Music, in physical form

“Tracey’s voice is so lovely,” a friend writes. He’s hearing Amplified Heart for the first time, on vinyl. I’m celebrating the ability to share something with someone. I’m celebrating the ability to physically give things, in the way share used to be meant. In the modern world physical goods are equally a gift to the sender: the music nearly demanding a response, nearly demanding a listen.

Mentioned a half dozen times on this site already, the nineteen ninety four album remains in my top five records. First given to me in Kawaguchi in two thousand two, in the era of ripping minidiscs of friends’ CD’s, Everything But the Girl’s perfect album has soundtracked much of the intervening twenty years. It’s still something I reach for on waking with space and time, on Saturdays or public holidays.

Playing “Troubled Mind” this morning after the above text, it matched my own brain so well, befuddled from working till two am.

I remember that song from nights spent watching the Saikyo line pass from my Yonohonmachi balcony. It was the first train line I’d ever lived near enough to see out the window. My vision of a “goods train” was built on the sound of that line blended with the coal trains that ran up the shore of Cayuga to the power plant in my youth, on whose path we would flatten pennies.

Two weeks ago we played Joan Armatrading in our tiny Tokyo apartment, the central lyric ringing out through open screens.

“You called all the way from America, and said I’ll soon be home girl.”

The record, well loved, is a gift carried from that country to this, from one home to another. The joy of music in physical form demanding a spin, demanding entrance into the space we share. And the words, long a Saturday morning favorite in our Hong Kong homes, feel both familiar and brand new.

The soundtracks of our lives are intentional, self-created structures of repetition that anchor elements of the people we once were to our current selves. My dozens and dozens of plays of Jai Wolf’s remix of Kiiara’s “Feels” are tied so specifically to the weekend in Shanghai I first discovered it, to the metro out to Waigaoqiao for ultimate, to the type of long commutes made better with obsessions.

And yet our soundtracks are the product too of our friends, of their music overheard or shared. Our soundtracks are built in partnership during relationships, and as a response to them when they end. So often old songs long forgotten become the anchor for something new out of the coincidence of shuffle, the ease of access. Our vinyl collection in Tokyo is a strange reminder of the physical space those songs now occupy, the cardboard box that houses music that can not be listened to in Hong Kong.

Save that it can, and that our dalliance with such items is a way to anchor our listening, rather than necessary to enable it. We are working to build a new world, and that world has specific songs engraved into mornings and evenings, into the family moments and the late night ones. It’s a world of the Sound of Music, an old copy dug out of record bins near Ikebukuro, and a brand new copy of Blue purchased in Shibuya. The afternoons of sunlight on the balcony are built on copies of the Jezabel’s Brink and Star’s Set Yourself On Fire, and the evenings to Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Burials’ self-titled debut.

Like my friend hearing Disenchanted and 25th of December for the first time in Ann Arbor, our listening is supplemented by what friends have given, from Joan Armatrading to Nirvana and Daft Punk. As we play them all in rotation we remember the friends, their gift and their intention. Some times, building block towers with Clara to tunes I know well but did not bring to this space, I look up, realizing that “Landslide” will always have a new meaning, of tiny magnetile towers tumbling, and say a silent thank you to the visitors who brought us both.

In flight

From somewhere above the sea, between Hong Kong and Tokyo.

So much of what I write about recently is through the lense of a toddler. Our life in many ways remains, its outlines no different from the days before her arrival. We work constantly and travel often. We play frisbee wherever and whenever we are able. We climb, see friends, dine out, and are almost more social than our bodies can support.

And yet.

On this flight I am in awe of the toddler. Not yet three she is comfortable on planes in a way I only dreamed of. She knows the path to the airport, taxi to train, and how many stops. She is ready for the lines and then her spinny cart. She asks if we can go to the lounge and get food before the plane. Then she’s excited to find “her airplane”. She carries her own stuff, in her brand new unicorn backpack, and pulls out her hoodie when cold. Onboard she knows to wait till takeoff to watch, to wait till we are in the sky.

And now, crushing egg waffles onboard Hong Kong Express, watching Totoro in Japanese in her hoodie and sambas, she is a happy little crab, a person in her own world.

I’m so grateful to be here for it.

Smiles, a decade on

Looking at Elements from the Hong Kong / Macau ferry terminal in the afternoon

The beauty of living in Hong Kong strikes me on a Wednesday. As too often I am in a rush, trying to make it home before a call, trying to make it from one appointment to another despite having left myself no buffer. It’s too common an occurrence because I try always to say yes, always to do one more thing. Even when there is no physical way to do both, when attempting will add more stress to an already crowded life. I do it not because it’s possible, but because trying, while hard, makes me feel alive. Life is short. Our daughter is almost three. There’s never enough time, for any of us. And so I rush, and so I am scrambling out of the subway on the first hot Wednesday in 2025. There will be many more, and we will tire of them quickly.

Today, though, people are excited, and the outfits are good. Hong Kongers have great style, a huge diversity of styles, and today in Causeway Bay they are on glorious display. Within two blocks I see an older man in a flamboyant suit, two ladies in model-level outfits, and a passel of children wearing everything from Pokémon to 90’s rave wear. I see a man carrying a small dog and a women with a printed dog on her shirt. I see two old people with canes wacking the ground with ambition, hard sacks to scope out the sturdiness of the built environment. I appreciate his endurance. I appreciate the consideration for the weather, for the appearance in public, for the part of all these people that brought them out today.

Hong Kong makes me happy. Often, in the current job, I step off of zoom and outside without thinking, my brain still wrapped up in whatever I was working on a moment prior. I leave my apartment for food, for an errand, part of a city but also alone in it, removed from it by remote work. Within a block, or two, I am happy to live here, happy to be among so many humans. Living in a truly dense environment, in the kind of built density that is so rare even in humanity’s busiest cities, is a gift. I encounter so many people, and they pull my mind away from zoom, from the internet, from the annoying burdens of modern life.

I am finally realizing that people need different things. Some people thrive on long quiet walks across the rolling hills, or through forests. Some thrive on the mountains, or the beach. And some, like me, are best when presented with so many external stimuli that the internal whirlwind of the mind takes a back seat to “wow that’s a big dog” or “watch out for that hand cart”.

And so a wish, on this first warm Wednesday in twenty twenty five: may more of us get what we need from the place we choose to live.

The gift of mornings

It’s been years since I appreciated the strongest drug humanity has yet discovered: rapid motion over great distance. My body, newly returned from America, has been moved so abruptly as to have lost all sense of itself, it’s location. And so I make coffee at five thirty am and sneak outside through the kitchen door that creaks to stretch on the balcony, and then write. The light is not yet bright enough to see by. Instead I rely on my sense of my body running through familiar routines. The long years working to write in straight lines are valuable when neither my eyes nor my hands are fully present. Jet lag has always been a glorious event.

I treasure these moments more on returning home than on departing. On the road, everything is new and the lack of sleep will cost me more in the afternoon, when others are awake, than it will grant me in the early hours. For years I have been the type of traveler that calibrates on airplanes, sleeping in accordance with where I am going, rather than with where I have been. I eat nothing, drink water, and sleep only lightly on the twelve hour overnight flight to San Francisco. The goal is to adapt, to be functional, and to focus on what I am there to do.

On the way home I do likewise, sleeping 12 hours straight to ensure my early morning arrival is in line with my body. And yet, in both directions, there’s a night of waking at five am, my body utterly lost in a swirl of dreams that have no anchor in the day’s activities. In San Francisco I lie still until sleep reclaims me an hour later. At home, though, I treasure the feeling, the quiet moments of my own routine I never see. Before the family wakes, when even the cat is content to check on me and return to his bed.

It’s been years of this life, from one side of the Pacific to the other. A search of this site reveals dozens of posts written with my soul halfway across the ocean behind me. I’m grateful for every chance to move so fast, and for every morning like this one, awake before I ought to be.

A gift of space

Looking towards the sun setting over Toshima, Tokyo

In Otsuka young people linger outside on a Sunday night even in the winter. It’s been a warm day, though the morning will be sharply colder. Monday will come with the feel of winter not out of place this first weekend in March. And yet in this joy at the sun, in the crowded outdoor space by the station and the group of people sitting laughing along the tram line I feel another joy as well. It’s one that I miss, that makes me feel both young and old: it is the joy of the student or the hourly wage worker. It is the joy of those with no children, and no place they should be. In the light breeze of evening then they gather, celebrating the day ending, the weekend that has been. As a victory lap on time, it’s a good moment.

I watch them from my seat on a bench near the station, grateful for my partner putting the baby to sleep. I am thankful too for the brief respite from work’s mental assault that the coming Monday off has granted me. I am grateful for this space to think, and to write. Although I can no longer feel the freedom of those without salaried jobs or children, I can enjoy the presence of those who do, and relax in their joy. We all grow older, I think, and find our own ways back to peace.

So much of Tokyo is this now. It’s our peace. It is our spaceship, as Tara said today. Our way to escape whatever we are running from. May it ever feel so.

For we need youth in our lives, need to feel the sense of having no other requirements that grows harder to remember each year. We need somehow to remember what we were once, and can again be. To remember who it was we fell in love with, and in turn who they did.