A spattering of things.
For anyone who's interested,
Hawaii, from the paper journal.
The first thing that comes to mind that I want to remember about Hawaii are the words: the delicate, beautiful vowel-heavy language that I can't pronounce, all the i's and a's and o's mixed in with an abundance of k's and l's and n's. The first street I want to remember, that I have kept in my head without losing for a few hours, is Ala Wai, along the Ala Wai Canal which separates Honolulu from Waikiki on the island of Oahu. Ala Wai: No hard syllables at all, just flows out. The second thing I want to remember is the color of the water - not from far away, but up close, when you really get in and look at it. Like it's out of a Crayola set, but one that's been used by a toddler: strangely, smoothly bright. The true meaning of aquamarine: aqua, Latin for water, of the sea.
And overall - the thing I don't just want to remember, that I need to see more of - the wildlife. The trees, the plants with outrageously colored and shaped flowers, even the birds which are the equivalent of pigeons here seem fascinating to me - their tails are longer, their necks are stripped with thin bands of black and white, even though they come too close to you pecking for food, just like all the sad birds in Boston. Honolulu is nice and all, but the waves at Waikiki are full of cigarette butts and dirty bandaids, and the scenery in front of all the craggy dark mountains (unlike any I've seen before) is a conglomerate of more skyscrapers than you would expect, most of them expensive hotels and million-dollar condominiums. And all it does is make me wonder what this place was like before all of this; makes me realize how out of our leage we really were to take it all over from the Queen. And how many islands are out there in the world that are still the way this was? This trip completes a big step in my mission to visit all 50 states but the truth is it makes me feel more far away from America, and much closer somehow to the rest of the world.
-
Yesterday, Alan Hankin was in my mind and my heart. Specifically, the first day of our Marine Biology class, when he asked us how much experience we personally had with the subject. Could we swim. Had we been to the ocean, and where. Then the questions were elevated: had we ever snorkeled, went scuba diving, what kind of animals had we seen? I couldn't say anything, but now I could, since we went snorkeling in Hanauma Bay, a half hour outside of Waikiki. And mostly Hankin was in my mind because of how he reacted to everyone's answers to his questions. He would burst in with his own experiences, so excited! So purely enthralled any time he had such an opportunity, so genuinely happy for us any time we had experienced the same. His eyes showed that in his mind, once you got up close and personal with this kind of stuff, these kinds of ecosystems and this kind of wildlife, there was simply no question about why he would want to devote so much of his life to learning as much as he could about it. A natural love affair. I feel like I'm over-romanticizing this, but all I wanted to say was that yesterday I actually got it. Once I actually got used to the clumsy flippers on my feet, the mask covering half of my face in thick plastic, somehow finding every little hair to pinch, once I got down the right breathing, and when I wasn't trying to get caught up with everyone else in the group, or getting splashed in the face by them, and I could take a minute to just float. To look down through the glassy clear blue water and catch a calm glimpse of a sea turtle, of a school of fish, of all the different kinds whose names I'm not even close to knowing (although Hankin would), darting in and out of endless pockmarked stoney coral - all working together in a rapid puzzle that somehow works. And for at least an hour I thought of nothing else except for how freaking cool it all was. And so if he was still alive today, maybe I would try to tell him somehow, maybe send him a quick email, just to say, I know. Thank you. You're right.
-
The quintessential (commercialized) Hawaiian activity: the luau! We went on Maui. The food was good, I had a Mai Tai and a glass of white wine and got to feeling kind of light, relaxed. I wore my red dress and red necklace I bought at the marketplace on Oahu. 'Drums of the Pacific,' a majesticly titled luau, or perhaps only majestic sounding to me because I respect drums so much, because anything heavily involving drums usually turns out to be so entertaining. All the members of the luau show were ridiculously good looking, tan and toned; the way the women shook their hips made me jealous, knowing that I couldn't duplicate something as sexy and smooth if I tried. There was a fire guy, who juggled and twirled sticks lit bright orange at both tips. And the whole thing was narrated by one floral-print-shirt clad man, and it was near the end of the show that he tried to bring in the audience by asking who were there on their honeymoons. A spattering of people stood up, including both of the couples at our table. Anniversaries? Another spattering of people. Just a big holler to anyone in love! And he introduced a Hawaiian love song which is apparently famous but sounded somewhat mediocre. And I remembered, stupidly and suddenly, that this is why most people come here, not on family vacations. I had been so focused on my own experience that I had forgotten all the touristy love that was bouncing all around me, and love is something that my family doesn't really talk about, that we're left to discover ourselves. And as we sat there quietly during the song, my eyes rested for a minute on my mom. She had been in Hawaii once before: On her honeymoon with my dad. What was she thinking in that moment? Maybe I am just overly sentimental about memory; I know it has been years not only since her honeymoon, but also since her and my dad's divorce. But I thought from the start anyway that it was a brave decision, her choosing Hawaii for this vacation. As we drive around these places, this scenery that she experienced thirty years ago, what memories are stubbornly making their way into her head? Is she totally over it, fine, able to block them out? Or is she keeping thoughts deep inside her about her life, a life that I don't know, in a hidden space that I will never be able to see?
-
And so now it is time to cram in all the things I haven't had time to say, as we sit on our United flight from Lihue to San Francisco.
I fell in love with Maui on our initial drive in our massive rented Chrysler from the airport to our hotel, and this initial drive is still my favorite thing I remember from the island, although we probably saw more impressive things. First there were the mountains, unlike any of the mountains that come to mind when I think of the word - the craggy, bare boned Rockies and Sierra Nevadas. These in Maui roll and slope in big green mounds, covered in so much vegetation that from a distance they look soft, fuzzy, like it'd be fun and easy to just roll down them, like when I was a kid at the park in pigtails. Romantically lush like Lord-of-the-Rings-New-Zealand kind of mountains. As you drive around different parts of the island, areas that receive different trade winds and amounts of moisture, the mountains and the fields become drier, interspersing patches of brittle yellow grasses and earth red rocks and soil. The road curved around and in between these sharp red cliffs down to the ocean, where the rocks became darker, grayer, gray, blue-black and black. If the water of Hawaii made me think of Alan Hankin, the land made me think of Tom Bicki, who taught me about volcanoes and the layers of rock that make up history. (It isn't surprising that I kept thinking of science teachers - visiting places like Hawaii is inspiring enough to make anyone want to be a scientist, an observer and a discoverer.)
I had known before coming to Hawaii, but somehow forgot while here until halfway through the trip - that most of what habitates Hawaii, such as their famous pineapples and coconuts, aren't actually Hawaiian. It has all been brought over, on purpose or by accident, by the Polynesians and then Captain Cook and the Europeans and then whoever came next. I was saying this yesterday, sitting at a picnic table by a pool of water in the middle of the forest after tubing in Kauai, the overlay of tree branches giving a cool breeze. Jeff said, "Well, it makes it look pretty," and Mom said, "Yeah, and since they're just volcanoes, you need plants brought in or it would just be rock." I felt hard-pressed then, to start an argument, or to try to explain why I thought saving endemic plots of Hawaiian land, the few that are left, is important: just for the moral simple sake of it. Respecting at least the idea of the way things were first. And in that regard, if you're searching for what true natural Hawaii is, you have to admire the rock, the soil, and that's why I thought of Tom Bicki, taking his son on car rides just to point out particularly impressive rock cuts along the highway, all the other normal drivers calmly passing by, as he excitedly points out the stratified layers, the meaning and the aesthetic they all hold. In Kauai, the oldest island, erosion has been around the longest to show off the most smooth pretty beaches, but also the most exposed, softest soil. Rich is the only word for it - the slightest bit of moisture turns it into oil paint, rubbing off so easily on your skin and refusing to come out of your clothes [it stained my toenails red for two weeks no matter how I scrubbed], the color of bright rust, or sunset on desert rock. In the car in Kauai Jeff commented, "If soil can be pretty," he laughed at the words coming out of his mouth, "Then that's pretty soil."
Then there were the endless fields of sugarcane, their tall green blades like huge sheets of magnified grass. Strangely, the final sweet product relies on fire: the first step to processing raw sugarcane is to burn it. And so the few fields having just undergone this fire would stand brown, either empty or with the burnt stalks bunched together in even groups, curled around each other like crispy coils of wire.
One more name I want to remember: The Waimea Canyon, 'the Grand Canyon of Hawaii,' a just comparison. I should feel blessed to have seen both, and to be reminded at each one of how small I really am, and how the list of awesome things to see in the world never really ends.
On another note, I've uploaded my Documentary Photo project I worked on throughout my last semester at Emerson. Go see it, please, unless you're one of my friends that have already looked through the actual pictures like twenty times. (Mainly Kathy.) It'd mean a lot.
Also, searching for jobs online makes me feel like a listless blob of nothing, prompting me to be in a lazy funk for the rest of the day. It's weird.
Musical asides:
- In case you don't know, because I certainly didn't until I saw the movie, Ben Folds does most of the music for Over the Hedge [it's cute and has an anti-sprawl, pro-environment message for kids, which is obviously the kind of stuff I eat up. Coincidentally, I also just finished reading Hoot which has a very similar theme] and it's all pretty much awesome. Especially "Heist" and "Still" which you should download. Like geez I love this man.
- Favorite lyric from "Still":
You want something that's constant, and I only wanted to be me.
But watch, even the stars above things that seem still are still changing.
- What I learned from the Starbucks this week: The new Dixie Chicks album is almost alarmingly good. Really.
- I've listened to Sufjan Stevens' "The Predatory Wasps of the Palisades Are Out to Get Us" about fifty times in the last few months, but it still amazingly makes me kind of teary-eyed every time.
Hawaii, from the paper journal.
The first thing that comes to mind that I want to remember about Hawaii are the words: the delicate, beautiful vowel-heavy language that I can't pronounce, all the i's and a's and o's mixed in with an abundance of k's and l's and n's. The first street I want to remember, that I have kept in my head without losing for a few hours, is Ala Wai, along the Ala Wai Canal which separates Honolulu from Waikiki on the island of Oahu. Ala Wai: No hard syllables at all, just flows out. The second thing I want to remember is the color of the water - not from far away, but up close, when you really get in and look at it. Like it's out of a Crayola set, but one that's been used by a toddler: strangely, smoothly bright. The true meaning of aquamarine: aqua, Latin for water, of the sea.
And overall - the thing I don't just want to remember, that I need to see more of - the wildlife. The trees, the plants with outrageously colored and shaped flowers, even the birds which are the equivalent of pigeons here seem fascinating to me - their tails are longer, their necks are stripped with thin bands of black and white, even though they come too close to you pecking for food, just like all the sad birds in Boston. Honolulu is nice and all, but the waves at Waikiki are full of cigarette butts and dirty bandaids, and the scenery in front of all the craggy dark mountains (unlike any I've seen before) is a conglomerate of more skyscrapers than you would expect, most of them expensive hotels and million-dollar condominiums. And all it does is make me wonder what this place was like before all of this; makes me realize how out of our leage we really were to take it all over from the Queen. And how many islands are out there in the world that are still the way this was? This trip completes a big step in my mission to visit all 50 states but the truth is it makes me feel more far away from America, and much closer somehow to the rest of the world.
-
Yesterday, Alan Hankin was in my mind and my heart. Specifically, the first day of our Marine Biology class, when he asked us how much experience we personally had with the subject. Could we swim. Had we been to the ocean, and where. Then the questions were elevated: had we ever snorkeled, went scuba diving, what kind of animals had we seen? I couldn't say anything, but now I could, since we went snorkeling in Hanauma Bay, a half hour outside of Waikiki. And mostly Hankin was in my mind because of how he reacted to everyone's answers to his questions. He would burst in with his own experiences, so excited! So purely enthralled any time he had such an opportunity, so genuinely happy for us any time we had experienced the same. His eyes showed that in his mind, once you got up close and personal with this kind of stuff, these kinds of ecosystems and this kind of wildlife, there was simply no question about why he would want to devote so much of his life to learning as much as he could about it. A natural love affair. I feel like I'm over-romanticizing this, but all I wanted to say was that yesterday I actually got it. Once I actually got used to the clumsy flippers on my feet, the mask covering half of my face in thick plastic, somehow finding every little hair to pinch, once I got down the right breathing, and when I wasn't trying to get caught up with everyone else in the group, or getting splashed in the face by them, and I could take a minute to just float. To look down through the glassy clear blue water and catch a calm glimpse of a sea turtle, of a school of fish, of all the different kinds whose names I'm not even close to knowing (although Hankin would), darting in and out of endless pockmarked stoney coral - all working together in a rapid puzzle that somehow works. And for at least an hour I thought of nothing else except for how freaking cool it all was. And so if he was still alive today, maybe I would try to tell him somehow, maybe send him a quick email, just to say, I know. Thank you. You're right.
-
The quintessential (commercialized) Hawaiian activity: the luau! We went on Maui. The food was good, I had a Mai Tai and a glass of white wine and got to feeling kind of light, relaxed. I wore my red dress and red necklace I bought at the marketplace on Oahu. 'Drums of the Pacific,' a majesticly titled luau, or perhaps only majestic sounding to me because I respect drums so much, because anything heavily involving drums usually turns out to be so entertaining. All the members of the luau show were ridiculously good looking, tan and toned; the way the women shook their hips made me jealous, knowing that I couldn't duplicate something as sexy and smooth if I tried. There was a fire guy, who juggled and twirled sticks lit bright orange at both tips. And the whole thing was narrated by one floral-print-shirt clad man, and it was near the end of the show that he tried to bring in the audience by asking who were there on their honeymoons. A spattering of people stood up, including both of the couples at our table. Anniversaries? Another spattering of people. Just a big holler to anyone in love! And he introduced a Hawaiian love song which is apparently famous but sounded somewhat mediocre. And I remembered, stupidly and suddenly, that this is why most people come here, not on family vacations. I had been so focused on my own experience that I had forgotten all the touristy love that was bouncing all around me, and love is something that my family doesn't really talk about, that we're left to discover ourselves. And as we sat there quietly during the song, my eyes rested for a minute on my mom. She had been in Hawaii once before: On her honeymoon with my dad. What was she thinking in that moment? Maybe I am just overly sentimental about memory; I know it has been years not only since her honeymoon, but also since her and my dad's divorce. But I thought from the start anyway that it was a brave decision, her choosing Hawaii for this vacation. As we drive around these places, this scenery that she experienced thirty years ago, what memories are stubbornly making their way into her head? Is she totally over it, fine, able to block them out? Or is she keeping thoughts deep inside her about her life, a life that I don't know, in a hidden space that I will never be able to see?
-
And so now it is time to cram in all the things I haven't had time to say, as we sit on our United flight from Lihue to San Francisco.
I fell in love with Maui on our initial drive in our massive rented Chrysler from the airport to our hotel, and this initial drive is still my favorite thing I remember from the island, although we probably saw more impressive things. First there were the mountains, unlike any of the mountains that come to mind when I think of the word - the craggy, bare boned Rockies and Sierra Nevadas. These in Maui roll and slope in big green mounds, covered in so much vegetation that from a distance they look soft, fuzzy, like it'd be fun and easy to just roll down them, like when I was a kid at the park in pigtails. Romantically lush like Lord-of-the-Rings-New-Zealand kind of mountains. As you drive around different parts of the island, areas that receive different trade winds and amounts of moisture, the mountains and the fields become drier, interspersing patches of brittle yellow grasses and earth red rocks and soil. The road curved around and in between these sharp red cliffs down to the ocean, where the rocks became darker, grayer, gray, blue-black and black. If the water of Hawaii made me think of Alan Hankin, the land made me think of Tom Bicki, who taught me about volcanoes and the layers of rock that make up history. (It isn't surprising that I kept thinking of science teachers - visiting places like Hawaii is inspiring enough to make anyone want to be a scientist, an observer and a discoverer.)
I had known before coming to Hawaii, but somehow forgot while here until halfway through the trip - that most of what habitates Hawaii, such as their famous pineapples and coconuts, aren't actually Hawaiian. It has all been brought over, on purpose or by accident, by the Polynesians and then Captain Cook and the Europeans and then whoever came next. I was saying this yesterday, sitting at a picnic table by a pool of water in the middle of the forest after tubing in Kauai, the overlay of tree branches giving a cool breeze. Jeff said, "Well, it makes it look pretty," and Mom said, "Yeah, and since they're just volcanoes, you need plants brought in or it would just be rock." I felt hard-pressed then, to start an argument, or to try to explain why I thought saving endemic plots of Hawaiian land, the few that are left, is important: just for the moral simple sake of it. Respecting at least the idea of the way things were first. And in that regard, if you're searching for what true natural Hawaii is, you have to admire the rock, the soil, and that's why I thought of Tom Bicki, taking his son on car rides just to point out particularly impressive rock cuts along the highway, all the other normal drivers calmly passing by, as he excitedly points out the stratified layers, the meaning and the aesthetic they all hold. In Kauai, the oldest island, erosion has been around the longest to show off the most smooth pretty beaches, but also the most exposed, softest soil. Rich is the only word for it - the slightest bit of moisture turns it into oil paint, rubbing off so easily on your skin and refusing to come out of your clothes [it stained my toenails red for two weeks no matter how I scrubbed], the color of bright rust, or sunset on desert rock. In the car in Kauai Jeff commented, "If soil can be pretty," he laughed at the words coming out of his mouth, "Then that's pretty soil."
Then there were the endless fields of sugarcane, their tall green blades like huge sheets of magnified grass. Strangely, the final sweet product relies on fire: the first step to processing raw sugarcane is to burn it. And so the few fields having just undergone this fire would stand brown, either empty or with the burnt stalks bunched together in even groups, curled around each other like crispy coils of wire.
One more name I want to remember: The Waimea Canyon, 'the Grand Canyon of Hawaii,' a just comparison. I should feel blessed to have seen both, and to be reminded at each one of how small I really am, and how the list of awesome things to see in the world never really ends.
On another note, I've uploaded my Documentary Photo project I worked on throughout my last semester at Emerson. Go see it, please, unless you're one of my friends that have already looked through the actual pictures like twenty times. (Mainly Kathy.) It'd mean a lot.
Also, searching for jobs online makes me feel like a listless blob of nothing, prompting me to be in a lazy funk for the rest of the day. It's weird.
Musical asides:
- In case you don't know, because I certainly didn't until I saw the movie, Ben Folds does most of the music for Over the Hedge [it's cute and has an anti-sprawl, pro-environment message for kids, which is obviously the kind of stuff I eat up. Coincidentally, I also just finished reading Hoot which has a very similar theme] and it's all pretty much awesome. Especially "Heist" and "Still" which you should download. Like geez I love this man.
- Favorite lyric from "Still":
You want something that's constant, and I only wanted to be me.
But watch, even the stars above things that seem still are still changing.
- What I learned from the Starbucks this week: The new Dixie Chicks album is almost alarmingly good. Really.
- I've listened to Sufjan Stevens' "The Predatory Wasps of the Palisades Are Out to Get Us" about fifty times in the last few months, but it still amazingly makes me kind of teary-eyed every time.