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When I went to visit my aunt, I’d have to eat Fish Cakes in order to earn dessert. I hated fish and fish cakes in particular made me want to kill myself but sometimes I’d force down a few bites in order to get a Screwball ice-cream. The reason why my Aunt was probably so bent on giving me fish cakes was because her husband built a frozen food empire up from the ground and amongst the masses of frozen foods, he sold fish cakes, and often some of the surplus landed in my Aunts freezer. This is Rachel and I at my Uncle’s factory dressing up in Factory Worker attire.

I went to school so that Factory Worker attire would remain under the Dressing Up category of clothing and not Regular Work Uniform. No offence intended to Factory Workers, you do good hard work and I love you everytime I open a triple pack of Magnum Classic ice-creams. I just couldn’t hack it. I also don’t fit the hats.

We’re moving back to America on Wednesday. I was rooting through some childhood stuff at my parents house to see if there was anything more noteworthy than my high school uniform tie to abscond with when I found this.

The assignment was stupid enough (write a poem about an emotion using all five senses) but I didn’t do myself any favours by trying so hard to rhyme that the content sucked.

Andy here again.

Julian Andrew Martin
2 May 2010, 5:05am
8 lb 7 oz

When Rachel and I were kids, we’d put kernels of corn over our incisors and pretend to be hill-billy prospectors. I have no idea why we associated gold teeth with American prospectors when we had so prime a selection of British golden-grilled gangsters to imitate. I think at the time we were both consuming nutritionally useless cereal bits that were shaped like gold nuggets and were sold to us by a cartoon prospector.

I met Kara and Michelle in college where we jokingly formed the semi-asian society, since Michelle’s Malaysian (with white skin, green eyes, and freckles), Kara’s Indian/Irish, and I’m a halvsie. Nicky was an honorary member since her ethnicity (entirely caucasian) technically included the word “asian”.

I hadn’t seen Kara and Michelle since we were all eighteen up until a few weekends ago. Even though we hadn’t really spoken a lot in the past five years, when we realised we were all living around London, we fancied getting together for dinner or something.

A lot changes in between the ages of 18-24. I don’t wear boy jeans and I now eat green vegetables, if that’s anything to gauge change by. Its impossible to recount all the minute character-changing details life chucks at you and so sometimes, when you’ve not witnessed the gradual changes in people, it can be hard to refresh time-lapsed friendships. Sometimes friendships arise from situation, or convenience, and are naturally set to expire when circumstances change. Some friendships seem at first to be circumstantial, but then prove to be more durable then you would have imagined.

The chasm a five-year time lapse can leave between good friends is sometimes unbridgable. Maybe one friend has outprogressed another, or one has progressed in a different track to what they were on five years ago. Either way, a good friendship can’t be perpetuated on memories and if friends grow apart, the friendship changes depth, just runs its course or something.

A lot has changed for myself, Kara, and Michelle in the past five years. I’ve been in the US, I’m married, pregnant, and partway through a masters. Kara is a graphic designer, living with her like-minded boyfriend in central London. Michelle is working for funding on her PhD and even though she’s still living with the same boyfriend, he’s a broadcast engineer now. You have to wonder if all these changes, that happened in each others absence, would render a friendship stale.

It tickled me that Kara, Michelle and I all got on so well after not seeing each other for half a decade. I would never say “it was like we’d never been apart” – far too much has happened to each of us to claim that, but somehow our twenty-four year old selves got on just as well as our seventeen year old selves did. It was as if we were all exactly five years along the parallel tracks we’d been on in college. We had all seen the same films, appraised the same records, read the same books, and that’s just the superficial junk. Our time hanging out was hilarious, stimulating, and satisfying.

There’s something to be said for friends like that. I don’t have many friends, so it was a surprise to find I still had a good friendship with girls I hadn’t seen since being a teenager. It was also so refreshing to be with smart, ambitious girls, who were up for a laugh, yet had all the right priorities, and the valuable sense of not feeling the need to prove themselves to anyone.

You don’t come across people like that too often.

I’d always liked These Days as sung by Nico. In fact, I’ve always liked anything Nico’s laid her vocals over, but These Days adopted a new sense of likeability for me after I first met Andy.

The night I met Andy, I had dragged myself out of relative hermitness (a schedule of working at the library, studying, volunteering at the mental hospital and probably lying face down on my bed with earphones on – a seasonal phenomenon that occurs when your roommate is your only friend, and she practically works nights so you rarely see her) to hang out with Milk and Davey. I often went through phases of hating to be around people, constantly being around people, then wanting to be left alone again. I guess I wasn’t ever really a true hermit, as I had a small circle triangle of friends who I guess I won’t name since they probably don’t want their social statii (statuses? what?) decreased by the admission they were indeed befriending a hermit for most of 2005-2007. It’s not that I didn’t have social skills; sometimes I just begrudged having to use them and thought it more appropriate that during times I fancied communicating like a neanderthal, I should just keep to myself.

Anyway, I was out in daylight to meet Milk and Davey for some food. After we had dinner, we returned to the porch of their rented residence to consume our personal pots of Ben & Jerry’s (which were on sale at Smiths).

At the time, Milk and Davey were living with Christopher Johnson, Patrick Harding, and Andy Martin in a house on 800N. I’d heard of Andy from various sources, none of which I’d bothered with since I didn’t know Andy. To avoid contention, I’ll just generally note that some of the things I’d heard put Andy in the “potentially unfriendly” category of person and one of the more favourable opinions was from an arguably biased source. To be honest, I didn’t give the topic second thought because I didn’t really care either way. So far as I knew, “Andy Martin” was a name floating on the Provo breeze. And probably down the Provo river with a gaggle of dumb Provo fake-vegan girls who like to sit around and define themselves according to which Devendra Banhart track their aura best related with. Then, in the same way that once you learn a new word you start hearing it everywhere, after I heard Andy existed, I suddenly heard of a trillion Provo girls who had Provo crushes on him. Anyway, who knew/cared. I for one did not. In fact I was resurfacing from a weird relationship I had suddenly started hating earlier that year, was tangled over an old romance, and was certainly more interested in downing ice-cream than meeting new people.

I think I was about half of the way through the pot of Ben & Jerry’s I was downing on Milk and Davey’s porch when Andy appeared out of the evening dark. He removed his earphones (which were notably and pleasingly not blinding white (alright, so I judged off first appearances, bite me. And no there’s nothing wrong with having iPods, it’s just that… nevermind. That was a pretentious thing to say)), waved a general Hello in our direction and scooted inside the house.

I’ll be honest: I’m not going to be scrupulously honest about what actually crossed my mind upon first seeing Andy.

Andy reappeared a minute later, sitting on the doorstep to shove his feet into green Duffs which bore the scuffs of many a pavement. Apparently he was waiting for Davis to go and skate. The Duffs made sense. Davey had been telling me that Andy had guitar skills (which I’d heard from Crystal), so Davey asked if Andy would demonstrate said skills. I hate playing my violin on demand because classical music isn’t super accessible and that’s all I could play, if mentally unprepared I play terribly, and because it’s plain awkward for me: I’m not a performer. Andy obviously wasn’t struck with the same stagefright, easily agreed and reappeared a second later with a guitar.

Trying to mentally recollect what I’d heard about Andy, I assumed he was going to play some horribly croony version of a New Order song. I braced for the indie-worst and was surprised when he started to play These Days, a song I hadn’t heard live on the guitar because frankly, it takes finger-picking abilities to play, and he could sing (added bonus: he wasn’t trying to sound like Ian Curtis). Davis appeared, Andy returned his guitar to someplace in the house, politely introduced me to Davis (who I’d already met at least 3 times, but was somehow talking to me like he’d never met me) and they took off on their skateboards. I was a bit shocked, and a bit smitten. By Andy that is, not Davis.

You’re probably all bored to death by now of my reminiscing (if you even made it this far), so I’ll wrap this monster-post up.

Andy posted a video of Nico’s These Days on his blog a few days ago and that’s what made me think of all this. There was absolutely no reason why Andy chose to play These Days the night we met; he had no interest in impressing me (in fact he barely spoke a word to me that night) and so far as he goes, it was just a good song to play on a porch. The song had little importance or significance at the time, but from where we are now, it signifies the start of all things good for me. So I like it even more than I did before I met Andy.

I especially like the video because I haven’t seen Andy in almost nine weeks and I think he’s rather easy on the eyes, he plays it well, and I got to see Moses make a cameo appearance in the background (he’s getting fat!). You should have a peep.

In case you don’t know what happened the day after we first met, we got together the day after (my move) to see if we could do Bob Dylan’s Oh, Sister (Andy’s idea) and were practically dating from then on. Apparently Davey called us getting hitched that same night. I probably owe him some money on that or something.

I hope you have, or will have, an equally solid How We Met story.

I think that like most people, a lot of my memories are activated by songs and smells. I heard that some people don’t remember things visually, but in terms of words or items. For me, when I remember something (whether it’s where I put my keys or what my seventh birthday was like) I recall and visualise an actual scene. I don’t think I’d like it any other way.

Most of the time, the memories that pop into my mind when I hear a song or smell something are meaningless. Like when I smelled treacle toffee this morning, and was transported back to picking my sister up from her school one Hallowe’en, where Miss Mayer, the Head of Halitosis, was there with a witches hat on dishing out sweets. Or the time a few days ago I thought I smelled a brief wisp of American Garage and was struck by a sincere longing for the 4th of July, kids toting Radio Flyers, and cherry “popsicles” conspicuously stolen from a friend’s garage freezer. Or how about when I accidentally ended up listening to Darude’s Sandstorm on the bus the other day, I was instantly transported back to a Lunchtime Disco my high school had when I was fourteen. The song always reminds me of how funny everyone looked when the song’s persistent beat gave way to its beat-less bridge, rendering everyone’s spastic MTV dance moves completely baseless. I remember looking over at Nicky during the bridge and realising that she had surrendered to the embarrassment of the beat-lessness, embraced it, and was performing some sort of interpretive dance by the time the song kicked back into gear.
Classic.

But like I said, semi-meaningless.

I do have a lot of meaningful memories interspersed with the random ones. Some of my favourite memories I can recall at will, without any sort of trigger. One of them is the time that Andy and I were competing to outdo each others running-start somersaults onto our bed. Although, come to think of it, I generally edit that memory to make it a bit shorter as our competition ended when I almost smashed my face into the corner of a table. It’s all fun and games ’til someone loses and eye and all that. Alright so maybe that’s not one of my better memories, but I do have a selection of quality memories I keep close to my conscious.

I’ve been having a lot of cheerless days lately. I reprimand myself often enough that I’m just not counting my blessings, but recently that trick hasn’t been working. It doesn’t decrease the number of miles Andy would have to cross to give me a hug, or the fact I come home to an empty, glorified shoebox every night. On days like these I mentally flip through my prized selection of memories to cheer myself up. Some have songs attached, some don’t. Some favourite memories have some of my favourite songs connected to them, but I’ve forgotten whether those songs were my favourite before I had a good memory to go with them, or whether the song just became a favourite because I had something good to remember it by.

I’m writing all this as a prelude to something I might post tomorrow, if I feel inclined to bare my soul. Sortof. “Bare it” in a modest one-piece and sarong sort of way.

Last night I went to Pizza Hut with my dad. My dad doesn’t really do the ‘going out to eat’ thing. He’s more of the “this leftover spaghetti sauce will go with this leftover rice because they are both leftovers” kind of person, if such a genre of person existed previously. Surprisingly, after I voiced the desire for greasy pizza, he decided we would go to Pizza Hut. He was excited because when the large Hawaiian arrived it was in fact large, even by American standards. Trying to find the silver lining in Andy being so far away, I took the opportunity to order a pizza with pineapple bits scattered over it’s ENTIRE surface. Andy is of the school that Pineapple on Pizza is Fundamentally Wrong, whereas my dad would have eaten the pizza even if I’d grated a beetroot over it, never mind pineapple. So. Hawaiian.

The dinner conversation was based on three things, and I will share my dad’s advice with the internet:

1) “Be charitable, but don’t go crazy”.
When my dad was a kid, his mum and neighbors used to put out tables laden with oranges, bars of soap and the likes for the monks. On the Saturday when a Full Moon was out, Monks would file past the tables and take one of each item as supplies and collect them in a bowl to take back to the monestary. My dad remembered that the more merchandising monks would have a caddy carrying additional bags so the monk would swipe more SWAG. So. Be charitable.

2) “Put your hands in lots of honey pots”
My dad is an excellent diagnostician and consultant. He’s not ‘just’ a doctor though; he fancies himself as an aspiring property mogul, business/law/pharmacy student and __________ (insert anything). He believes that outside of your “job” job you need to have other jobs, so that you are always busy and have tons of things to get involved with. He is encouraging me, in my “youth”, to build a portfolio and aim to become an enterprising professional of some sort. So. Confucius say: Put hands in many honey pots.

3) Love America
My dad asked me today why I didn’t want an American Accent.
I said that it didn’t really have much to do with not wanting one. I just hadn’t adopted one. Probably because I learned to speak English, not American, and eighteen years of speaking one way doesn’t really change just because you cross an ocean. My dad expressed that I might do a better job of integrating into the states with an American accent. I wasn’t really sure how to respond, but I imagined that all the people who nagged me for months to “Say Something In American” would have been gleeful at hearing my dad say that. I could only ever recite the first half of the Young Women’s Theme or say something about Cheeseburgers in American. Good party trick? Anyway. My dad loves America. When he left Burma and came to England the final plan was to end up in the states. His sister made it (she’s in San Francisco) and his brother almost made it (Toronto!) and he wants to move. He likes that American food is cheaper and fully believes that anything is possible in America. GO USA.

I forget that my dad’s first language isn’t English when I’m not around him or in contact. It’s not until I hear him mispronouncing words (I just re-noticed recently he says “FLIM” instead of “FILM”) or using incorrect grammar (he has issues with plural vs. singular) that I remember entirely. He’s adding more and more Western phrases to his vernacular though. He picked up the word “Right” when I was about fourteen, and from then on has been ending sentences with “Right?” to make sure you understood what he just said. He’s also taken to using textspeak on gchat, so he often asks “HOW R U?” and makes up his own abbreviations for states (Pennsylvania = PN). It’s funny to sortof compare notes with my cousins on my dads side on the diminishing Fob nature of our parent(s).

I recently found these two websites (My Mom is a Fob and My Dad is a Fob which amused me to no end. It surprised me when some of the comments on the site were people being angry that others made fun of immigrants broken English. I hadn’t even thought about it that way. The broken English is endearing. At least when you’re not trying to communicate with your parent about something important.

Here’s Greenways. It’s where I did a lot of my growing up:

You can see the Preston Temple from my old bedroom window. And Rachel’s. The Temple wasn’t there when we moved in. There was just a big fat empty field with much adventure potential. When the Temple was built we stopped having church in an old textile factory and moved into a fancy new building.

When my dad was growing up he lived next door to a large family. Like all Burmese families with a grain of money behind them, the family next door wanted to send their children to the West for school and jobs. These families expected their children to really apply themselves to their education, which I suppose goes hand-in-hand with wanting them to be able to escape to the UK/USA. My dad and his siblings studied hard and were smart, which this made the family next door feel rather competitive. My dad said that sometimes the kids next door could be seen spying on them with binoculars, and if they saw my dad or his siblings studying, they’d rush to study too. Seems like a really ineffective way to get ahead, but I thought it was a funny story nonetheless.