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Ok, well tell your wife, she didnt dum it down nearly enough for me. I got lost in all that time-stuff.
What i want to know is: what did you see/do in Hawaii?
I always wanted to see the Pipeline. Sposed-to-be a beautiful wave.
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vOkay, well the Hacksized version is Australia is really only 7 hours time difference, not 17. And London is an 8-hour difference, and McVay’s plan worked fine.
As for Hawaii, I already told you about the shark encounter.
The other thing I saw was a wedding. Which is why I was in Hawaii because there is no way I would have gone to Hawaii given a free choice.
Since we were going anyway, we decided to stretch out the thing to 10 or 11 days, and make the best of it. We were on Maui the entire time. We drove the “Road to Hana” on the eastern side of the island which is verdant whereas the rest of the island is more arid. That’s an all day trip, there and back, with several points of interest to visit along the way: waterfalls, a black sand beach, botanical gardens, and so on.
Otherwise, we largely “beach-hopped” and snorkeled along the west coast where we stayed the entire time.
Oh, we went to a luau a couple of days before the wedding (with the bride and her family, who are the reason we went at all). There was Hawaiian dancing and historical narrative (which neither entirely embraced nor entirely rejected the harsh facts of colonization). It’s allegedly the best one of several on Maui, but it was kind of a passionless event at which I felt it was painfully clear that all the Hawaiians involved were just doing their job. Given 24 hours in their control booth, I could have made their lighting 10 times better. They had the equipment, but didn’t put any creativity into it which is sorta inexcusable because they were grossing between $75,000 and $100,000 a night (depending on how many “comps” or discounts they were giving). The direction wasn’t very good, either.
I doubt that I will ever return to Hawaii. I would actually rather live there than be a tourist. I liked the vibe. The Aloha/Mahola energy is really nice. I don’t know about the big cities (Honolulu and Hilo), but on Maui, everybody was pretty relaxed. No anxious rat race energy. All kind of “easy come, easy go” “what’s mine is yours” kind of thing. I actually looked up the high school in Lahaina (which is the oldest high school west of the Mississippi River (1831), and which escaped the devastating fire there 3? years ago), and wondered about getting a teaching job there. I could do that for a year or two. But I have no interest in being a tourist in Hawaii again.
P.S. Go Rams! Got a big game coming up against the 9ers, I heard.
P.P.S. The pipeline is on the north coast, and it exists only in the Winter, so we didn’t go there.
Narratives. Stories. Stories we create. I read these stories people tell, whether its sports or politics or whatever, and…a lot of times you can tell exactly why the person would create such a narrative but its often got little to do with ‘reality’.
It’s interesting that people who have had some experience as teachers are aware of this.
…
As an English teacher, I think about this a lot.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that the shape of a society’s stories is as distinct and culturally revealing as the shape of its ancient pottery shards or prehistoric spearheads. And I think that an individual’s story does the same thing. These people are just rationalizing an interpretation of circumstances to give Seattle an edge. That it does not, in fact, have.
