Most of the readings I've done over the past two weeks had to do with the development of Cultural Community Psychology. But this in a very broad sense. The field of Community Psychology is actually only about half a century old, measuring from its official inception. However, chapters and articles by Community Psychologists that I've been reading have looked farther into the past, pulling up movements and events that contributed to the evolution of the mindset that led to the evolution of Community Psychology.
And this is the interesting thing to me.
One of the readings, for instance, had to do with the Settlement Houses 'round the turn of the last century. Jane Adams, Hull House, all that stuff. And of course I already knew the basics of that history. I did, after all, just spend four years as a full time volunteer in Chicago. I'd have been hard put to not learn anything about Hull House. That being said, I also hadn't gone out of my way to learn more than the basics. What I didn't realize was how similar in motivation and in deed the Settlement Houses were to the Catholic Worker Movement and to the international and domestic full time volunteer programs. And I didn't realize that workers in Hull House did a lot of the same exact work in Chicago that we were doing a century later. I was so excited to have been given this historical perspective.
Another chapter I was reading discussed various methods of research that Community Psychologists have employed and what successes and limitations come with them. It was at this time that I learned that I do, in fact, have an awful lot of research experience. I've just never done it formally. Sorting through the data and creating reports is what will be new to me here. But the research methods most often involved in Community Psychology have to do with joining a community, learning its ins and outs, working with them intensively, talking with them, interviewing them, and then reporting what you find, in vivid detail, to people outside of that community. And, again, I've done that, have been doing that for years. I've just never been peer-reviewed.
The more I learn about this field that I have joined, the more thankful I am that it is not what I thought it was. My preconceptions of what it would mean to become a Research Psychologist involved a lot of staunch stand-offishness. I imagined myself having to fight my field to be able to be involved in a community and actually develop proper relationships with them. I imagined peers telling me I would be compromising the validity of my research if I bothered to give a damn about what was actually happening with thus and such community. But no, there is a half-century of precedent behind the sort of work I want to do. Cultural Community Psychology is still a very small field, but it is established.
When I told Cliff (my advisor) about this, he just laughed. He told me that not many people know about Community Psychology because it's not taught much in undergrad.
I applied to two schools that had a Community Psychology program. The others I applied to were Social Psychology or Developmental Psychology. And of course, I chose the schools based on the fact that very few schools in the United States study racism. I applied to the ones that did, regardless of what their program was called. I feel so lucky that I wound up in Community Psychology. This would be a very different experience somewhere else.
Furthermore, I feel like I ought to give Cliff some kudos for picking me out. That was a really good call on his part. I don't know that he read through my application and thought, "Man, she'd be perfect!" But the more I learn about what it is we do here, the more I think, "Man, I'm perfect for this!" In fact, I've already been doing it for years.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Industry
It's been an industrious time here. Over the past month, while I've been waiting for grad school to start, I've been filled with this energy. It comes from excitement. People who know me well know that I'm most productive when I'm entirely too busy. It's because when I'm really busy, I'm usually really excited about what's going on, whether it be a good excitement or not. But excitement breeds energy, and for me that means creative energy. So I find myself facing down deadlines with crises erupting left and right, and suddenly my creative mind explodes and I start working on stories or art projects or trying to figure out the meaning of life in my non-existent free time.
It's awesome to be alive during these periods. And exhausting. But so worth it. I love it.
Well, after we'd set up the apartment and basically found our way around Honolulu, there were still weeks left before my new adventure began. But the excitement was already here. And... excitement breeds energy and for me that means creative energy. Which means I've been creating during this time. And it's good. If I'd just sat here with no projects, I'd have gone insane with the waiting. So,
1) I made drapes. Hand sewn drapes. Nine of them, four of which are a five and a half feet long, four feet wide. It took about two weeks. And I was even able to figure out a way to hand sew something without my left hand getting too stiff. And now we have drapes. Really pretty ones, albeit simple ones. But perfectly functional and nice enough to look at.
2) I laid out every chapter of four books in this series I've had popping around in my head over the last couple of years. We'll see if I ever actually get around to writing it. Oh, wait. I take it back. The last book is not laid out chapter by chapter. It's just a brief summary of events. Still, the entire story is there for me to put together. If I ever get around to doing that.
3) I built a shelf for our kitchen counter so that the microwave, the surge protector and other appliance cords could fit without taking up our entire counter space. I just finished that one a few minutes ago.
This is, of course, after we put our desks together and our bookshelf together and I cut a hold in the back of the bookshelf so the outlet wouldn't be covered up. I wish sometimes that I had formal training in this sort of thing so that the finished product would look nicer, but eh. I also realize that for me, half the fun of doing it is figuring out how to do it. As long as the finished product basically works, I'm cool if it doesn't look professional. And the drapes work, and the shelf works, and the storyline works, so yeah... I'm happy.
I have my first class tomorrow. And I wonder how much more I'll get done by then.
It's awesome to be alive during these periods. And exhausting. But so worth it. I love it.
Well, after we'd set up the apartment and basically found our way around Honolulu, there were still weeks left before my new adventure began. But the excitement was already here. And... excitement breeds energy and for me that means creative energy. Which means I've been creating during this time. And it's good. If I'd just sat here with no projects, I'd have gone insane with the waiting. So,
1) I made drapes. Hand sewn drapes. Nine of them, four of which are a five and a half feet long, four feet wide. It took about two weeks. And I was even able to figure out a way to hand sew something without my left hand getting too stiff. And now we have drapes. Really pretty ones, albeit simple ones. But perfectly functional and nice enough to look at.
2) I laid out every chapter of four books in this series I've had popping around in my head over the last couple of years. We'll see if I ever actually get around to writing it. Oh, wait. I take it back. The last book is not laid out chapter by chapter. It's just a brief summary of events. Still, the entire story is there for me to put together. If I ever get around to doing that.
3) I built a shelf for our kitchen counter so that the microwave, the surge protector and other appliance cords could fit without taking up our entire counter space. I just finished that one a few minutes ago.
This is, of course, after we put our desks together and our bookshelf together and I cut a hold in the back of the bookshelf so the outlet wouldn't be covered up. I wish sometimes that I had formal training in this sort of thing so that the finished product would look nicer, but eh. I also realize that for me, half the fun of doing it is figuring out how to do it. As long as the finished product basically works, I'm cool if it doesn't look professional. And the drapes work, and the shelf works, and the storyline works, so yeah... I'm happy.
I have my first class tomorrow. And I wonder how much more I'll get done by then.
Friday, August 17, 2007
The Geyser on our Block
I would like to point out that that is not a misprint. This is not a post about a geezer on our block. This is a geyser-related post.
Let me set the scene. It was evening. Yesterday. We were at home. I lay on our two-thirds-of-a-couch sectional, reading the final pages of Dune. Michael was playing video games, until he stood up to get a drink of water. Standing near the kitchen window, he pulled back the drape and looked out into the still black night, which was actually neither still (due to traffic and other activity) nor black (being lit with street lights and what not). And that was when he saw it.
"There's a fire or something over there," he said.
"Huh?" I replied, showing off my quick wit and verbal prowess.
We looked out the window to a place about half a block down Kapi'olani Blvd., where police and fire engine lights were flashing, and a thick spray of water was evident in the air. Quickly, we deduced that we would be able to see more if we stopped looking through the small window, and instead went outside. So we went outside.
No one else in our building seemed aware of the excitement just half a block down, but the people across the street were all outside looking. We looked too. At the distance, we couldn't tell if a pipe had busted or if the water was being directed to put out a fire. Using our brilliant intellect and basic reasoning skills, we figured out soon thereafter that we would probably be able to tell if we moved closer to the action. So we did.
Half a block away, we came to a stop within the circle of police cars flashing blue and white. There was a small crowd of people around us, looking at the enormous spray.
"Do you know what happened?" I asked one man.
"No, I just got here," he said.
I waited for a lady to get off her cellphone and then asked her the same question.
"No, we just came outside and this was going on," she told me.
"Do you know who lives there?" I asked, motioning to the building that was being deluged.
"No," she said. "But their roof is getting a good cleaning."
A few of us laughed. You had to be there.
They spray--the geyser, if you will-- was over four stories tall, which we were able to immediately assess because it was more than twice as tall as the two story building right next to it. In fact, the conversation went thusly:
"What do you think? Four, five stories high?"
That was me. I was being inclusive by asking a question rather than just stating my assessment as fact and leaving others out of the process. It's because I'm so open-minded.
"Mmm... closer to four. More than four, I think."
That was Michael. He was also contributing to the assessment so that the facts would not be based on a single person's opinion. That would be autocratic. We like to discourage that sort of thing.
The water blew up in a torrent. It was really quite an incredible sight. When the wind would blow, it created an arch, which, unfortunately for the firefighters at work, would land on their heads as they slogged through a two-foot deep puddle, trying to secure a giant allen wrench into some unseen valve. They stumbled under the weight of the water, stumbled under the force of it. It was pretty loud out there because of all the water, but I like to imagine that the firefighters were swearing imaginatively, rather than just saying the same few swear words over and over.
Me? I was upwind, and the water--the growing puddles, even-- only came about four or five feet in our direction, instead spilling into the street, spilling over the firefighters, spilling over the apartment unit next the geyser's source. I was able to get close enough to see the base of the geyser. And the base of the geyser was... the ground. But next to the base of the geyser, on the ground, was a fire hydrant laying uselessly on its side. It was an entire fire hydrant. Not a piece. Not the top of it. It was the entire friggin fire hydrant, including part of it at the bottom which was not painted yellow, presumably because it had been secured inside the pavement.
I looked around for a car that might have bashed into it, tearing it from the earth. But there wasn't one. There seemed to be no source to the disturbance.
"It looks like it just came out," I said, motioning to the useless fire hydrant.
Michael grinned with an inward vision. "I wonder how far it shot into the air."
I grinned as well. Maybe I had a different inward vision than Michael, but I bet they were pretty similar. However, I didn't ask, so we may never know for sure.
Michael went back home after a bit because we had not bothered to lock our front door when we left, but I stayed on, orange plastic tumbler in my hand. It was empty of water now, because I had drank it all, and I wished that I had more in my cup, but it's funny because it never occurred to me to go fill it up from this seemingly endless source of water tumbling out of the earth in front of me. I'm not sure the firefighters would have appreciated that anyway.
So I stayed on, and I marked the shape of the water as it hurled itself into the air, came back down upon itself, was hurled up again by the force of more water. And I marked the shape of it as the wind began to blow and it landed on the firefighters who had just made a little progress in turning the ginormous allen wrench. And I marked the size of it as it reached various summits. And I marked the size of it as it began to shrink. And it was funny, because when it was two stories high, it looked so much smaller. But it really wasn't small. It only seemed small in comparison. And when it was one story high I had to remind myself that was still pretty high. And when it was one person's height high (which I could immediately judge because there was a person standing next to it), it seemed so small. But I thought how powerful it must still be, and that even as small as it looked now, I would not want to have that force hitting me. And then it went away altogether.
And a few people on the other side clapped. And this one woman started yelling out, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank God! Thank God for this day! Thank God! Thank God for this day! Thank God for this day! Thank God for this day!" And at first I thought that was kind of nice, but then she just kept yelling the same things over and over and I started to think she was probably a crazy person and she reminded me of the woman we saw at the garden in Chinatown who was screaming at the bushes and splashing water on her feet and at first we'd thought she was an actor or a storyteller giving a performance to children, until we got closer and realized that she had her own reality and something very interesting was happening in it.
The lady kept screaming, "Thank God for this day!" and I thought of that lady in the garden and again I wondered what it was that had been going on from her point of view.
In the relative silence of the lack of geyser, I heard the crowd of people on the other side talking, and one man said, "No, just all of the sudden I heard this loud SHHUH!" And this led me to believe that there had been no wreck or accident or crash or any reason really for the fire hydrant to come out of the ground. That it had just happened of its own volition. But I didn't stick around and ask anyone else, and I didn't have Michael there anymore to offer his own assessment of events, and I didn't find anything in the news this morning or online when I looked just now, so that's just one person's opinion, really. And it's a little autocratic, if you ask me.
Let me set the scene. It was evening. Yesterday. We were at home. I lay on our two-thirds-of-a-couch sectional, reading the final pages of Dune. Michael was playing video games, until he stood up to get a drink of water. Standing near the kitchen window, he pulled back the drape and looked out into the still black night, which was actually neither still (due to traffic and other activity) nor black (being lit with street lights and what not). And that was when he saw it.
"There's a fire or something over there," he said.
"Huh?" I replied, showing off my quick wit and verbal prowess.
We looked out the window to a place about half a block down Kapi'olani Blvd., where police and fire engine lights were flashing, and a thick spray of water was evident in the air. Quickly, we deduced that we would be able to see more if we stopped looking through the small window, and instead went outside. So we went outside.
No one else in our building seemed aware of the excitement just half a block down, but the people across the street were all outside looking. We looked too. At the distance, we couldn't tell if a pipe had busted or if the water was being directed to put out a fire. Using our brilliant intellect and basic reasoning skills, we figured out soon thereafter that we would probably be able to tell if we moved closer to the action. So we did.
Half a block away, we came to a stop within the circle of police cars flashing blue and white. There was a small crowd of people around us, looking at the enormous spray.
"Do you know what happened?" I asked one man.
"No, I just got here," he said.
I waited for a lady to get off her cellphone and then asked her the same question.
"No, we just came outside and this was going on," she told me.
"Do you know who lives there?" I asked, motioning to the building that was being deluged.
"No," she said. "But their roof is getting a good cleaning."
A few of us laughed. You had to be there.
They spray--the geyser, if you will-- was over four stories tall, which we were able to immediately assess because it was more than twice as tall as the two story building right next to it. In fact, the conversation went thusly:
"What do you think? Four, five stories high?"
That was me. I was being inclusive by asking a question rather than just stating my assessment as fact and leaving others out of the process. It's because I'm so open-minded.
"Mmm... closer to four. More than four, I think."
That was Michael. He was also contributing to the assessment so that the facts would not be based on a single person's opinion. That would be autocratic. We like to discourage that sort of thing.
The water blew up in a torrent. It was really quite an incredible sight. When the wind would blow, it created an arch, which, unfortunately for the firefighters at work, would land on their heads as they slogged through a two-foot deep puddle, trying to secure a giant allen wrench into some unseen valve. They stumbled under the weight of the water, stumbled under the force of it. It was pretty loud out there because of all the water, but I like to imagine that the firefighters were swearing imaginatively, rather than just saying the same few swear words over and over.
Me? I was upwind, and the water--the growing puddles, even-- only came about four or five feet in our direction, instead spilling into the street, spilling over the firefighters, spilling over the apartment unit next the geyser's source. I was able to get close enough to see the base of the geyser. And the base of the geyser was... the ground. But next to the base of the geyser, on the ground, was a fire hydrant laying uselessly on its side. It was an entire fire hydrant. Not a piece. Not the top of it. It was the entire friggin fire hydrant, including part of it at the bottom which was not painted yellow, presumably because it had been secured inside the pavement.
I looked around for a car that might have bashed into it, tearing it from the earth. But there wasn't one. There seemed to be no source to the disturbance.
"It looks like it just came out," I said, motioning to the useless fire hydrant.
Michael grinned with an inward vision. "I wonder how far it shot into the air."
I grinned as well. Maybe I had a different inward vision than Michael, but I bet they were pretty similar. However, I didn't ask, so we may never know for sure.
Michael went back home after a bit because we had not bothered to lock our front door when we left, but I stayed on, orange plastic tumbler in my hand. It was empty of water now, because I had drank it all, and I wished that I had more in my cup, but it's funny because it never occurred to me to go fill it up from this seemingly endless source of water tumbling out of the earth in front of me. I'm not sure the firefighters would have appreciated that anyway.
So I stayed on, and I marked the shape of the water as it hurled itself into the air, came back down upon itself, was hurled up again by the force of more water. And I marked the shape of it as the wind began to blow and it landed on the firefighters who had just made a little progress in turning the ginormous allen wrench. And I marked the size of it as it reached various summits. And I marked the size of it as it began to shrink. And it was funny, because when it was two stories high, it looked so much smaller. But it really wasn't small. It only seemed small in comparison. And when it was one story high I had to remind myself that was still pretty high. And when it was one person's height high (which I could immediately judge because there was a person standing next to it), it seemed so small. But I thought how powerful it must still be, and that even as small as it looked now, I would not want to have that force hitting me. And then it went away altogether.
And a few people on the other side clapped. And this one woman started yelling out, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank God! Thank God for this day! Thank God! Thank God for this day! Thank God for this day! Thank God for this day!" And at first I thought that was kind of nice, but then she just kept yelling the same things over and over and I started to think she was probably a crazy person and she reminded me of the woman we saw at the garden in Chinatown who was screaming at the bushes and splashing water on her feet and at first we'd thought she was an actor or a storyteller giving a performance to children, until we got closer and realized that she had her own reality and something very interesting was happening in it.
The lady kept screaming, "Thank God for this day!" and I thought of that lady in the garden and again I wondered what it was that had been going on from her point of view.
In the relative silence of the lack of geyser, I heard the crowd of people on the other side talking, and one man said, "No, just all of the sudden I heard this loud SHHUH!" And this led me to believe that there had been no wreck or accident or crash or any reason really for the fire hydrant to come out of the ground. That it had just happened of its own volition. But I didn't stick around and ask anyone else, and I didn't have Michael there anymore to offer his own assessment of events, and I didn't find anything in the news this morning or online when I looked just now, so that's just one person's opinion, really. And it's a little autocratic, if you ask me.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
TAship
So, I have been through TA Orientation, which means that I am officially trained and ready to be a TA, no matter what that might entail. It took three days of workshops to make me thus prepared. And, as it turns out, I have my assignment now, so I even know (somewhat) what I'll be doing come Monday morning. But I'm gonna back up in the story just a bit, for the sake of narrative.
I had the basic assumption going into TA training that I would not be actually teaching a class this first semester, but instead, helping a professor who would be teaching the class. I figured I'd be grading papers, grading tests, making copies, handing out copies, and other boring things like that.
One the first day of training, experienced TAs began talking to the group of... what? 100 or so? of us about how we would be teaching classes in one week. Yup, teaching classes in one week. One woman in the audience raised her hand and said, "To what extent are we actually going to be teaching?" They said, "Oh, it depends on your assignment, but most of you will be teaching the whole class. Do you have your assignment yet?" She said, "No." They said, "Oh. What department are you in?" She said, "Psychology." They said, "Oh. Is there anyone else who doesn't have their assignment yet?" About five of us raised our hands. They laughed and said, "Yeah, there's always a few. Well, (facetiously) good luck!" And everyone laughed.
Except us five, who were all thinking, "Well, this sucks. We might be teaching a class next week and we haven't even seen the textbook." And then we thought, "Oh well, at least we have four years experience teaching those HIV classes with H.O.P.E. Program. At least we have basic teaching experience in our backgrounds. And as long as we get the textbook a couple days in advance, we can pull together a syllabus of some sort and at least fudge our way through."
That's what we were all thinking.
Anyway, I joked with that woman that I was going to check online to the psych intro classes to see if my name was up there. She said, "Surely they'd tell us first." I laughed. I looked anyway. And what I found was that the instructor for every section of the introductory psychology course was "Dale R. Fryxell (P) TBA." And I don't know who this Dale R. Fryxell person is, but I somehow doubted he was really going to be teaching 29 sections of introductory psychology, and that TBA was really starting to look like it read "Laura K Corlew." Especially that 7:30am three-credit Monday morning lecture. Yikes.
I attended the second day of TA orientation under the assumption that come Thursday morning I was going to find out I would be teaching come Monday morning. In a way, this kind of freaked me out because I thought, "My god that's poor preparation from the Psychology Department." But in another way it didn't freak me out so much because I just kept thinking, "Well, gotta do this."
After yesterday's orientation, I met my advisor for the first time. He had baked cookies and we chatted and he gave me a textbook and told me that really most of what I'll be doing this semester is reading. Yup, reading. That's what I'll be doing this semester. Reading. Because I need background knowledge before I can really get into the meat of planning my research and dissertation, and the only way to acquire that knowledge is to read. I read the first chapter of that textbook yesterday (it's called Community Psychology, and it's about Community Psychology) and... my professor was cited from a 2005 study. I have to say, never once at MTSU did I read a textbook that cited one of my professors, unless it was written by that professor. It made me happy, thinking, "Yes, I will really be involved in this field."
Also, I talked to him about the TAship and the likelihood that I would be teaching next week. He said that was highly unlikely, that I would be doing all the boring stuff like grading papers and tests and making copies and sitting office hours, and maybe teach a class or two toward the end of the semester.
Then I went home and talked to my brother who finished the Appalacian Trail and is back in Tennessee and has a beard and long curly hair and I hadn't gotten to speak to him and hear his voice for months. It was great. I'm just so... proud of my siblings. They're neat.
Next, Michael and I went down to Ala Moana to check out the hurricane. It looked like a grey horizon. The storm that was passing over Oahu at the time looked more threatening, but of course, it was closer, so it would. We got misted on, but we managed to avoid the rain. But it was pretty out there and felt nice, and on the way home we got to wait at the bus stop in front of Backseat Betty's Love Boutique.
Then we went home and I checked my email and got my TA assignment. I'll be working with Ashley Maynard who is the new graduate chair of the department. So, it looks like I'll be doing more of the making copies and less of the helping out in classes, but... Ashley Maynard is the professor here that did work in Chiapas with that Mayans, and we had emailed previously about the Zapatistas, my work in Chicago, and our trip to Guatemala two years back. It was, granted, a short email exchange, but I've been interested to meet her anyway, and now I get to work with her. So I'm excited about that.
In other news, we had a hurricane yesterday. It was anticlimactic. And on the big island there was an earthquake and a landslide and there's been volcanic activity and on the north shore of Oahu there's been this fire blazing out of control. I wasn't going to say anything because I didn't want you all to worry, but it seems like people on the mainland know about it anyway, so eh. That stuff is going on. And white people are suing the OHA and the Kamehameha schools because they say they're race-based and violate non-Native Hawaiian's equal rights protections. But that's apparently an on-going legal battle. It's hard for me to get a pulse on what is actually news, and what is just something coming up again after many previous attempts. So, we'll see about all of that.
peace.
I had the basic assumption going into TA training that I would not be actually teaching a class this first semester, but instead, helping a professor who would be teaching the class. I figured I'd be grading papers, grading tests, making copies, handing out copies, and other boring things like that.
One the first day of training, experienced TAs began talking to the group of... what? 100 or so? of us about how we would be teaching classes in one week. Yup, teaching classes in one week. One woman in the audience raised her hand and said, "To what extent are we actually going to be teaching?" They said, "Oh, it depends on your assignment, but most of you will be teaching the whole class. Do you have your assignment yet?" She said, "No." They said, "Oh. What department are you in?" She said, "Psychology." They said, "Oh. Is there anyone else who doesn't have their assignment yet?" About five of us raised our hands. They laughed and said, "Yeah, there's always a few. Well, (facetiously) good luck!" And everyone laughed.
Except us five, who were all thinking, "Well, this sucks. We might be teaching a class next week and we haven't even seen the textbook." And then we thought, "Oh well, at least we have four years experience teaching those HIV classes with H.O.P.E. Program. At least we have basic teaching experience in our backgrounds. And as long as we get the textbook a couple days in advance, we can pull together a syllabus of some sort and at least fudge our way through."
That's what we were all thinking.
Anyway, I joked with that woman that I was going to check online to the psych intro classes to see if my name was up there. She said, "Surely they'd tell us first." I laughed. I looked anyway. And what I found was that the instructor for every section of the introductory psychology course was "Dale R. Fryxell (P) TBA." And I don't know who this Dale R. Fryxell person is, but I somehow doubted he was really going to be teaching 29 sections of introductory psychology, and that TBA was really starting to look like it read "Laura K Corlew." Especially that 7:30am three-credit Monday morning lecture. Yikes.
I attended the second day of TA orientation under the assumption that come Thursday morning I was going to find out I would be teaching come Monday morning. In a way, this kind of freaked me out because I thought, "My god that's poor preparation from the Psychology Department." But in another way it didn't freak me out so much because I just kept thinking, "Well, gotta do this."
After yesterday's orientation, I met my advisor for the first time. He had baked cookies and we chatted and he gave me a textbook and told me that really most of what I'll be doing this semester is reading. Yup, reading. That's what I'll be doing this semester. Reading. Because I need background knowledge before I can really get into the meat of planning my research and dissertation, and the only way to acquire that knowledge is to read. I read the first chapter of that textbook yesterday (it's called Community Psychology, and it's about Community Psychology) and... my professor was cited from a 2005 study. I have to say, never once at MTSU did I read a textbook that cited one of my professors, unless it was written by that professor. It made me happy, thinking, "Yes, I will really be involved in this field."
Also, I talked to him about the TAship and the likelihood that I would be teaching next week. He said that was highly unlikely, that I would be doing all the boring stuff like grading papers and tests and making copies and sitting office hours, and maybe teach a class or two toward the end of the semester.
Then I went home and talked to my brother who finished the Appalacian Trail and is back in Tennessee and has a beard and long curly hair and I hadn't gotten to speak to him and hear his voice for months. It was great. I'm just so... proud of my siblings. They're neat.
Next, Michael and I went down to Ala Moana to check out the hurricane. It looked like a grey horizon. The storm that was passing over Oahu at the time looked more threatening, but of course, it was closer, so it would. We got misted on, but we managed to avoid the rain. But it was pretty out there and felt nice, and on the way home we got to wait at the bus stop in front of Backseat Betty's Love Boutique.
Then we went home and I checked my email and got my TA assignment. I'll be working with Ashley Maynard who is the new graduate chair of the department. So, it looks like I'll be doing more of the making copies and less of the helping out in classes, but... Ashley Maynard is the professor here that did work in Chiapas with that Mayans, and we had emailed previously about the Zapatistas, my work in Chicago, and our trip to Guatemala two years back. It was, granted, a short email exchange, but I've been interested to meet her anyway, and now I get to work with her. So I'm excited about that.
In other news, we had a hurricane yesterday. It was anticlimactic. And on the big island there was an earthquake and a landslide and there's been volcanic activity and on the north shore of Oahu there's been this fire blazing out of control. I wasn't going to say anything because I didn't want you all to worry, but it seems like people on the mainland know about it anyway, so eh. That stuff is going on. And white people are suing the OHA and the Kamehameha schools because they say they're race-based and violate non-Native Hawaiian's equal rights protections. But that's apparently an on-going legal battle. It's hard for me to get a pulse on what is actually news, and what is just something coming up again after many previous attempts. So, we'll see about all of that.
peace.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Down the Rabbit Hole
I had a dream last night that my sister Mary and I were in a frenzy of preparations before we started... something that was up-coming. I was supposed to be in a series of meetings regarding... something, but I knew I had a much more important meetings in the surreal and unreal world. I also knew I could not explain this to other people because other people would either object to me wasting my time, or simply wouldn't believe the place I was going to was real. Mary and I were packing for the day (she had other things to do than me) and we threw tins of pretzels and tins of cookies and sandwiches wrapped in t-shirts into large paper grocery sacks and headed off. My most preeminent meeting was with the Queen of Hearts. I did not know what to expect. So I stepped off into the surreal and unreal world and... nothing. Woke up. And I nodded to myself and thought two things:
1) the preparation for the meeting with the Queen of Hearts was the more important part of the dream, which is why I never got to experience the supposed goal of the dream while I slept.
2) that I would be walking into a surreal and unreal world to meet with the Queen of Hearts is just as likely an outcome of going to grad school than any other expectation I've created. I simply do not know what to expect from this. Everyone who's been through something like it tells me it is nothing like anything else I've done. So I may as well expect a meeting with the Queen of Hearts, and at least know that it *probably* won't be that.
All told, it was a satisfying dream. I got to hang out with my sister and wrap a sandwich in a long-sleeve blue t-shirt. You really can't beat that.
xxx
Michael and I are officially registered for classes. My TA training starts on Monday. Classes for both of us start the following Monday. Michael is taking Chinese. I am so incredibly jealous. I'll be taking three classes this semester: Methodologic Foundation of Psychology, Cultural Community Psychology, and Community Psychology Research. The last is the course from which my Masters Thesis will be derived.
I haven't yet met my advisor/mentor person. In person. We've talked on the phone, of course. He was the first person who called me from any of the grad schools I applied to. I'll be meeting him in person for the first time this coming Tuesday. Queen of Hearts. Everything and nothing to expect because it doesn't matter. It will be different anyway.
In all of this, I am actually not nervous. I'm excited. But I don't have anxiety. I don't worry that I'll mess up or get or wrong or anything like that. I do have the confidence of my past, of knowing there has not yet been anything I wanted to do that I have not bee able to do. At least for reasons stemming from myself. As it is, I can hardly wait.
1) the preparation for the meeting with the Queen of Hearts was the more important part of the dream, which is why I never got to experience the supposed goal of the dream while I slept.
2) that I would be walking into a surreal and unreal world to meet with the Queen of Hearts is just as likely an outcome of going to grad school than any other expectation I've created. I simply do not know what to expect from this. Everyone who's been through something like it tells me it is nothing like anything else I've done. So I may as well expect a meeting with the Queen of Hearts, and at least know that it *probably* won't be that.
All told, it was a satisfying dream. I got to hang out with my sister and wrap a sandwich in a long-sleeve blue t-shirt. You really can't beat that.
xxx
Michael and I are officially registered for classes. My TA training starts on Monday. Classes for both of us start the following Monday. Michael is taking Chinese. I am so incredibly jealous. I'll be taking three classes this semester: Methodologic Foundation of Psychology, Cultural Community Psychology, and Community Psychology Research. The last is the course from which my Masters Thesis will be derived.
I haven't yet met my advisor/mentor person. In person. We've talked on the phone, of course. He was the first person who called me from any of the grad schools I applied to. I'll be meeting him in person for the first time this coming Tuesday. Queen of Hearts. Everything and nothing to expect because it doesn't matter. It will be different anyway.
In all of this, I am actually not nervous. I'm excited. But I don't have anxiety. I don't worry that I'll mess up or get or wrong or anything like that. I do have the confidence of my past, of knowing there has not yet been anything I wanted to do that I have not bee able to do. At least for reasons stemming from myself. As it is, I can hardly wait.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Well, it turns out we don't have TB after all. Who'd have thought? We're getting our shots now for the MMR; first one this week, second in a month to follow. We'll head out to KCC (Michael's school) this morning to turn in the health form and hopefully talk to an advisor about which classes he should start out with. I'll be registering for classes on Friday. I'm taking three. It's gonna be wicked-awesome.
In other exciting news, Michael and I have now touched the Pacific Ocean. Walked in it, in fact. Some people, when we told them we were coming to Hawai'i for school, said we'd need to be careful not to while away our time at the beach. But I think those people had forgotten who they were talking to. To be fair, I think most people would have made it to the beach within the first two weeks of living in Hawai'i. Michael and I didn't quite. But it is quite lovely. The water feels great and it's this amazing blue that I haven't seen since I was in Belize. I'll be going back. Sometime.
We went to the aquarium and I learned a lot about coral reefs and Hawaiian/Pacific fishes. And I'm struck again and again by how very damaging to the environment the tourist industry is. Who on earth thought it was a good idea? Oh, that's right. The Hiltons. And others who are making a killing selling paradise vacations to environments they're destroying. Don't get me wrong. In itself, I think travel is a good thing, and especially for us Americans and our cultural vacuum. As we sit here comfy at the top, we are for the most part wholly unaware of the world being squashed under our asscheeks. Sorry, that was crass. But travel, and even "tourism" in the form of touring around to learn of new cultures, is a good idea in principle.
It's just that the tourist industry is not about learning new things or exploring new environments or celebrating the world we live in. It's about luxury vacations and exploiting (and definitely not protecting) the lands we've seized from other people. And--as a nice synchronicity for me--I came back from the aquarium where I'd been thinking about this, and I read some more of Haunani Trask who began discussing the tourism industry in Hawai'i. And she said,
"Now, we Hawaiians have no control over the massive tourist industry, which imports more than six million foreigners into our tiny islands each year. Multinational corporations see our beauty; the world's rich buy it in two- and four-week packages. These foreigners, mostly haole and Japanese, think of our homeland as theirs, that is, as a place they have a claim to visit, pollute, and destroy by virtue of their wealth. Our role, as indigenous people, is to serve and wait upon these visitors, to illuminate and fulfill their dreams. Throughout the Pacific Basin, First World tourists play out this racist fantasy of an "island vacation," ruining our waters and lands, degrading our living cultures. When they leave, tourists have learned nothing of our people or our place. They have not listened to the land nor have they heard her singing."
Already I'm thinking of the people who will come here to visit us, and I try to figure out where I can take them and what I can show them that does not play into this industry of waste and exploitation. I've got some time, and already I've got some ideas. Will have to work on this. Also, as I was falling asleep last night, I had a sort of waking-dream of leading a walking tour of Honolulu called "The Haole Tour of Colonialism," and I walked white American tourists through the history of our people conquering a nation that posed no threat to us, but who lived in a beautiful and strategic location mid-way through the Pacific. Not to say I will do this, but it did make for interesting thoughts as I drifted off to sleep.
I've joined the Hawaiian Independence mailing list (http://hawaii-nation.org/index.html) and I plan on going by the UH (my school) Center for Hawaiian Studies because they have further information about Ka Lahui Hawai'i (http://hawaii-nation.org/turningthetide-6-4.html) and other Native Hawaiian and Hawaiian sovereignty information. Also, Haunani Trast is a professor there. I think it's likely, being in Hawai'i and all, that my research into racism, poverty, and marginalization will focus on what we have done/are doing to Native Hawaiians. But of course, I know from previous study into racism, and I have seen again and again as I look into Hawai'i's history, that one of the main problems that minorities have is white people coming in thinking they know the answer, that we know what is good for them. I don't want to be that white person. So if I'm going to do this, I need to make connections with Hawaiians and with Hawaiian groups who can tell me what I can do for them, how I can help, what they want, and what is good for them. I refuse to do it any other way.
Theirs is not my revolution. I cannot profess to say that I have always been an advocate of Hawaiian sovereignty, or that two weeks ago I was an advocate of Hawaiian sovereignty. That is their revolution. My revolution is anti-racism. My revolution is to stop discrimination against the poor. My revolution is to include people who we have pushed to the margins. I just hope they can use my revolution in their revolution. Because I do really respect their revolution, and I would love to help.
In other exciting news, Michael and I have now touched the Pacific Ocean. Walked in it, in fact. Some people, when we told them we were coming to Hawai'i for school, said we'd need to be careful not to while away our time at the beach. But I think those people had forgotten who they were talking to. To be fair, I think most people would have made it to the beach within the first two weeks of living in Hawai'i. Michael and I didn't quite. But it is quite lovely. The water feels great and it's this amazing blue that I haven't seen since I was in Belize. I'll be going back. Sometime.
We went to the aquarium and I learned a lot about coral reefs and Hawaiian/Pacific fishes. And I'm struck again and again by how very damaging to the environment the tourist industry is. Who on earth thought it was a good idea? Oh, that's right. The Hiltons. And others who are making a killing selling paradise vacations to environments they're destroying. Don't get me wrong. In itself, I think travel is a good thing, and especially for us Americans and our cultural vacuum. As we sit here comfy at the top, we are for the most part wholly unaware of the world being squashed under our asscheeks. Sorry, that was crass. But travel, and even "tourism" in the form of touring around to learn of new cultures, is a good idea in principle.
It's just that the tourist industry is not about learning new things or exploring new environments or celebrating the world we live in. It's about luxury vacations and exploiting (and definitely not protecting) the lands we've seized from other people. And--as a nice synchronicity for me--I came back from the aquarium where I'd been thinking about this, and I read some more of Haunani Trask who began discussing the tourism industry in Hawai'i. And she said,
"Now, we Hawaiians have no control over the massive tourist industry, which imports more than six million foreigners into our tiny islands each year. Multinational corporations see our beauty; the world's rich buy it in two- and four-week packages. These foreigners, mostly haole and Japanese, think of our homeland as theirs, that is, as a place they have a claim to visit, pollute, and destroy by virtue of their wealth. Our role, as indigenous people, is to serve and wait upon these visitors, to illuminate and fulfill their dreams. Throughout the Pacific Basin, First World tourists play out this racist fantasy of an "island vacation," ruining our waters and lands, degrading our living cultures. When they leave, tourists have learned nothing of our people or our place. They have not listened to the land nor have they heard her singing."
Already I'm thinking of the people who will come here to visit us, and I try to figure out where I can take them and what I can show them that does not play into this industry of waste and exploitation. I've got some time, and already I've got some ideas. Will have to work on this. Also, as I was falling asleep last night, I had a sort of waking-dream of leading a walking tour of Honolulu called "The Haole Tour of Colonialism," and I walked white American tourists through the history of our people conquering a nation that posed no threat to us, but who lived in a beautiful and strategic location mid-way through the Pacific. Not to say I will do this, but it did make for interesting thoughts as I drifted off to sleep.
I've joined the Hawaiian Independence mailing list (http://hawaii-nation.org/index.html) and I plan on going by the UH (my school) Center for Hawaiian Studies because they have further information about Ka Lahui Hawai'i (http://hawaii-nation.org/turningthetide-6-4.html) and other Native Hawaiian and Hawaiian sovereignty information. Also, Haunani Trast is a professor there. I think it's likely, being in Hawai'i and all, that my research into racism, poverty, and marginalization will focus on what we have done/are doing to Native Hawaiians. But of course, I know from previous study into racism, and I have seen again and again as I look into Hawai'i's history, that one of the main problems that minorities have is white people coming in thinking they know the answer, that we know what is good for them. I don't want to be that white person. So if I'm going to do this, I need to make connections with Hawaiians and with Hawaiian groups who can tell me what I can do for them, how I can help, what they want, and what is good for them. I refuse to do it any other way.
Theirs is not my revolution. I cannot profess to say that I have always been an advocate of Hawaiian sovereignty, or that two weeks ago I was an advocate of Hawaiian sovereignty. That is their revolution. My revolution is anti-racism. My revolution is to stop discrimination against the poor. My revolution is to include people who we have pushed to the margins. I just hope they can use my revolution in their revolution. Because I do really respect their revolution, and I would love to help.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
When a Corlew gets TB...
In school news, Michael and I are in the final processes of getting our registration on. We got TB tests yesterday, which will be read on Monday. I need to bring in my passport to have it varified by the graduate chair, who has as of yet only seen a photocopy. And we're searching high and low for records of MMR vaccinations. Mom's been a great help with this, looking through her records, being a local contact for St. Benedict which may or may not have this on file. I was able to contact the MTSU Health Services Center, and they said they only had round one of my MMR on file. But the lady at the UH Health Services said that was fine; they could give me round two next week and I'll be on my way.
Michael's been a bit trickier. There's something wrong with the Oakland High phone system, so that it just hangs up whenever he tries to transfer to the office. He'll probably wind up having to get both rounds of the vaccine, but, they say after the first round they'll temporarily lift the health hold on his registration so he can go ahead and sign up for classes. So all's well, all told.
Michael finally got his speakers set up that he had gotten for free through some... thing... promotion? I forget. Thing is, he'd read the reviews online for them and they all complained about things like the cords not being long enough to set up the surround sound speakers in proper locations about the room. We have decided that these are people with large living rooms, because they set up nicely in ours. And now we have become people with a surround sound audio system. I never imagined I would be one of those people. When I told Michael this, he laughed and said, "Why? It's so cheap."
Anyway, a lot of you know we don't have a TV (and don't want one, so don't get any ideas for Christmas from that statement). And we don't have a stereo. So the surround sound now solely exists for the random DVD rental, or as in the case of last night, Homestar Runner viewing. Ah, love it.
Today, we're going to head out to the Aquarium in Waikiki. I think it's near a beach, which would mean we might see a beach today too. That would be a first. Ocean we have now seen from the top of Diamond Head. We even looked over a handrail in Ala Moana near the Aloha Tower and saw tropical fish in the water (that doesn't count as seeing ocean because that's where all the huge-ass ships dock, so you cannot see more than maybe... thirty or forty yards into the water). So today, we will see an aquarium, and maybe a beach if one presents itself.
But let me get back to part two of the series I've titled in my head 'Is it any wonder they hate us?' I had been told again and again before I came here that Native Hawaiians would not like me because I was white and an outsider. This was told to me with a kind of a... 'well, what are you gonna do?' sort of tone. I guess it just seems to me that we, or at least I, never bothered to learn the history here. So of course we, or at least I, would wonder why would I be an outsider from the same country, and second off, why would they hate white people so much?
There have been two things that have struck me about my own personal thought processes: One, I was flat out wrong about Haunani Trask. And I'm already embarrassed by my original assumptions. Granted, "well-spoken angry activist" is very high praise from me. It is kind of what I aspire to be. And she is those things. But she's also a historian with an incredible understanding of the story of her people. And she's a genius as far as I'm concerned with this encyclopedic knowledge of Hawaiian, national, and international law. I struggle to understand the full implications of legalese, making me all the more certain that we need an overhaul of our systems of law and politics if we are going to make them workable to the common person. At any rate, the second thing that surprises me repeatedly is how very little I know, and how very little it occurs to me that there is to know. It doesn't really shock me when I read about how the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor and marginalized. What shocks me each time I hear about these things is how it never occurred to me that it might be going on. It has never occurred to me to wonder about the Native people of Hawai'i. And now that it is on my mind, I can't help but think, "Why not?" And how many other people are out there being stepped on for my benefit and why is it still not occurring to me to wonder about them?
Haunani Trask makes a good point, and one that I've never before considered. The United States is a settler society. The Constitution that we look to to protect people's rights was written by settlers who were living on land they had stolen, and that they felt they had every right to be a free people on. The rights to life, liberty, and property did not apply to the indigenous people. And even now there is nothing in our Constitution that protects them. There is nothing in our Constitution that protected Hawai'i from us. There is nothing in our Constitution that protects Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or anyone else from us. Our Constitution protects us from us, and us from other people, and that's about it.
So the Native Hawaiians are looking to international law to find some protection. Did you know that Native Hawaiians do not have the same rights and autonomy as the Native Americans on the mainland? There are no reservations, there is no land set aside for them, there is no self-governance. There are systems within the government that conquered them that are supposed to be taking care of them, but those systems are run by our government, meaning we are determining what is best for them. Even right now, in the paper this morning, non-Hawaiian residents are suing the Office of Hawaiian affairs for using money set aside for the benefit of Native Hawaiians to creating a voter registry of Native Hawaiians that would be used to help determine what steps Native Hawaiians should take toward a Native Hawaiian governing entity. And why are these white guys suing over something that clearly doesn't concern them? They say it's because they think it's racist that they wouldn't get to vote too. But really, why do you think? When it comes to Hawai'i, we don't have the Native Hawaiians' best interests at heart. We have money at heart. So yeah, they're looking to international human rights laws for help. And really, I think they deserve to have third party intervention.
Michael's been a bit trickier. There's something wrong with the Oakland High phone system, so that it just hangs up whenever he tries to transfer to the office. He'll probably wind up having to get both rounds of the vaccine, but, they say after the first round they'll temporarily lift the health hold on his registration so he can go ahead and sign up for classes. So all's well, all told.
Michael finally got his speakers set up that he had gotten for free through some... thing... promotion? I forget. Thing is, he'd read the reviews online for them and they all complained about things like the cords not being long enough to set up the surround sound speakers in proper locations about the room. We have decided that these are people with large living rooms, because they set up nicely in ours. And now we have become people with a surround sound audio system. I never imagined I would be one of those people. When I told Michael this, he laughed and said, "Why? It's so cheap."
Anyway, a lot of you know we don't have a TV (and don't want one, so don't get any ideas for Christmas from that statement). And we don't have a stereo. So the surround sound now solely exists for the random DVD rental, or as in the case of last night, Homestar Runner viewing. Ah, love it.
Today, we're going to head out to the Aquarium in Waikiki. I think it's near a beach, which would mean we might see a beach today too. That would be a first. Ocean we have now seen from the top of Diamond Head. We even looked over a handrail in Ala Moana near the Aloha Tower and saw tropical fish in the water (that doesn't count as seeing ocean because that's where all the huge-ass ships dock, so you cannot see more than maybe... thirty or forty yards into the water). So today, we will see an aquarium, and maybe a beach if one presents itself.
But let me get back to part two of the series I've titled in my head 'Is it any wonder they hate us?' I had been told again and again before I came here that Native Hawaiians would not like me because I was white and an outsider. This was told to me with a kind of a... 'well, what are you gonna do?' sort of tone. I guess it just seems to me that we, or at least I, never bothered to learn the history here. So of course we, or at least I, would wonder why would I be an outsider from the same country, and second off, why would they hate white people so much?
There have been two things that have struck me about my own personal thought processes: One, I was flat out wrong about Haunani Trask. And I'm already embarrassed by my original assumptions. Granted, "well-spoken angry activist" is very high praise from me. It is kind of what I aspire to be. And she is those things. But she's also a historian with an incredible understanding of the story of her people. And she's a genius as far as I'm concerned with this encyclopedic knowledge of Hawaiian, national, and international law. I struggle to understand the full implications of legalese, making me all the more certain that we need an overhaul of our systems of law and politics if we are going to make them workable to the common person. At any rate, the second thing that surprises me repeatedly is how very little I know, and how very little it occurs to me that there is to know. It doesn't really shock me when I read about how the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor and marginalized. What shocks me each time I hear about these things is how it never occurred to me that it might be going on. It has never occurred to me to wonder about the Native people of Hawai'i. And now that it is on my mind, I can't help but think, "Why not?" And how many other people are out there being stepped on for my benefit and why is it still not occurring to me to wonder about them?
Haunani Trask makes a good point, and one that I've never before considered. The United States is a settler society. The Constitution that we look to to protect people's rights was written by settlers who were living on land they had stolen, and that they felt they had every right to be a free people on. The rights to life, liberty, and property did not apply to the indigenous people. And even now there is nothing in our Constitution that protects them. There is nothing in our Constitution that protected Hawai'i from us. There is nothing in our Constitution that protects Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or anyone else from us. Our Constitution protects us from us, and us from other people, and that's about it.
So the Native Hawaiians are looking to international law to find some protection. Did you know that Native Hawaiians do not have the same rights and autonomy as the Native Americans on the mainland? There are no reservations, there is no land set aside for them, there is no self-governance. There are systems within the government that conquered them that are supposed to be taking care of them, but those systems are run by our government, meaning we are determining what is best for them. Even right now, in the paper this morning, non-Hawaiian residents are suing the Office of Hawaiian affairs for using money set aside for the benefit of Native Hawaiians to creating a voter registry of Native Hawaiians that would be used to help determine what steps Native Hawaiians should take toward a Native Hawaiian governing entity. And why are these white guys suing over something that clearly doesn't concern them? They say it's because they think it's racist that they wouldn't get to vote too. But really, why do you think? When it comes to Hawai'i, we don't have the Native Hawaiians' best interests at heart. We have money at heart. So yeah, they're looking to international human rights laws for help. And really, I think they deserve to have third party intervention.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Library Card = Knowledge
Okay, so I succeeded in having an entry solely devoted to spam (see below). Now, let's talk about some other things.
I hadn't mentioned, but I cut my hair maybe two days into our move. I realized quickly that this place has perpetual ponytail weather, and I wondered what was the point of having all this hair if I would never see it and never use it. So I used Anna's faux-layering technique and chopped of about 13 or 14 inches. My hair is just long enough that I can pull it all into a ponytail if I want. And it's just short enough that when I leave it down, it doesn't get sweaty on my shoulders and back. And now that we have internet, I can look up the address to Locks for Love and mail it off.
Also, I use a lot less shampoo and conditioner now, and my showers take much less time. So that's another bonus.
...
We've been in Hawaii for almost two weeks. It was time to get a library card. So yesterday, Michael and I pulled out our trusty map and located all of the purple squares marked "L." We also checked the phone book because we knew there was one somewhere around King Kamehameha's statue but we couldn't find it marked. Anyway, we found one within short-walking distance from our house. So we completed The Daily Sunscreen Routine and set out.
The Daily Sunscreen Routine, for those of your who were wondering, is exactly what it sounds like it might be. I'll point out here that perhaps the most important word in that title is Daily. I don't really like wearing sunscreen. I don't like the way it feels and I don't like the way it smells. So it used to be that I would only wear it when I knew I would need it (just before I went on a 10 mile run, just before I went to the lake or an outdoor barbecue, just before I went on a protest march, etc.). Now, however, it goes on before I leave the house. No matter what. I have worn sunscreen every day, all day long, since I have been here. It strikes me as odd that I will always have to do this, but I know I will always have to do this. Even with all the sunscreen, I'm already tanned. I'm perhaps more tanned than I've even been in my life, excepting the months following that severe sunburn I got in Belize.
Anyway, we went to the library. We don't have local IDs yet, so we had to provide bills as proof of residence. We registered, got our cards, and then asked if they had museum passes you could check out. It turns out that very, very few (like, maybe one) museums in Honolulu are city or state run. They're all private. So no, there are no museum passes at the library. But the lady suggested that we call the museums about their free-days, and also get info about annual passes, which are especially good if you're expecting lots of visitors in a year.
We poked around a bit. I discovered that the library near our apartment has the entire Dune series, which I have always wanted to read. I checked out the first book, Dune, because it's been seven years since I read it. I wanted to refresh before I moved on.
But the first book I picked up, actually the first book I pulled into my hand when I started looking around is "From a Native Daughter" by Haunani-Kay Trask. I opened into the introduction and could not pry my eyes away from the pages. Trask is an activist and advocate for Native Hawaiian rights. I read the first few pages of her introduction and debated, seriously debated, whether or not I should read the book. On the one hand of the debate was the learning the Native Hawaiian history and perspective from an angry, well-spoken, and highly knowledgeable activist. I really value such knowledge and insight. As a child of the dominating class, my education has so oftentimes glossed over or ignored completely the struggles of the people we have conquered and oppressed in our quest to obtain and retain our power. Some (white people) would argue that an angry minority activist is not going to give you a true depiction of history either. But I would argue that the story deserves to be told from both sides, especially since it has been proven over and over that the winner's history is *never* completely accurate. And as far as the history of Hawai'i goes, the only side of the story I ever heard in school was "Hawai'i finally became a state in 1959." And there was much rejoicing. Yay. As a child it never occurred to me there might be more story to it than that. And very clearly, there is.
So, holding this book in the library, the other hand of my debate on whether I should check it out and read it was the fear that I would read it and hate myself, as a white woman, for coming to this stolen land. In the end, there was really no debate. I owe it to the people who should own these islands to know how it was that I got here. One of my major goals in life is to NOT be one of those white people who simply accepts and benefits from the privileges given me, but to instead by a white person who pays attention, who gives a damn, and who does something about it. Furthermore, I realize upon reflection, there is no home I can go back to that had not been conquered by our forefathers. Ours is a heretage of conquest. I can ignore this past, but this past remains.
I checked the book out. The introduction is a brief history of American colonization, military domination, a depletion by 90% of the native population in 70 years due to imported diseases, the overthrowing of the democratically elected ruling government, the installation of an all-white government where only English-speaking wealthy property owners could vote, the refusal of President Grover Cleveland to annex Hawai'i after an investigation revealed the extent of the force and corruption involved in the ceding of powers by the Hawaiian Queen to the United States, but how the Native Hawaiian government was never reinstated, how the islands were annexed by McKinley in 1898, how the military declared martial law for seven years during and after World War II, and how Hawai'i became a state without a vote of the people or even a vote in Congress because there was not enough support from either-- from Native Hawaiians for the obvious reasons, and from Congress because they were wary of accepting a "colored" population into our pretty white country. (And god, I have to apologize for using that word, even in quotation marks. Trask used it in her book and it reflects white people's concept of minorities at the time, but I still feel dirty having it in my blog.)
It is really no different than any other story within the creation of this great nation. I'm glad I picked up this book, almost randomly, off of the library shelf. It is a fitting place for me to begin my Hawaiian journey.
I hadn't mentioned, but I cut my hair maybe two days into our move. I realized quickly that this place has perpetual ponytail weather, and I wondered what was the point of having all this hair if I would never see it and never use it. So I used Anna's faux-layering technique and chopped of about 13 or 14 inches. My hair is just long enough that I can pull it all into a ponytail if I want. And it's just short enough that when I leave it down, it doesn't get sweaty on my shoulders and back. And now that we have internet, I can look up the address to Locks for Love and mail it off.
Also, I use a lot less shampoo and conditioner now, and my showers take much less time. So that's another bonus.
...
We've been in Hawaii for almost two weeks. It was time to get a library card. So yesterday, Michael and I pulled out our trusty map and located all of the purple squares marked "L." We also checked the phone book because we knew there was one somewhere around King Kamehameha's statue but we couldn't find it marked. Anyway, we found one within short-walking distance from our house. So we completed The Daily Sunscreen Routine and set out.
The Daily Sunscreen Routine, for those of your who were wondering, is exactly what it sounds like it might be. I'll point out here that perhaps the most important word in that title is Daily. I don't really like wearing sunscreen. I don't like the way it feels and I don't like the way it smells. So it used to be that I would only wear it when I knew I would need it (just before I went on a 10 mile run, just before I went to the lake or an outdoor barbecue, just before I went on a protest march, etc.). Now, however, it goes on before I leave the house. No matter what. I have worn sunscreen every day, all day long, since I have been here. It strikes me as odd that I will always have to do this, but I know I will always have to do this. Even with all the sunscreen, I'm already tanned. I'm perhaps more tanned than I've even been in my life, excepting the months following that severe sunburn I got in Belize.
Anyway, we went to the library. We don't have local IDs yet, so we had to provide bills as proof of residence. We registered, got our cards, and then asked if they had museum passes you could check out. It turns out that very, very few (like, maybe one) museums in Honolulu are city or state run. They're all private. So no, there are no museum passes at the library. But the lady suggested that we call the museums about their free-days, and also get info about annual passes, which are especially good if you're expecting lots of visitors in a year.
We poked around a bit. I discovered that the library near our apartment has the entire Dune series, which I have always wanted to read. I checked out the first book, Dune, because it's been seven years since I read it. I wanted to refresh before I moved on.
But the first book I picked up, actually the first book I pulled into my hand when I started looking around is "From a Native Daughter" by Haunani-Kay Trask. I opened into the introduction and could not pry my eyes away from the pages. Trask is an activist and advocate for Native Hawaiian rights. I read the first few pages of her introduction and debated, seriously debated, whether or not I should read the book. On the one hand of the debate was the learning the Native Hawaiian history and perspective from an angry, well-spoken, and highly knowledgeable activist. I really value such knowledge and insight. As a child of the dominating class, my education has so oftentimes glossed over or ignored completely the struggles of the people we have conquered and oppressed in our quest to obtain and retain our power. Some (white people) would argue that an angry minority activist is not going to give you a true depiction of history either. But I would argue that the story deserves to be told from both sides, especially since it has been proven over and over that the winner's history is *never* completely accurate. And as far as the history of Hawai'i goes, the only side of the story I ever heard in school was "Hawai'i finally became a state in 1959." And there was much rejoicing. Yay. As a child it never occurred to me there might be more story to it than that. And very clearly, there is.
So, holding this book in the library, the other hand of my debate on whether I should check it out and read it was the fear that I would read it and hate myself, as a white woman, for coming to this stolen land. In the end, there was really no debate. I owe it to the people who should own these islands to know how it was that I got here. One of my major goals in life is to NOT be one of those white people who simply accepts and benefits from the privileges given me, but to instead by a white person who pays attention, who gives a damn, and who does something about it. Furthermore, I realize upon reflection, there is no home I can go back to that had not been conquered by our forefathers. Ours is a heretage of conquest. I can ignore this past, but this past remains.
I checked the book out. The introduction is a brief history of American colonization, military domination, a depletion by 90% of the native population in 70 years due to imported diseases, the overthrowing of the democratically elected ruling government, the installation of an all-white government where only English-speaking wealthy property owners could vote, the refusal of President Grover Cleveland to annex Hawai'i after an investigation revealed the extent of the force and corruption involved in the ceding of powers by the Hawaiian Queen to the United States, but how the Native Hawaiian government was never reinstated, how the islands were annexed by McKinley in 1898, how the military declared martial law for seven years during and after World War II, and how Hawai'i became a state without a vote of the people or even a vote in Congress because there was not enough support from either-- from Native Hawaiians for the obvious reasons, and from Congress because they were wary of accepting a "colored" population into our pretty white country. (And god, I have to apologize for using that word, even in quotation marks. Trask used it in her book and it reflects white people's concept of minorities at the time, but I still feel dirty having it in my blog.)
It is really no different than any other story within the creation of this great nation. I'm glad I picked up this book, almost randomly, off of the library shelf. It is a fitting place for me to begin my Hawaiian journey.
Let the meat be canned
Spam.
Everyone said there would be spam here. And that people ate it all the time. We haven't yet been to any restaurants, so I haven't confirmed it there. We haven't yet been to any people's houses for dinner, so I haven't confirmed it there. However, we've been to the grocery store several times, and well... the spam aisle is... extensive. There are types and varieties of spam that I never would have dreamed of. There are special anniversary cans. There are collectible cans. There are flavors for every palate from spicy to sweet. There is turkey spam. There is spam lite. (Speaking of "spam lite," Anna, I received a spam email today with the subject title "we received your appication." And I wondered, 'my appication for what?')
That I know of, I'd never had spam before. It has a taste kind of reminiscent of Vienna sausages. And ham. And... stuff. But we've thrown ourselves into this spam thing, eating spam sometimes five, sometimes seven times a day. Okay, slight exaggeration. We've had it thrice total, so let me share my superior spam knowledge with all of you non-spam-eaters back home.
Regular spam tastes better once it has been fried. And it is good with maple flavor baked beans and rice. It is very rich and after you've eaten it, you kind of feel like you should never eat meat or eggs or anything with fat or cholesterol or sodium in it ever again.
Turkey spam is a whole lot less bad for you than regular spam. Way less fat and cholesterol. I think the sodium's about the same though. Which is somewhere around 'a lot'. We discovered two things with our venture into the world of turkey spam. One, it's just not as good as the pork kind. Two, if you're going to make a spam sandwich, don't forget the tomato.
Spam lite tastes similar to regular spam, but is a lot less rich. It's lower in fat and lower in sodium. And because I have tried three varieties now, I feel as though that gives me the authority to have a favorite. Spam lite is my favorite. But I don't think I'll get any when we go grocery shopping this weekend. I think I'm all spammed out for now.
Everyone said there would be spam here. And that people ate it all the time. We haven't yet been to any restaurants, so I haven't confirmed it there. We haven't yet been to any people's houses for dinner, so I haven't confirmed it there. However, we've been to the grocery store several times, and well... the spam aisle is... extensive. There are types and varieties of spam that I never would have dreamed of. There are special anniversary cans. There are collectible cans. There are flavors for every palate from spicy to sweet. There is turkey spam. There is spam lite. (Speaking of "spam lite," Anna, I received a spam email today with the subject title "we received your appication." And I wondered, 'my appication for what?')
That I know of, I'd never had spam before. It has a taste kind of reminiscent of Vienna sausages. And ham. And... stuff. But we've thrown ourselves into this spam thing, eating spam sometimes five, sometimes seven times a day. Okay, slight exaggeration. We've had it thrice total, so let me share my superior spam knowledge with all of you non-spam-eaters back home.
Regular spam tastes better once it has been fried. And it is good with maple flavor baked beans and rice. It is very rich and after you've eaten it, you kind of feel like you should never eat meat or eggs or anything with fat or cholesterol or sodium in it ever again.
Turkey spam is a whole lot less bad for you than regular spam. Way less fat and cholesterol. I think the sodium's about the same though. Which is somewhere around 'a lot'. We discovered two things with our venture into the world of turkey spam. One, it's just not as good as the pork kind. Two, if you're going to make a spam sandwich, don't forget the tomato.
Spam lite tastes similar to regular spam, but is a lot less rich. It's lower in fat and lower in sodium. And because I have tried three varieties now, I feel as though that gives me the authority to have a favorite. Spam lite is my favorite. But I don't think I'll get any when we go grocery shopping this weekend. I think I'm all spammed out for now.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
And Now We're Online
Things are getting set up nicely for us. We've got furniture, and for the most part, everything that has arrived in Honolulu has been put away. We'll still be receiving more boxes in the coming weeks (we shipped some things slowly to save money), and then that stuff'll be put away. And we're still trying to arrange our counterspace in the kitchen so that everything fits. But it's all coming together.
Like I said, it's not a pretty place, but I really kind of like it. And I like it all the more because it's Michael's and my first place alone together. It's nice. And so far as I can tell after two weeks, the noise of the traffic on Kapi'olani Blvd would be the only reason we'd move out of here before our four years is up. But we'll evaluate all these things as the weeks move into months and we have a better perspective of life in Honolulu.
Michael and I are still in this phase of doing everything together. Every errand that could be run by one is run by two. We visit each other's campuses together. It'll last, I suspect, for another week and a half. Once I start my grad school orientation and we get our own seperate daily schedules, we'll start doing our own things. But it's nice while it lasts, that your first few weeks in a new place you get to spend with someone so cool who's also exploring. We did the same those first few weeks in Chicago. And we have this nice parentheses in between moving and starting life, so we get to relax and poke around and take care of things without sweating our schedules. But still, we sweat.
It is hot here. And our little section of Hawai'i is certainly not pretty. We've got a vacant lot taking up most of the view out of the front of our place. Seven pick-up trucks pull into it every morning, then the drivers load into a van and go off somewhere to work. Presumably, at least. If you look out to the left from some points you can see Diamond Head. And if you look out to the right you can see bits of the Ko'olau Range. We're certainly not living in luxury, but we are certainly living with all the basic comforts. We got our coffee maker, our microwave, and now, our internet. And we're getting a window box air conditioner to use in the front room in the afternoons, which I've mentioned below, gets friggin hot when the sun hits the western portion of the sky.
Summer is different here than in Chicago. By February I would be so sick of the cold of winter. It would take me a good couple of months of real heat before I'd feel ready to face it again. So I'd spend my summers hot, soaking up the heat as though it gave me some sort of internal store that would help me survive the quickly coming cold. But there is no coming cold. I don't have to store up the heat, filling up my bones with it, holding it in. In fact, I don't have to take advantage of every pretty day that comes along. Because every day is pretty. I can live with this.
I'm not used to the time differences yet. It's 10:30am right now, but it's 4:30 pm in TN and Chicago. I was going to call home on Sunday to talk to everyone at family dinner, but by early afternoon, it was too late. It's weird. It'll take some getting used to.
Another thing, off the subject, that Michael and I have been enjoying is the birdlife here. We've been watching birds, and they have been entertaining. We saw three right outside our door get into a knock-down, drag-out fight. Literally, one of the birds pinned another one to the ground and beat with its wings whenever it tried to get back up! Crazy tropical ghetto birds.
Well, it's August now. And I've got my Month of August 2007 pass for The Bus. So, I guess it's time to go get my explore-on.
peace out,
kati
Like I said, it's not a pretty place, but I really kind of like it. And I like it all the more because it's Michael's and my first place alone together. It's nice. And so far as I can tell after two weeks, the noise of the traffic on Kapi'olani Blvd would be the only reason we'd move out of here before our four years is up. But we'll evaluate all these things as the weeks move into months and we have a better perspective of life in Honolulu.
Michael and I are still in this phase of doing everything together. Every errand that could be run by one is run by two. We visit each other's campuses together. It'll last, I suspect, for another week and a half. Once I start my grad school orientation and we get our own seperate daily schedules, we'll start doing our own things. But it's nice while it lasts, that your first few weeks in a new place you get to spend with someone so cool who's also exploring. We did the same those first few weeks in Chicago. And we have this nice parentheses in between moving and starting life, so we get to relax and poke around and take care of things without sweating our schedules. But still, we sweat.
It is hot here. And our little section of Hawai'i is certainly not pretty. We've got a vacant lot taking up most of the view out of the front of our place. Seven pick-up trucks pull into it every morning, then the drivers load into a van and go off somewhere to work. Presumably, at least. If you look out to the left from some points you can see Diamond Head. And if you look out to the right you can see bits of the Ko'olau Range. We're certainly not living in luxury, but we are certainly living with all the basic comforts. We got our coffee maker, our microwave, and now, our internet. And we're getting a window box air conditioner to use in the front room in the afternoons, which I've mentioned below, gets friggin hot when the sun hits the western portion of the sky.
Summer is different here than in Chicago. By February I would be so sick of the cold of winter. It would take me a good couple of months of real heat before I'd feel ready to face it again. So I'd spend my summers hot, soaking up the heat as though it gave me some sort of internal store that would help me survive the quickly coming cold. But there is no coming cold. I don't have to store up the heat, filling up my bones with it, holding it in. In fact, I don't have to take advantage of every pretty day that comes along. Because every day is pretty. I can live with this.
I'm not used to the time differences yet. It's 10:30am right now, but it's 4:30 pm in TN and Chicago. I was going to call home on Sunday to talk to everyone at family dinner, but by early afternoon, it was too late. It's weird. It'll take some getting used to.
Another thing, off the subject, that Michael and I have been enjoying is the birdlife here. We've been watching birds, and they have been entertaining. We saw three right outside our door get into a knock-down, drag-out fight. Literally, one of the birds pinned another one to the ground and beat with its wings whenever it tried to get back up! Crazy tropical ghetto birds.
Well, it's August now. And I've got my Month of August 2007 pass for The Bus. So, I guess it's time to go get my explore-on.
peace out,
kati
The First Days
7/28/07
I haven’t figured out what I’m going to call this blog yet, but that’s fine. I still have days left before we have internet, so the world will have to wait at least that long for my inspired genius anyway.
We landed in Honolulu on Monday night after an extraordinarily long flight, punctuated by extraordinarily long delays. We flew over snow-capped mountains, which I thought was awesome given where we were going to end up. All told, travel took us like, 20 hours. We were quite tired when we got in. We were supposed to land at 1:30, giving us plenty of daylight hours to get settled in, get the basics adjusted. Instead, we landed at 8:30. Sun had set at 7:15; I had checked the weather report the day before to get that time. It was dark, and yes, rainy. The cab driver made some quip about the heaviness of our luggage. ‘It’s like you’re moving,’ he said. ‘We are,’ we told him. He didn’t know where our place was, asked us for directions. I shrugged. Never been there. He didn’t seem too impressed. I began to wonder about this renting sight-unseen idea. Maybe my undying belief that everything will be alright, even when it isn’t, was going to fail me.
But I shouldn’t have worried so much.
We drove past some nice places. We drove past some not-so-nice places. We drove past some more nice places, and some more not-so-nice places. And lots and lots of city. I had been telling myself for weeks to remember that I’m not really moving to an island. I’m moving to a city. And yeah, I did. Most of the Honolulu that I’ve seen these past days does not quite fit into my idea of what Hawai’i is. Mostly because my idea still does not contain a huge friggin city. It’s island, and resort, and palm trees, and volcanoes, and ocean beyond ocean… So far, I’ve seen a good deal of the ridge, but I haven’t really seen the ocean. Not yet.
At any rate, we pulled up next to our building, which is this tiny, cinder-block eight-flat painted brown and tan. It’s on Kapi’olani Blvd, which is kind of a major street. Big enough that you must cross at a stoplight, or you will get run over. Or the cars will have to stop, one. I knocked on Walter’s door and he let us into our place. We dragged our stuff inside, popped down to a corner convenience for some toilet paper, laid out the Korean blanket on the floor, and went to sleep on it.
We explored a bit more the next day. Here’s the layout of the place. We’re the upper corner on the far end from the street. The front door opens into a living room/kitchen area. If you step a bit to the left, onto the linoleum of the kitchen, you can walk straight forward into the bathroom, which is actually pretty big. Actually, it’s the biggest bathroom I’ve had since I moved out of the dorms and stopped sharing my bathroom with twenty other girls. Michael and I talked about that excess of space, and how we might want to find something to do with it. We haven’t yet.
On the other side of the bathroom is our lanai, which translates into “shitty little balcony with a washer/dryer, sink, water heater, and cramped view of the backs of other people’s apartments.” Or maybe we just didn’t get too great a lanai. I’ve already taken to having my morning coffee out on the front second-story walkway, where I’ve got a just-as-uninspiring-but-at-least-wide-open view of Kapi’olani Blvd. Only thing is, I can’t put a chair out there because it’s shared space. Who knows, maybe I’ll warm up to the lanai. I think more likely is that we’ll put some plants back there, but never really use it for anything but laundry.
But back to the linoleum kitchen, you can take a right just past the living room and enter our bedroom. It’s big enough, and it has got a pretty big closet. All in all, this is a nice place. But not nice like “pretty Hawaiian flat.” Nice like, “cozy, with everything we need, and no bug or critter infestation.” Thanks, E, by the way, for your blessing. It worked.
It’s really only been a few days that we’ve been here, but already it’s hard to distinguish what we’ve done during each one. I know the first day we found the grocery store, about a third to a half a mile down the street. We cleaned up some more, just to be sure it’s only our own filth that covers everything. (Although everything does look kind of dingy regardless. I think it’s because you really kind of keep the… eleven windows open all the time.) And we got our gas hooked up. On Wednesday we went to meet the building management people, who are all really nice. We gave them the checklist apartment stuff, where we’d made note of slightly-broken stuff so that we don’t get charged for it at the end, and they sent a repair guy out on Friday. We also spent about two hours looking for a phone. Wound up at Sears in the Ala Moana shopping center, which is… expletive huge. And open air.
That’s something I’ve noticed about most large buildings here. The hallways are all open-air. The shops in this mall, for instance, are indoors and air conditioned. But everything in between is open air. The post office the same way. Campus buildings, same. I do wonder about what happens during a tropical storm. Do they just let the mall flood, or is there some sort of sealing system that takes care of things like that? I mean, it’s all concrete and stone, but there are also all the things you would see in the hallways of any other mall— cellphone kiosks and that car that every mall everywhere is always raffling off.
Thursday was the big crazy day. We rented a U-Haul and drove around collecting furniture and appliances from Goodwill, K-mart, Salvation Army, and the Waialae Furniture Bargain House. We now have everything. It’s like a real apartment. Not that I didn’t enjoy sleeping on the floor, but dude, queen-size bed is way better.
On Friday we went to my campus, met a couple people in my department, poked around a bit, and set up furniture. Which brings us to today in which we did our first weekly shopping trip (Previously we’d bought a day-ish worth of food because we had to carry it home. But we bought a cart while we were at K-mart, so now we can bring home a week’s worth at once). Also, I pulled out my back pretty badly this morning in the final stages of putting together furniture. My poor back. It’s had a tough week. But it gets a rest now.
So here are some things of note about living in Hawai’i.
* First off, people like throwing apostrophes into words here. Sometimes I can tell they work as stresses, as in the case of Kapi’olani, which I had been stressing incorrectly. But other words, like Hawai’i… dunno. Maybe? Also, the h’s are really pronounced here. It’s not quite like the jota in Spanish, which of course has the kind of throat-clearing sound in with it, but the h’s are pronounced. And it’s kind of a ‘hoh’ sound, which give Hawai’i a kind of diphthong there at the beginning. I’m still working on this.
* Also, it’s pretty hot here. It’s not really warm with tropical island breezes. For the most part, it’s just hot. And it rains here on this part of the island several times a day, but nothing ever gets wet, partially because the rain is usually misty and doesn’t last long, and partially because even when it rains hard, it evaporates like nothing. The front half of our house is west-facing and gets really warm in the afternoon. The windows do not help between 4:30 and 6:30. The door becomes hot to the touch. The cinder-block walls become warm. We have an “air conditioner” in the kitchen, but I’m putting it in quotes because it doesn’t work. But the back of our place stays pretty well cool in the evenings. Too bad our desks have to go in the front, eh?
* People are really nice here. It’s just fine to smile and wave at a complete stranger. If you look like you don’t know where you’re going, someone will stop you and ask you if you need help. And sometimes, they’ll stop other people and ask them if they agree with the help they’ve already offered you. If it has to do with bus travel, everyone says, “Ask the driver.” But in a really emphatic way, like you’ll hurt their feelings if you don’t ask the driver after they just told you to. Of course, they’ve already told you what they know. I guess it’s just because they don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction. Also, drivers will always stop at crosswalks if people are standing near them, preparing to cross the street. Then they’ll smile and wave at you. Our neighbor whose name I don’t know yet offered to help us unload the U-Haul. We were already finished and were about to leave to return it, but he stopped us, waved us over, and asked if we needed help. Trisha, who’s and undergrad that works in the Psych office, gave me a campus map and showed us all the places we might possibly want to go while we’re students, including tips on which nearby restaurants had good food. Then she gave us a map of plants on campus. Michael and I bummed around with it for about an hour. There’s some really cool stuff here.
Haven’t seen the ocean yet, and only a couple random views of the Ko’olau Range. We’re going to Diamond Head crater tomorrow, and after August starts, we’re going to start taking the bus all over. We’re waiting for August because the month passes are for calendar months, not for thirty-days beginning whenever like the Chicago CTA passes. Now that we have our place set up, there’s a lot less to do in terms of settling in. And in the meantime of settling in, we have figured a lot out. We’ve got a very general layout of Honolulu in our heads. We’re learning the bus routes. We know where the shops are that we’ll use regularly, and a few not-so-regular ones. And we found Chinatown, which is on the bus route that goes right past our place. I’m excited about this because I know they’ve got farmer’s markets there, and I really dig local shopping.
There’s not much of a rhyme or reason as far as I can tell, to where poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods go. We’ve gone down streets where you would pass a poor neighborhood, then a rich neighborhood, then another poor neighborhood, and then another rich neighborhood—all within the space of a mile and a half. They just all seem mixed together in some random way.
I saw someone with a Hawai’i foodbank t-shirt, so I know that exists here. I’ve found on the map a Salvation Army family services center not too far from Michael’s campus. And I found a community center not too far from my campus. So I’ll poke around at these and other places to see if there is somewhere good to volunteer. After I get my grad school schedule. Grad school, I know, will be wholly different than anything I’ve done before. I don’t want to put too much on my plate before I know what exactly I’ll be doing. At the same time, I can’t imagine NOT volunteering after these past four years. It just… doesn’t seem right. I know I’ll have time to do something. And if I don’t take that time to do something, I’ll be wasting that time.
Also, I really don’t know how poor people move. It sucks, absolutely sucks, trying to get around and set yourself up in a new place when you don’t have a car. It would have been impossible if we hadn’t rented the U-Haul. At least, we’d still be sleeping on the floor and wouldn’t have desks, or chairs, or dressers. Picking up boxes from the post office is an ordeal on the bus. So yeah, I’m soooo thankful that we had some savings from our pre-Chicago years to help us out with moving. Money makes everything easier. And no, Mom, we don’t need anymore. We’ve got savings to live on until the income starts. And that won’t be too much longer anyway.
7/31/07
August starts tomorrow, which is a good thing in terms of bus travel. Michael and I are really looking forward to August. It is such a pain when you travel about as much as we’ve been doing to count out your ones, go buy something cheap so you can have more ones, make sure you have enough ones…. But August starts and we get to flash our nifty bus passes that say “August 2007” and they’ll just let us get on the bus and ride.
Busy and loud though our street is, it’s actually a pretty good location in terms of getting around. The number 9 bus, that goes right by our house, connects to pretty much every bus route to any location on the island. We can see it all, in two trips or less.
The Bus isn’t as frequent as the Chicago CTA. The wait times, especially during non-peak hours, can be quite cumbersome. What I think that’ll translate to in practice, at least for me, is that I’ll schedule that extra time into whatever I’m planning, and use it as one more excuse to sit back and relax. And sweat. Which is of course, now part of the daily routine.
Michael and I switched up our plans a bit for purposes of practicality. We didn’t go to Diamond Head that next day. Instead, we went to Chinatown and bummed about. And yes, fruits and vegetables seem to be almost half price there than they are in our local grocery. But, it’s a long-ass ride. I don’t think we’ll be shopping there regularly, which is a shame. And it rained for a few minutes while we were there. Like, actual rain that made the streets wet and everything. I watched the passers-by at this time. They paused underneath awnings to let the rain pass, which it did rather quickly.
Chinatown, by the way, is not like Chinatown in Chicago. There you will find restaurants and a few shops for very Chinese-looking things that were, yeah, made in China. But in Honolulu’s Chinatown, you’ll find Chinese life. When you walk through you really do feel as though you’re walking through a small piece of displaced China. It’s really neat.
Anyway, I haven’t seen Walgreens around here, but there is Long’s Drugstore. And we knew there was one in Chinatown, so we went there. And we bought… inserts for our shoes to make them comfortable for the long hike of Diamond Head!
Which brings us to Monday. And by the way, I’ll stop with the daily play-by-play once I have a daily schedule. But for now, every day brings something new.
So. We went first to Kapi’olani Community College where Michael’s gonna go. It is right on the edge of Diamond Head Crater. I’ll also say, I believe it is a far prettier campus than mine. The landscaping is incredible. There’s a cactus garden with every variety of cactus that exists, and a few more that they made up just to show off. We poked around a bit, found out that Michael needs shots to go to school, and also found out that he can wait until my paperwork has been processed to process his paperwork, and get the nifty in-state tuition level.
And then we hiked Diamond Head. It’s less than a mile up, but that’s a mile UP, so it seems like more. There were old ladies going up with walkers… okay, I exaggerate… they had canes. It seemed doable for them, but hard, and long. Took me and Michael about a half hour to get up to the top and oh my god… the view is great. I could look about maybe 270degrees and see ocean on the horizon. The remaining 90degrees holds the Ko’olau Range. Oh, it’s so worth it. I told one the ladies with a cane that on my way back down. She said, “Oh good, I keep telling myself that.” Anyway, anyone who comes to visit me will have to hike Diamond Head with me. It costs a dollar. Or, at the top you can spring for the $5 (I think) certificate of achievement. We didn’t. And there’s t-shirts. Proceeds go to support Oahu hiking trails. I’ll support them at some point, I’m sure, since I intend to use them at least once during our time here.
I haven’t figured out what I’m going to call this blog yet, but that’s fine. I still have days left before we have internet, so the world will have to wait at least that long for my inspired genius anyway.
We landed in Honolulu on Monday night after an extraordinarily long flight, punctuated by extraordinarily long delays. We flew over snow-capped mountains, which I thought was awesome given where we were going to end up. All told, travel took us like, 20 hours. We were quite tired when we got in. We were supposed to land at 1:30, giving us plenty of daylight hours to get settled in, get the basics adjusted. Instead, we landed at 8:30. Sun had set at 7:15; I had checked the weather report the day before to get that time. It was dark, and yes, rainy. The cab driver made some quip about the heaviness of our luggage. ‘It’s like you’re moving,’ he said. ‘We are,’ we told him. He didn’t know where our place was, asked us for directions. I shrugged. Never been there. He didn’t seem too impressed. I began to wonder about this renting sight-unseen idea. Maybe my undying belief that everything will be alright, even when it isn’t, was going to fail me.
But I shouldn’t have worried so much.
We drove past some nice places. We drove past some not-so-nice places. We drove past some more nice places, and some more not-so-nice places. And lots and lots of city. I had been telling myself for weeks to remember that I’m not really moving to an island. I’m moving to a city. And yeah, I did. Most of the Honolulu that I’ve seen these past days does not quite fit into my idea of what Hawai’i is. Mostly because my idea still does not contain a huge friggin city. It’s island, and resort, and palm trees, and volcanoes, and ocean beyond ocean… So far, I’ve seen a good deal of the ridge, but I haven’t really seen the ocean. Not yet.
At any rate, we pulled up next to our building, which is this tiny, cinder-block eight-flat painted brown and tan. It’s on Kapi’olani Blvd, which is kind of a major street. Big enough that you must cross at a stoplight, or you will get run over. Or the cars will have to stop, one. I knocked on Walter’s door and he let us into our place. We dragged our stuff inside, popped down to a corner convenience for some toilet paper, laid out the Korean blanket on the floor, and went to sleep on it.
We explored a bit more the next day. Here’s the layout of the place. We’re the upper corner on the far end from the street. The front door opens into a living room/kitchen area. If you step a bit to the left, onto the linoleum of the kitchen, you can walk straight forward into the bathroom, which is actually pretty big. Actually, it’s the biggest bathroom I’ve had since I moved out of the dorms and stopped sharing my bathroom with twenty other girls. Michael and I talked about that excess of space, and how we might want to find something to do with it. We haven’t yet.
On the other side of the bathroom is our lanai, which translates into “shitty little balcony with a washer/dryer, sink, water heater, and cramped view of the backs of other people’s apartments.” Or maybe we just didn’t get too great a lanai. I’ve already taken to having my morning coffee out on the front second-story walkway, where I’ve got a just-as-uninspiring-but-at-least-wide-open view of Kapi’olani Blvd. Only thing is, I can’t put a chair out there because it’s shared space. Who knows, maybe I’ll warm up to the lanai. I think more likely is that we’ll put some plants back there, but never really use it for anything but laundry.
But back to the linoleum kitchen, you can take a right just past the living room and enter our bedroom. It’s big enough, and it has got a pretty big closet. All in all, this is a nice place. But not nice like “pretty Hawaiian flat.” Nice like, “cozy, with everything we need, and no bug or critter infestation.” Thanks, E, by the way, for your blessing. It worked.
It’s really only been a few days that we’ve been here, but already it’s hard to distinguish what we’ve done during each one. I know the first day we found the grocery store, about a third to a half a mile down the street. We cleaned up some more, just to be sure it’s only our own filth that covers everything. (Although everything does look kind of dingy regardless. I think it’s because you really kind of keep the… eleven windows open all the time.) And we got our gas hooked up. On Wednesday we went to meet the building management people, who are all really nice. We gave them the checklist apartment stuff, where we’d made note of slightly-broken stuff so that we don’t get charged for it at the end, and they sent a repair guy out on Friday. We also spent about two hours looking for a phone. Wound up at Sears in the Ala Moana shopping center, which is… expletive huge. And open air.
That’s something I’ve noticed about most large buildings here. The hallways are all open-air. The shops in this mall, for instance, are indoors and air conditioned. But everything in between is open air. The post office the same way. Campus buildings, same. I do wonder about what happens during a tropical storm. Do they just let the mall flood, or is there some sort of sealing system that takes care of things like that? I mean, it’s all concrete and stone, but there are also all the things you would see in the hallways of any other mall— cellphone kiosks and that car that every mall everywhere is always raffling off.
Thursday was the big crazy day. We rented a U-Haul and drove around collecting furniture and appliances from Goodwill, K-mart, Salvation Army, and the Waialae Furniture Bargain House. We now have everything. It’s like a real apartment. Not that I didn’t enjoy sleeping on the floor, but dude, queen-size bed is way better.
On Friday we went to my campus, met a couple people in my department, poked around a bit, and set up furniture. Which brings us to today in which we did our first weekly shopping trip (Previously we’d bought a day-ish worth of food because we had to carry it home. But we bought a cart while we were at K-mart, so now we can bring home a week’s worth at once). Also, I pulled out my back pretty badly this morning in the final stages of putting together furniture. My poor back. It’s had a tough week. But it gets a rest now.
So here are some things of note about living in Hawai’i.
* First off, people like throwing apostrophes into words here. Sometimes I can tell they work as stresses, as in the case of Kapi’olani, which I had been stressing incorrectly. But other words, like Hawai’i… dunno. Maybe? Also, the h’s are really pronounced here. It’s not quite like the jota in Spanish, which of course has the kind of throat-clearing sound in with it, but the h’s are pronounced. And it’s kind of a ‘hoh’ sound, which give Hawai’i a kind of diphthong there at the beginning. I’m still working on this.
* Also, it’s pretty hot here. It’s not really warm with tropical island breezes. For the most part, it’s just hot. And it rains here on this part of the island several times a day, but nothing ever gets wet, partially because the rain is usually misty and doesn’t last long, and partially because even when it rains hard, it evaporates like nothing. The front half of our house is west-facing and gets really warm in the afternoon. The windows do not help between 4:30 and 6:30. The door becomes hot to the touch. The cinder-block walls become warm. We have an “air conditioner” in the kitchen, but I’m putting it in quotes because it doesn’t work. But the back of our place stays pretty well cool in the evenings. Too bad our desks have to go in the front, eh?
* People are really nice here. It’s just fine to smile and wave at a complete stranger. If you look like you don’t know where you’re going, someone will stop you and ask you if you need help. And sometimes, they’ll stop other people and ask them if they agree with the help they’ve already offered you. If it has to do with bus travel, everyone says, “Ask the driver.” But in a really emphatic way, like you’ll hurt their feelings if you don’t ask the driver after they just told you to. Of course, they’ve already told you what they know. I guess it’s just because they don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction. Also, drivers will always stop at crosswalks if people are standing near them, preparing to cross the street. Then they’ll smile and wave at you. Our neighbor whose name I don’t know yet offered to help us unload the U-Haul. We were already finished and were about to leave to return it, but he stopped us, waved us over, and asked if we needed help. Trisha, who’s and undergrad that works in the Psych office, gave me a campus map and showed us all the places we might possibly want to go while we’re students, including tips on which nearby restaurants had good food. Then she gave us a map of plants on campus. Michael and I bummed around with it for about an hour. There’s some really cool stuff here.
Haven’t seen the ocean yet, and only a couple random views of the Ko’olau Range. We’re going to Diamond Head crater tomorrow, and after August starts, we’re going to start taking the bus all over. We’re waiting for August because the month passes are for calendar months, not for thirty-days beginning whenever like the Chicago CTA passes. Now that we have our place set up, there’s a lot less to do in terms of settling in. And in the meantime of settling in, we have figured a lot out. We’ve got a very general layout of Honolulu in our heads. We’re learning the bus routes. We know where the shops are that we’ll use regularly, and a few not-so-regular ones. And we found Chinatown, which is on the bus route that goes right past our place. I’m excited about this because I know they’ve got farmer’s markets there, and I really dig local shopping.
There’s not much of a rhyme or reason as far as I can tell, to where poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods go. We’ve gone down streets where you would pass a poor neighborhood, then a rich neighborhood, then another poor neighborhood, and then another rich neighborhood—all within the space of a mile and a half. They just all seem mixed together in some random way.
I saw someone with a Hawai’i foodbank t-shirt, so I know that exists here. I’ve found on the map a Salvation Army family services center not too far from Michael’s campus. And I found a community center not too far from my campus. So I’ll poke around at these and other places to see if there is somewhere good to volunteer. After I get my grad school schedule. Grad school, I know, will be wholly different than anything I’ve done before. I don’t want to put too much on my plate before I know what exactly I’ll be doing. At the same time, I can’t imagine NOT volunteering after these past four years. It just… doesn’t seem right. I know I’ll have time to do something. And if I don’t take that time to do something, I’ll be wasting that time.
Also, I really don’t know how poor people move. It sucks, absolutely sucks, trying to get around and set yourself up in a new place when you don’t have a car. It would have been impossible if we hadn’t rented the U-Haul. At least, we’d still be sleeping on the floor and wouldn’t have desks, or chairs, or dressers. Picking up boxes from the post office is an ordeal on the bus. So yeah, I’m soooo thankful that we had some savings from our pre-Chicago years to help us out with moving. Money makes everything easier. And no, Mom, we don’t need anymore. We’ve got savings to live on until the income starts. And that won’t be too much longer anyway.
7/31/07
August starts tomorrow, which is a good thing in terms of bus travel. Michael and I are really looking forward to August. It is such a pain when you travel about as much as we’ve been doing to count out your ones, go buy something cheap so you can have more ones, make sure you have enough ones…. But August starts and we get to flash our nifty bus passes that say “August 2007” and they’ll just let us get on the bus and ride.
Busy and loud though our street is, it’s actually a pretty good location in terms of getting around. The number 9 bus, that goes right by our house, connects to pretty much every bus route to any location on the island. We can see it all, in two trips or less.
The Bus isn’t as frequent as the Chicago CTA. The wait times, especially during non-peak hours, can be quite cumbersome. What I think that’ll translate to in practice, at least for me, is that I’ll schedule that extra time into whatever I’m planning, and use it as one more excuse to sit back and relax. And sweat. Which is of course, now part of the daily routine.
Michael and I switched up our plans a bit for purposes of practicality. We didn’t go to Diamond Head that next day. Instead, we went to Chinatown and bummed about. And yes, fruits and vegetables seem to be almost half price there than they are in our local grocery. But, it’s a long-ass ride. I don’t think we’ll be shopping there regularly, which is a shame. And it rained for a few minutes while we were there. Like, actual rain that made the streets wet and everything. I watched the passers-by at this time. They paused underneath awnings to let the rain pass, which it did rather quickly.
Chinatown, by the way, is not like Chinatown in Chicago. There you will find restaurants and a few shops for very Chinese-looking things that were, yeah, made in China. But in Honolulu’s Chinatown, you’ll find Chinese life. When you walk through you really do feel as though you’re walking through a small piece of displaced China. It’s really neat.
Anyway, I haven’t seen Walgreens around here, but there is Long’s Drugstore. And we knew there was one in Chinatown, so we went there. And we bought… inserts for our shoes to make them comfortable for the long hike of Diamond Head!
Which brings us to Monday. And by the way, I’ll stop with the daily play-by-play once I have a daily schedule. But for now, every day brings something new.
So. We went first to Kapi’olani Community College where Michael’s gonna go. It is right on the edge of Diamond Head Crater. I’ll also say, I believe it is a far prettier campus than mine. The landscaping is incredible. There’s a cactus garden with every variety of cactus that exists, and a few more that they made up just to show off. We poked around a bit, found out that Michael needs shots to go to school, and also found out that he can wait until my paperwork has been processed to process his paperwork, and get the nifty in-state tuition level.
And then we hiked Diamond Head. It’s less than a mile up, but that’s a mile UP, so it seems like more. There were old ladies going up with walkers… okay, I exaggerate… they had canes. It seemed doable for them, but hard, and long. Took me and Michael about a half hour to get up to the top and oh my god… the view is great. I could look about maybe 270degrees and see ocean on the horizon. The remaining 90degrees holds the Ko’olau Range. Oh, it’s so worth it. I told one the ladies with a cane that on my way back down. She said, “Oh good, I keep telling myself that.” Anyway, anyone who comes to visit me will have to hike Diamond Head with me. It costs a dollar. Or, at the top you can spring for the $5 (I think) certificate of achievement. We didn’t. And there’s t-shirts. Proceeds go to support Oahu hiking trails. I’ll support them at some point, I’m sure, since I intend to use them at least once during our time here.
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