Friday, April 25, 2008

Fin

The exciting cause for celebration is that I busted my ass and have finished my papers. I have finished my first year of grad school.

Yesterday, as I was nearing the close, I was typing away at some final paragraphs and thinking back to that marathon I ran in 2004. Right around mile 21, I thought about that finish, about that mile 26.2 just up ahead, and it was so beautiful. I was taken by this well of emotions, overcome by the thought of the finish. I just started to cry. I thought about this as I worked on those final paragraphs, knowing that I was so close to being done with them, and choked up with the thought of it. I knew that I would still have to fix the citation format. I knew I would still have to reread (and probably rewrite) for spelling, grammar, syntax, and continuity errors. But still, with the meat of the work so near done, I got a little teary-eyed.

I finished today. My papers are done, ready to be sent in. I felt far more victorious yesterday. I guess that's the difference between "I got all of my thoughts down coherently! I have expressed everything I learned!" and "My grammar and syntax are proofread and acceptable." Yesterday was climax; today is denouement.

Tomorrow is the happily ever after part.

It's funny; I've been so busy on these papers for so many weeks, just going going going, that what I'm really looking forward to is returning to normal everyday life stuff. I'm so excited about cleaning my place properly. And going shopping for a pair of shorts. And writing fiction again. And walking to the beach if I take a notion to walk to the beach. My god, it sounds like heaven. I'm not quite sure I believe that this could really be my life, so seeped have I been in absorbing and reconfiguring and regurgitating information. Do I really get to go to the thrift store tomorrow? Like, really?

I know I had times like this with the Claretians. I can think of six two-month periods off the top of my head. Different because I was running around with people and events rather than chasing around the thoughts in my head. Same because you just run out of the time and energy to do the standard taking-care-of-yourself things. Either way it's exhausting and exhilarating. I have felt very much alive these past weeks. I have felt like I had my hand on the pulse of life, coming just one step closer to really understanding what we people are all about. There are many ways to learn, and I love all of them.

I have years more of this. I would say that grad school is like a marathon, and I've just completed mile five, but that simile just doesn't hold up because what I'm feeling now has nothing to do with mile five and everything to do with that mile 26.199 where all you have to do is stay upright and let the momentum carry you forward. Grad school is more like a number of marathons, interspersed with rest and more training.

I was telling Michael that most people who compare things to marathons haven't ever really run one, but me, I can compare things to marathons with proper authority. Brain surgery, though... hm. I don't know, maybe it's easy and really fun. Rocket science too. Because, you know, marathons are like brain surgery on rocket scientists. It's all about the happy ending.

Monday, April 21, 2008

The Water-Free Body

I was reading this little article on NPR about common myths surrounding water drinking, and discovered that people are 60% water. When I announced this fact to Michael, he had a great idea: weight loss through total dehydration. We'll be billionaires.

The plan is that we develop a way to extract all the water out of a person's body, and then advertise:

The Weight Loss Sensation Sweeping the Nation!
Lose Up To 60% of Your Body Weight in Seconds!!!*

*(side effects may include extreme death and dry mouth)

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Makapiapia

Makapiapia is the Hawaiian word for that gunky sleep sand that accumulates in the corner of your eye.

In case you were wondering.

Monday, April 7, 2008

The Honoka'a Trip

This happened two weeks ago already, so I'm a little fuzzy on the detail. No matter, if I get tripped up on something, I'll just add ninjas.

It was a two day trip that began at Really Friggin' Early O'Clock on a Friday morning. I had anticipated not getting much sleep that Thursday night, since I typically don't sleep well before trips. So I focused on getting sleep the night before the night before the trip. And that worked out well.

A med student I'll be living with this summer named Erin picked me up so I didn't have to bus it, and that was nice. Our entire team were on the same flight, one of Aloha Airline's last, it would turn out. A social work student I'll be living with named Deana decided mid-flight (knowing that I'm afraid of flying--she was sitting next to me and had witnessed first hand my anxious response to the take-off, in case she hadn't believed me when I just told her) that it would be a good time to tell me the story of how an Aloha Airline plane ripped apart mid-flight, and how her old high school friend was a flight attendant on the flight and how she took care of everyone until they managed to land. It was a great story, depicted in a TV movie called Miracle Landing. You can read more about it at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

Ah, wikipedia. Anyway, I was really happy to hear that story as we flew over the ocean on the same airline that had produced that story. To Deana's credit, though,she rubbed my shoulder and said soothing things when we hit turbulence on the descent and I gasped and went all white-knuckled grip on the armrests. Descent is my second least favorite part of flying, just after ascent. Third on the list is "the middle part."

Also, I got to see snow from my window up on the highest bits of the Big Island.

We had breakfast at some ninja diner place. I gave in to temptation and ordered eggs and sausage with hashbrowns and gravy, expecting the hashbrowns to be Waffle House-ish (but they were McDonald's-ish) and expecting the gravy to be sawmill-ish (but it was... I dunno, just brown gravy). But still, tasty enough. And the coffee was good.

We drove in to Honoka'a, which is a... ninja-length drive from Hilo where we landed. We got this picture as we came in:



The joke is that one of last summer's team broke the H off the sign by stepping on it. The town members had joked they would change the town's name to Onoka'a. Anyway, that's my team: Me (Kati), Erin, Kristina, and Deana.

Honoka'a is at a fairly high altitude. It's on the edge of the island, but is so high up that even though the land's horizon will be quite close, the ocean is still quite far away. Like so:



The land slopes up off the ocean so that the wind doesn't break before it hits the town. There is always, always, a breeze. And it's cooler anyway than Honolulu because of the high altitude. It's really nice. Here's the town:



I realize, living in Honolulu, that it's easy to forget sometimes that I also live in Hawai'i. Honolulu is among the ugliest cities in terms of design that I have ever been in. Don't get me wrong, I love it. It's got charm that I haven't quite figured out how to describe. But outside of Honolulu, there are things like Waipi'o Point:



And Akaka Falls:



That's a one thousand foot waterfall. And that's Kristina with me. Ron (our faculty advisor) is taking the picture. After we saw Akaka Falls, we walked around the area a bit and wandered onto a taro and pineapple farm:



From bottom to top you see brambles, pineapple, taro, background foilage, ocean, and sky. Yes, those green spiky things sticking up out of the ground are pineapples, which grow in the ground like that. Anyway, just after taking this picture, a man came up to us and told us all about this farm. It's part of the ceded lands for Native Hawaiians. These two guys took control of like 300 acres last year. They're both farmers and have the land open to any Native Hawaiian who wants to learn how to farm. Basically, you just go to them and say, hey, can I have some of that land for farming? And they give you some. Also, they'll teach you anything you want to know and help you set up. The only stipulation for using the land is that you use the land. If you just let it sit, they'll hand it on to someone else.

Other things that I saw and didn't take pictures of included Waimea Community Hospital, which, in addition to doctors and nurses, has prayer blankets and skylights and patient gardens and healing touch therapists. I also toured the Health Center in Honokaa where I'll be shadowing the mental health professionals. And I got to walk around early in the morning and talk to early morning coffee drinkers and sellers. I learned about the history of coffee growing in Hawai'i, which is a pretty interesting history. And plus there were ninjas.

All in all, I'm really looking forward to this summer. I still can't fathom spending six weeks away from Michael. I just... I really don't like that idea. My plan is to stay as busy as possible so that the time passes quickly while I get the most out of my trip. Gah. But otherwise, it'll be great. Honokaa is a groovy little town, and I think I'll have a good time there.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

The Thing About Plastic

I'll write about my trip to Honoka'a this weekend. I've been buried in resolutions at the Capitol this week and have been researching my butt off for plastic and styrofoam information that is applicable to the resolutions that are currently up. This won't quite go into my work this semester, but I have to share it. I heard about this awhile ago, and this more than anything has gotten me in my move away from the use of plastic. (I'm sorry John, except after you read this I effectively take back that apology, and you'll understand then why I'm not really that sorry that I think plastic is a pretty bad problem in our world right now.)

Please, please, please read this and start thinking about the implications of the things you use in your daily life. I know my readership is, like, twelve people, but read this and then tell others. This issue isn't far away from us. This is in our water, in our food. This is our future.

This article is from The Independent. You can read the original and see the graph at: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html

"The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan"

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.


The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.

"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.

KATI AGAIN: Also, here's a link to a short, low-res video about plastics in our oceans. http://www.macdonaldproductions.com/plastics_preview.html I got this link from the Fake Plastic Fish Blog that I have a link to on your left. This video is small, it's low-res, it's still worth watching. peace.