat chunk of all three members, resulting in a crunchy folky album that drifts along and does what it likes. The album is a whole mix of different stuff, but Million Dollar Bill stuck out for me for a number of reasons, not least because each member gets his own verse, before harmonising together in a swooning trio at each chorus. I think you’re going to like it too.

I’ve always thought it would be cool to write a book about all the different ways people do Christmas. Not a particularly profitable book, I suppose, because now that I think about it, it would probably be kind of boring, and the demographic would more or less basically just be me. Maybe just a magazine article then, or a Powerpoint presentation.

I’d still find it really interesting. I’m fascinated by the protocol of Christmas. Every family who celebrates the holiday has their own special way of doing it. Stockings on the bed or over the fireplace? Christmas Eve in with the family or out on the town? Presents all at once or spread throughout the day? For some, I understand, this protocol is relaxed and malleable. Your formula for the ideal family Christmas may be altered by varying circumstances, and family traditions may be subject to drastic change from year to year. This is not, however, the case for my family.

You see, we’re somewhat of a mobile bunch. In a few weeks’ time when we’ve all returned to our respective homes-away-from-home, my brother will be in Singapore, my sister will be in San Francisco, my twin will be in Scotland, my parents will stay in San Diego and I’ll be dodging bullets back up in Oakland. It’s always been this way, all of us spread out across the globe like a bunch of family diplomats each responsible for keeping up appearances in one corner of the Earth. Consequently, Christmas has become not just a time of celebration, but a time of reunion, when we get to eat homecooked food and wait with anticipation for each other to arrive from the airport. The location of that airport has changed many times over the years too. With each new move, we find a new place to call home, and a new quandary over which room in the new house we should put the Christmas tree in.

Among this swirling maelstrom of change, December 25th remains an island of unwavering consistency. Apart from the ever diminishing role that Santa Claus has taken as the years have passed, for the most part Christmas has remained more or less unchanged in the Burns family since around 1986.

Maintaining such ruthless regularity has not been difficult. You see, Papa Burns contributed a lot of German DNA to the family gene pool, and the clockwork precision and efficiency of our Teutonic heritage becomes apparent at this time of year. My sisters, who appear to have inherited the majority of this DNA, adopt the unofficial titles of Christmas Coordinators. Some years I forget portions of the Christmas protocol, but they are like the village elders, the keepers of ancient Burns family lore, always at hand with knowledge of old customs set by precedence of previous Christmases. Not sure which way the dessert spoons should face? Susie will tell you that since 1997 we have been facing them to the left, except between 2001 and 2003 when we broke tradition and used forks. Not sure if our mother will like the lavender hand soap you’re giving her? Consult with Holly and learn that over the years Mama Burns has received fourteen lavender-related items, and shown Medium to Medium-High recipient satisfaction for all of them. Should you have any doubts or queries, kindly direct them to the Christmas Coordinators (but please, if you wish to avoid any arguments you will be unable to win, keep all comments and suggestions to yourselves).

And so, keeping with the tradition of all past Christmases, this one was excellent. The food was overwhelming, the presents were fantastic and my family were as fun, gregarious and highly-efficient as ever. Now that my parents are happily settled in their current house (or at least, for now, their current state) and their children are gradually feeling the gravitational pull of America (Tom moves to New York in April), it seems like the restlessness of our past is finally starting to fade. I’m really looking forward to us maybe one day all being in the same country, to the day when we won’t have to worry so much about the effects that snowstorms or lost passports may have on us being reunited with each other every year. As much as I love the pomp and tradition of Christmas, I’m also kind of looking forward to the day when it won’t be such a big deal, when it’ll just be another day in December that I get to spend eating food and cracking jokes with my family.

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You know what I really really don’t get? Maybe I’m missing something here and one of you can correct me, but I just can’t understand why artists insist on covering Christmas songs. I’m still waiting for the day when a band covers Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas better than Sinatra or Fairytale of New York better than The Pogues. For me, each Christmas song is so wrapped up in the symbolism and meaning that hearing someone else cover it just sends me into uncontrollable convulsions of cringe.

However, there is one song in particular that kind of breaks this mould. Lisa Hannigan (she of Damien Rice duo fame) once released this amazing version of Silent Night, where she took the melody and some of the familiar lyrics of the song, but totally rewrote its meaning and delivery.

It’s a beautiful song, and is available for you to stream or download below. I really think that is the secret to a good cover; totally revolutionising the song, making it your own, but keeping enough of the original that people can still realise what an improvement you’ve made on the original.

Internet,

It’s been roughly 1,512½ hours since we last spoke. I’d like to say a lot of things have happened since then and now. I’d like to describe the exotic locales and hair-raising adventures that have kept me from you for so long, the tales of mystery, fun and excitement, the hilarious anecdotes and witticisms that I’ll be writing about for months to come. I’d like to sweep you off your feet with charming stories so that you soon forget the chasm that has developed between us, the unforgivable dereliction of my duty to provide you with a constant stream of beautiful folk day in and day out. I’d like to, but I can’t.

You see, unless you find stories about the hydrophobic interactions of non-soluble molecules particularly riveting, anything I tell you about the past two-and-a-half months probably isn’t going to have you on the edge of your seat. I found out pretty quickly on my eight-hour journey back from Oakland to San Diego with my Dad that the colligative properties of solutions do not make especially interesting road trip conversation topics. The same goes for quantum mechanics, DNA replication models and the intricacies of molecular photophosphorylation.

The problem is, suddenly these things have become incredibly interesting to me.

I spent so much of my life negotiating around the stickier, more troublesome elements of maths and science (kind of like how a triacylglycerol molecule would avoid the hydroxyl groups of water molecules, am I right?). I felt safe amongst grammar and vocabulary, secure within the pages of a novel and coddled by the familiarity of a language I needed to use every day. Maths stumped me. It wasn’t that I was bad at it (though I was also pretty bad at it). It just seemed so mean. There is nothing forgiving about mathematics. English would invite me over to its house with a nice broad question, ask me to elaborate, give me some wiggle room in response and a chance to express my own opinions, before sending me home in the afternoon with a good grade and some friendly constructive criticism. Maths and science would steal my lunch money and give me a wedgie. And a B-.

I began to change my opinion about science when I was introduced to biology. It wasn’t long before I was in love, describing the alimentary canal and mitotic cell cycle not only with the beauty of a writer, but the precision of a scientist. (Biology, you see, allows room for both.) After maths and chemistry were done holding my head in a toilet, biology would be waiting outside the bathroom with a towel and a hug. And so, I accidentally fell in love with science. It wasn’t enough to stop me from reverting back to the familiarity of the humanities when it came time for university, however, but through those long three years biology waited for me patiently, snubbed, but knowing that one day I would return.

And so when it came time to get my prerequisite subjects for medical school, I was a little nervous. Would biology still remember me? Would we still have fun together? Could we restore the As of the good old days? Even more importantly, how would chemistry and maths treat me now that I was all grown up?

It turns out I had nothing to fear. Biology and I are back in love. It’s as though we never left one another’s side. As for chemistry and maths, well let’s just say things have changed a little. We’re all a bit older now and those silly days of our adolescence have been mostly forgotten.

Of course, my writing has taken the biggest hit of all, now that, you know, I’m a scientist and everything. It’s been hard to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard midst all the formulas and equations I’ve had to learn, but now that I’m back home for Christmas I’ll be able to catch you up on the little bits and pieces that have occurred in between lectures. I suppose a couple cool things may have happened to me since last October, and I’m sure I can squeeze out a good story here and there. Whether or not you’ll need to start memorizing portions of the periodic table in order to read my blog, well, I can’t make any promises.

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While I stay busy searching for the perfect folk song based on the quadratic formula, I’ll have to make do with donations from elsewhere. Wonderful, beautiful Lacey emailed me out of the blue last month with a fantastic suggestion that has been keeping me very happy. Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan are The Milk Carton Kids, a couple of wise LA fellas with a penchant for making beautiful folky noise. Midst the cornucopia of nu-folk offerings and Mumford-imitators, I really respect a couple of guys who can cling on to their Americana roots, and still make something that sounds so original. While their lyrics can sometimes seem a little contrived, and sometimes even cringey, for the most part they echo something deep and meaningful, and have me hooked throughout.

everybody loves something new/ ’cause you can open it and plug it in/ and it feels like a good night’s sleep/ like the girl you like paid you a compliment/

Holly has three basic principles when it comes to finding music that she likes: anything with jangly guitars, vocal harmonies and a catchy melody will eventually wiggle its way into her heart and onto her iPod. I’m pretty sure The Milk Carton Kids, who tick all of Holly’s boxes will be there soon too.

Check out Queen Jane below, but also know that they have TWO FREE ALBUMS available on their website, should you, you know, want free music or something.

Things have gotten dark lately. I don’t mean in any sort of emotional or metaphorical sense. Literally, it’s been getting dark lately, as tends to happen during winter months, I suppose, you know, what with the tilt of the Earth and its journey around the sun and everything. Still, it came as quite a shock to me, having grown accustomed to such ceaseless unrelenting sunshine everyday, to open my window shades expecting a barrage of energising photons, and instead having to spend the rest of the morning trying to remember where I’d packed my umbrella.

At the age of 13 or 14 I suddenly became obsessed with the concept of consistency. I think it was something to do with never having had a single country to call my home, or living in a place like Singapore, where there was always just enough time to become somebody’s best friend before their dad’s boss made a casual decision during a Friday morning board meeting that sent the family spiralling off to a new life in China or Dubai or Hong Kong.

Change is definitely good. It’s what launches you outside of your comfort zone, forcing you to learn new skills for new situations and most importantly grinding you up against people whose customs you’re unaccustomed to. I would always advocate throwing all you’ve got at a single goal, turning your life so that it points in the opposite direction and soldiering through the curveballs and sliders of a new world where every person seems to drive on the wrong side of the road. This is, after all, exactly what I did when I set off to become a doctor in America with nothing but a degree in Politics & Sociology and a rough understanding of the Krebs cycle. (Doesn’t this make me sound like a Polish immigrant coming to New York in the 1890s? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…and those among you with first-class degrees from top British universities that have minimal scholastic value in America.)

I met a girl here a few days ago who has this whole academic thing completely nailed down. With straight As and a great shot at any medical school in the country, she is nearly ready to start that long, hard march to clinical residency. But she’s putting aside her applications for a year to travel. When I asked her where she wanted to go, she reeled off the names of most of the countries in Europe, and then added that she wouldn’t mind doing Africa, oh, and Asia too. She just wants to be anywhere but where she’s been for the last twenty years. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, or so claimed Oscar Wilde, and even the consistency so exquisitely crafted by my friend’s steady 4.0 GPA and her reliable circle of lifelong friends could do with a little disruption.

For all its merits, though, change can be a little trying sometimes. Spontaneity can get tiresome and unpredictability is not always welcome. There’s something mundanely beautiful about routine, something comforting in its familiarity, something beans-on-toast boring that you know is never going to let you down. And so, despite my claims of being a crazy maverick who moves five-thousand miles to complete anonymity, in truth I’m still surrounded by tiny islands of consistency that remind me of how mundane and unadventurous I really am. I call up Mama Burns for a chat nearly every day, or visit Holly and Sean and recant the same inside jokes we’ve had for the last decade. I go to the supermarket and buy butternut squash by the truckload, like I did without fail every week in Bristol, or jars of the same apple sauce I was eating back when I lived in Connecticut in 1995 (granted I was 6 then; the impressions I get from American friends now is that perhaps apple sauce is not something that twenty-two year olds are supposed to continue indulging in). For all the change we impose on ourselves and for all reports of clean slates and new leaves, there’s something comforting about doing the same old things, just in a brand new post code.

And so when I finally found my umbrella the other morning and ventured out into the grey wasteland outside my window, I didn’t get grumpy or mad about the change in weather. In fact, if anything, I felt a little homesick. The clouds in the sky and puddles on the street were just a little reminder of the last place I called home.

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Luckily for you, my taste in music is as bland and boring as it’s always been. An acoustic guitar and a clever lyric will catch my attention no matter what hemisphere I find myself in. I was catsitting again the other day, and in between textbooks, spent some time stumbling across the songs that passed me by while I wasn’t looking. One that slipped through the net way back in 2008 was something from Neil Halstead, who is, according to Wikipedia, “one of Britain’s most respected songwriters”. Though I haven’t had a chance to get to know his music super well yet, I’m happy for this title to stand while I listen to the excellent tune below again and again and again (and again and again and again).

Neil Halstead seems to get his words tangled up as he sings, and as a lifelong mumbler myself (I just got shivers at the thought of trying to articulate the phrase ‘lifelong mumbler myself’ out loud), there’s a nice familiarity there. He does, however, use the F-word perfectly.

I’m writing this alone, in a big empty house, on a dark cold night, in a city I don’t know. Every couple of minutes or so I hear a thump from behind the door I’ve closed in anticipation of creeping, knife-wielding burglars, and while, granted, the thumps could just be coming from one of the two noisy cats that I’m supposed to be looking after in my sister’s big empty house, on a dark cold night in San Francisco, they could just as likely be the footsteps of a murderer. I’m not taking any chances, so this means maintaining a constant loud one-way conversation in a dramatically masculine voice with the two cats, just so the knife-wielding burglars downstairs know that I have backup.

It’s nice to walk around this beautiful home and act like it won’t be another 15 years of student loan debt before I can actually afford one myself. Holly and Sean and their noisy cats are so close now, it’s almost unbelievable. While seeing them still means forty minutes of traversing a bridge, a freeway and the mountain range hills of San Francisco, it’s a helluva lot easier than the numerous time zones I had to traverse just to visit them in the past. Sometimes when I feel I’ve had enough of graduate life and its endless parade of periodic tables and hydrogen bonds, I pack up my little car and cross the bridge and the freeway and the hills, and ring a doorbell and suddenly my older sister is standing right there in front of me. For most of you, a sibling you can access without first buying a plane ticket may be the norm, but for me its a novelty I still haven’t quite become accustomed to. Holly and I sit in her kitchen and eat fruity salads and retell inside jokes we’ve been had since the mid-90s. Then I start work at the dining table, and she goes back to work in her office, but she keeps the door open so that we can crack each other up every fifteen minutes. It’s the kind of working environment that makes you forget you’re in a working environment.

When Sean comes home a few hours later, we eat together at the dining table, trying to carry on a conversation while fending off the noisy cats with our deftly placed thighs and elbows. By the end of the meal we’ve given in and the cats are licking our plates clean while we watch something trashy on TV. Then it starts getting late, and I get back in my little car and drive over the hills and the freeway and the bridge, where I catch glimpses in my rear-view mirror of the receding fog-blurred lights of San Francisco. Soon I am back on campus with my nose in a book, my stomach full of home-made spaghetti bolognese and my mind still anchored to that pretty little house in Sunset.

Moving to Northern California and starting a pre-med course here has been one of the Greatest Decisions of My Life. Coming from a sociology degree to a degree that requires me to learn the equation for determining the energy of a photo emitted during electron transfer* has its hiccups. I am by no means disparaging sociology; in fact if anything, I struggled more with the endless questioning and philosophising and theorising required to properly engage with the social sciences than I do now with the cold hard maths and logic of the natural sciences. My maladjustment is more to do with the fact that I’ve had to spend the last few weeks fumbling around for a lightswitch in that dark, cobweb-infested attic of my brain where fractions and quadratic formulas have been left untouched for the past decade. Turns out, though, that the bulb still works, and its actually getting brighter by the day.

The first week spent painstakingly converting the transmission of my brain was hellish. I was overwhelmed and undernourished, I was confused and tired and forcing myself to accustom not only to a new discipline, but a new college, a new city, a new country. I was up at 7 and in the library at 11, with an intervening day of lectures to attend and forms to fill and friends to make. Then suddenly, like these things tend to do, I woke up and everything had sorted itself out. All the knots became untangled, the square peg found the square hole and like the complementary wavelengths of two photons of light with equal constructive frequencies (that’s right), I found my own momentum propelling me forward. This is where I find myself now, careening through a frenetic world of concepts that mean nothing to me on Monday morning but by Wednesday afternoon have totally transformed the way I view the universe. It’s fast-paced, it’s tough and it’s scary, but I’m loving every second of it.

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Now step away for just a second from that part of my life that’s still moving at light-speed**, and head back with me to the rainbow-drenched streets of San Francisco. Sure, right now I may be surrounded by textbooks and unfinished homework, but there’s a purring cat on my lap and I’ll be in bed in a few minutes. In between dashing to lectures and somehow finding the time to clothe, bathe and feed myself, I’ve had brief moments of beautiful folk. Little songs have crept in here and there without me realising, so that I’ve suddenly got a fleshy list of tunes to show you over the next few weeks. Late at night in this dark house in the city, I stumbled upon something else that’s going to keep me up for a few minutes longer. My experience with Rachael Yamagata doesn’t go much further than a bit of Wikipedia research, and all I know of Ray Lamontagne is that his song ‘Lesson Learned’ accompanied me as overplayed soundtrack fodder through a teary breakup a few years ago. Pairing them together initially didn’t quite serve to excite me very much.

These quick judgements, though, suddenly faded when I actually listened to their heart-achingly complementary voices on the track below, titled, suitably enough, ‘Duet’. There’s just something about male/female covers that drives me crazy. You know I’m always looking for good folk, and if you like this Yamagata-Lamontagne partnership as much as I do, you’ll share your favourite duets (folk or otherwise) in the comments below. I’m in this house by myself for a few more days yet, and I need a little bit more noise to stifle those mysterious thumps coming from downstairs.

*E = (-RH/nf²) – (-RH/ni²)

** 3.00 x 10⁸ m/s

Ohmygoodness I’ve been so busy. Moving countries, losing passports, starting new schools. It’s all a little too much to take in. Happily, though, a lot of beautiful folk has somehow drifted into my iTunes, and I’ve got things I’d like to show you.

But since I’m supposed to be studying chemical bonds right now, I’ll have to make this brief. Since we last spoke I’ve bought a car, driven north, moved into a girls’ college and learned what an electron valence shell is.

It’s been a long week.

Until I get a nice grip on it, though, this live version of a beautiful, beautiful song by Mick Flannery that’s been notched up to #1 on my Morning Singing-in-the-Shower Top 100 Chart list (uh, sorry new housemates, guess the Chart wasn’t part of our lease when you signed it, huh?) will have to do. It’s called Safety Rope and if you don’t know it already, I think you’re gonna thank me for it.

‘Bye for now, don’t worry, we’ll chat soon!

Or download it here:

Safety Rope – Mick Flannery

You remember that time you lost your wallet and had to cancel all of your credit cards? Oh man, what a bother that was! What about when your car keys fell out of your pocket and you had to catch a ride to the dealership to replace them? How annoying! Oh, and then there was the time your passport was stolen on the other side of the world and the embassy wouldn’t send anyone to help you and you weren’t allowed to leave the airport without a passport and so you were trapped in the arrivals hall in a really really unfunny version of The Terminal?

No? Just me then.

I’d finished  a month of awesome traveling, starting with work experience in a hospital in Singapore and ending on my best friend’s farm an hour north of Brisbane. 8 hours after leaving Australia, I found myself in transit at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, at the unfriendly end of a 36 hour, three-part journey back to LAX. Upon landing in Malaysia at 6 am I prepared myself for my 8 hour layover, sank into a faux-leather armchair and spent the next 480 minutes on the lookout for departure lounge pickpockets, hungry for their jet-lagged prey.

You see, since becoming a quasi-grown up I’ve had a pretty decent track record for not losing things. The trick, I find, is to have absolutely no faith in yourself whatsoever, especially when carrying around  important items like passports or wallets full of cash or babies or whatever. When I’m airports, I constantly stop to check that my valuables haven’t fallen out of that invisible hole in my bag that may have mysteriously opened up in the intervening five minutes since I last checked for a hole that may have mysteriously opened up in my bag. When using free wifi, I wrap my legs around the straps of my rucksack to deter potential pickpockets (“Mmm, that gross dirty looking backpack must be full of diamonds…”) and I minimise risk by keeping all important documents in a single leather wallet whose location–uh, definitely not the front pocket of my bag–is known to no one but myself. It seems, however, that my weakness comes in bathrooms (I promise that wasn’t supposed to sound like an ad for incontinence medication).

I was about 7 and a half hours through my layover. As I walked towards my gate I removed the holy leather wallet from its sacred resting place in preparation for boarding. The next few minutes have replayed themselves so many times in my head that I’ve started to embellish them with facts that I think must be only semi-true (was there really a tiny Malaysian man with an eye patch and a missing tooth smiling at me as I walked in?). I don’t want to give away too many secrets about boys’ bathrooms to the ladies who read STFU, but the…ahem… ‘peeing section’ was all full, so I headed instead for the first stall. Oh, how I curse the architect who put a little shelf above the toilet so the passenger wouldn’t have to hold stuff while he urinated! Oh, how I hate the airline manager who dictated I should have 16 hours of idleness in which my brain could turn to irresponsible jelly! Oh, how angry I am at the airport staff who informed me that my gate was now open, hurrying me out of the bathroom and toward my waiting aircraft.

But most of all, oh, how utterly frustrated I am with myself that I turned and opened the stall door and left the bathroom and walked to the gate and sat in a spare seat, while my little leather wallet, with my passport, my green card, my boarding pass and the tiny bit of money I had been saving for months and months and months sat on that little shelf above the toilet.

Of course, five minutes later I had a Mysterious Bag Hole Check, and ran back screaming into the bathroom, and of course, it was gone, and of course, neither the cleaners nor the security nor the information desk had heard anything about it, and of course, the airline staff would not let me board without a passport, and of course, my luggage would be removed from the plane, and of course, sir, the police will have to be summoned if you do not calm down and stop flailing about in desperation. I’m only 21, I haven’t had much time yet to experience the more extreme emotions of life, but I think the moment I sat and watched the departure of the aeroplane I had waited 8 hours for to arrive, I got a basic understanding of despair, the feeling that there is nothing that can be done, that you are utterly bereft of any possible options, that were your life to somehow pick itself up and continue, the direction it heads in is entirely indeterminable. That’s a little dramatic. Perhaps it wasn’t full-blown adult despair, but certainly a taster, a kind of Diet version.

I went first to family, grabbing them on Gmail and begging for solutions. My parents are the most resourceful individuals I know, but at midnight, in a country 9,000 miles away, there is only so much that even they, the Captains of Knowledge, can do. I spent the next few hours pressing my desperate head on various help desk counters as reluctant staff joked in Malaysian around me and slowly passed me off down a gradually decreasing chain of authority. Eventually, by 5 pm I was sitting in an immigration office, listening to a catch-22 that in my jet-lag addled state, I couldn’t do anything but smile at. The UK embassy had told me earlier that day that it was strictly against policy to send staff to the airport to deliver emergency passports. The airport authorities, on the other hand, claimed that there was no possible way they would let me enter Malaysian soil without a passport, even if my destination happened to be the UK embassy. No one could think of a possible solution to this conundrum, and no one was willing to give. The boss lady sitting a few desks away certainly wasn’t. Instead, it was Papa Burns, a couple of continents away, who got on the phone to encourage the rusty wheels of bureaucracy. (It sounds like by encourage I mean ‘bribe’. Actually, I think it was more ‘speak rather sternly to’.) You’re never too old to defer to your dad.

To cut a long story short, I was given 7 days of special stay in Malaysia. I lived with an incredibly generous French family who had been our neighbours in Singapore, and in return for the room they let me sleep in and food they let me eat and money they let me borrow for the next few days, I babysat their kids a little bit. Not really a fair trade since their kids were so much fun, and the most consuming task I had while babysitting was thinking of the best way to balance all three of them on my shoulders in the swimming pool at the same time.

Through a combination of string-pulling, helpful embassy staff and, if I do say so myself, some pretty awesome shuttle-diplomacy skills on my part, I managed to replace passport, green card and aeroplane ticket in a measly four days, a task which I was originally told would take a couple weeks.

It was a pretty horrible experience in the end, and not the best way to cap off an awesome month of traveling. My 8 hour layover had become a 96 hour layover, and I still had 20 hours of flying on top of that before I finally arrived home. At LAX I was detained at immigration for an hour while they checked I was who I said I was, and it took me another hour to get through all the lines for customs. After all that, though, I finally emerged in the arrivals gate where my dad and my twin sister Susie were waiting. I saw them a split second before they noticed me. I could see the impatience and the anxiety and the nervousness and the worry splashed across their faces, the same exact look I’d had tattooed across my own for the last four days. They turned at the same time and saw me, and that look just vanished. Susie lifted a sign she’d made that said ‘FINALLY’. At that moment I knew everything was going to be alright.

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My entire folk collection has been depleted by a failed hard drive, and what with all this traveling and not being able to travel, I’ve been kept me away from doing any music research. Until I restore myself, you’ll just have to make do with some classic Jackson Browne. It’s the best way to keep reminding myself I’m back in California.

Today I woke up and had the best bowl of cereal I’ve had all year.

It wasn’t particularly high-quality cereal. The milk was pretty standard. The bowl was decidedly average and the spoon was nothing to write home about.

My chair was the same one I always sit on when I eat breakfast, the table, if anything, was even grimier than usual. Somebody had neglected their bin duties and there was a slight pong in the air.

All of this was irrelevant, however. Today was (and, technically, still is) my day off.

You know that feeling you get when you wake up and suddenly remember that it’s a Saturday, or a public holiday, and you can roll over and go right back to sleep? I experienced that three times this morning, as three different housemates each walked past my room three different times and shut the front door with three different slightly disgruntled, pointed slams.

My designated Day Off began as soon as I knew they had left. After the aforementioned Awesome Bowl Of Cereal, I had an Incredible Shower and read my Really Really Interesting Book. Then began the errands. For me, running errands is one of life’s purest joys. Filling a closet with fresh laundry, posting a letter that’s been sitting on your desk for days; there is no better feeling on Earth than the steady rhythm of box ticking on a To Do List that has been nagging you for weeks (I feel I get a lot more excited about completed To Do Lists than 21 year-old university students should probably get).

Now I’m back in the library, smiling at the exam crammers around me, preparing for the afternoon football in the park and the curry I’m sharing with a friend in the evening that will flesh out the rest of my day. I know that tomorrow morning will be another 6 am wake-up, a bowl of Genuinely Average Cereal and a Mildly Stimulating Shower, a day in the library studying the politics of Sub-Saharan Africa and an early night to prepare myself for starting it all over again in the morning. I also know, however, that in this ocean of diligence and drudgery and routine and perseverance, today I have built myself a little deserted island that I can sit on for a few hours, watching the rest of the world get caught up in knots and knowing it’ll be a while before I’ll have to start worrying about untangling them again. I don’t have many days left in this country, but I’m making sure the ones I still do have are as brilliant as I can make them.

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Here’s an artist I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. He played in Bristol a few weeks ago but exam guilt kept me at home. Hopefully sharing him with all of you will undo some of my shame at being such an armchair folkist lately.

It’s been a while since I’ve got my hands on quietish, falsetto, Bon Iver-like folk, but I think that’s exactly the kind of music you need on sunny Summer days like the ones the weather gods have been bestowing England with lately. I’m really keen to hear what you think. James Vincent McMorrow: do you love him or do you, upon reflection, mildly disapprove of his style of music (there’s no space for haters on STFU)?

This morning we were in a mob. At around 7.45 am, among a crowd of about a hundred people, we stood listening for a cue to start moving.  There were several false starts, moments when an individual at the front misheard the sign, and sent shockwaves of awareness that ricocheted through the rest of us. The crowd would contract, tensing up for a moment as if taking a breath. There would be a synchronised checking-of-watches, a universal recognition that we still had a few minutes to go, and then this giant organic entity would quietly relax. Conversation would restart until the next convulsion sent us all tensing up again.

We were waiting outside a building, and eventually a small door opened on the far right side. The moment which we had been standing in the cold with shower-damp hair and breakfast-less stomachs for had arrived. The crowd tensed up again but this time there was no relenting. We were caught up in the momentum of the mob, like invisible hands on a Ouija Board, nobody really pushing except everybody secretly pushing, semi-consciously willing the totem to shift. The rip tide dragged me toward the door, and as I got closer, the mass of bodies became more violent. People were swan-faced and tensely smiling, but beneath the surface their legs were kicking out for grip. A strategically placed shoulder blade here, an extended knee there: you did your best to politely screw over those around you, until finally, you reached the door. At the threshold came the final release, the champagne-cork pop that sent you sprawling into a foyer, half-smiling in concert with the co-conspirators around you, laughing inwardly at the others still engulfed in the maelstrom outside. You’d done it. You’d made it. Now you could find a desk and start revising.

That’s right. I WASN’T in line for tickets to a a super-awesome-trendy folk gig. I WASN’T queueing up to get on the last aeroplane out of volcano/blizzard-choked England. I was trying to get into the LIBRARY, and I’d been doing it every day for the last two weeks.

You probably think I go to a really nerdy university, where everybody is just so eager to learn that they stand outside in the cold every day at 8 am just so they can get hold of some juicy books on advanced trigonometry or neo-Marxian race-relations. The real truth, though, is that it’s exam season, and the Holy Place of Revision, the designated areas of worship where students come to pray that the Gods of Diligence might banish the Devils of Procrastination, happens to be the little wooden cubicles on the top floor of our main campus library. For the low, low price of a 6.30 am wakeup and half an hour of passive-aggressive shoving, you can slam down a backpack or jumper and reserve yourself a desk till midnight. At 11 am, the keen-eyed latecomers come to scavenge the scraps left behind by the early morning chaos, and they’ll pounce on any empty desk protected only by an ambiguous closed textbook. Vigilance is key; if you need an hour for lunch you must remember to leave an uncapped pen and a shuffle of half-finished notes to give the impression to envious passer-bys that you’ve only just popped off to the loo, that you’ll be back soon to reclaim your territory. Those among us who guard our desks in person, though, look up with sleep-deprived eyes and chuckle at the opportunistic scavengers. We know who the real hard workers are.

It is the library where I find myself now, condemned here not just because of the approaching exams but also due to a crashed hard drive that was conscientious enough to wait until I had finished my dissertation, but not enough to let me complete my exams too. I’ve given myself a guilt-racked hour to write a STFU post before I have to get back to revision. In the mean time, I have two textbooks on my desk to help me with my upcoming ‘Personal Life and Family’ sociology exam. One of them says ‘INTIMACY’ in big white letters on the cover, and I like to make sure it is especially conspicuous to anyone passing by.  ‘Oh, hello ladies. What was that? Yes, in fact I do know all about intimacy, I’ve even read a BOOK on it. What? You want my number? Oh sure, here it is…’

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With all this research on the delicate subject of intimacy, I’ve had little time to do any on local folk happenings. With the chance (don’t even want to think about it) that my carefully cultivated collection of folk (blocking it out of my head right now) might actually disappear (no!) with the rest of my melted hard drive (now actually sobbing a teensy bit), I’ve lost everything I wanted to show you. Nevertheless, like your great  aunt always says, why BUY it when you can MAKE it? Though by now you all know my opinions of the self-promoting douchebags who don’t follow the rules of folk etiquette, I want to show you a tune that I’ve left my fingerprints on. Papa Burns recently wrote a song on the guitar, that I then added lyrics to, and we both set about recording on a makeshift little set-up in my bedroom in California. He and I would meet there after long days in the garden, and in front of a growing dissertation, respectively, and collaborate our folky minds to make something that eventually become a song we are really proud of.

Papa Burns is quick to point out that he thought his voice was a little shaky in parts, that he may have been nervous doing his first ever recording, that there are parts he’d like to have another go on. To me, though, it’s faultless. The whole song perfectly encapsulates my relationship with my dad, a silent collaboration and recognition that we’re always on the same team, that we both know what we like, that we both had the same thing in mind from the onset. He wrote a vocal melody and guitar parts, all I had to do was fill in the blanks with some lyrics.

And so while it may be a bit douchebaggy for me to be putting my own music on a website about good folk, in the end it really isn’t my music at all. It’s the kind of music that everyone who loves their dads would make if they were lucky enough like me to be able to sit down and write songs with them, and I kind of wanted to share that with you.

I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it.

DOWNLOAD:
The Charlatan – Patrick and Luke (right-click here and select save as)