“tell me about your island life”
in the morning, i first have a cup of tea, then sit for 30-40 minutes, and then have a cup of coffee while i scribble nonsense in a journal, and then ákos and i head out for our morning walk. this is around seven am and though the air still feels cool from the night, the humidity and sun are already doing their work and i can feel the day coming. it's odd living at generally constant temperatures between 73º and 82º as you somehow quickly adapt and develop a fine grained sense of what makes for a great day and what weather will be placed into the bin of "meh". all the same, i've adjusted to putting on sunscreen in the morning before i leave the house.
joining the set of morning dog walkers in hawaii means that you start to have a whole host of new faces and acquaintances in your life, people who smile and wave to you with recognition in the morning even as you listen to podcasts or albums and know that it will never go beyond that basic gesture. i expect a dynamic somewhat like this would exist outside of hawaii, but somehow i suspect this would not have been the case in colorado had i been in this routine. people are truly friendlier here. i now "know" at least three morning runners, four morning walkers, a set of twins who walk to school along my route, and one woman who is always on a bike ride right when ákos and i are finishing up. the military is everywhere, and although it is obnoxious in other parts of the island, my little pocket seems more local...which of course makes me the problem, but so it goes.
the birds are colorful and new. between them and the plant life, there's so much more red in the world. ákos has grown accustomed to seeing feral chickens, but he still wants to kill them and often points at them while looking plaintively at me for direction.
school is kicking my ass and is wonderful at the same time, but i'm a nerd and there are no surprises there. of course i love the work; of course i desired it. i'm anticipating summering in japan to really push the language. i'm already mildly annoyed at my grad seminars in that the pedagogy sucks (seriously--they're just all bad teachers) and how discussion and conversation is dinted by the fact the professor either feels he has too much to say or that he's working on a paper based on the class and the discussion isn't going in the direction of his own questions. so, not even a quarter into my semester, i'm ready to be doing my own work and not theirs, but i suppose that is the point of a phd program.
i tend to surf on fridays, hike on saturdays, and then study all day sunday. i still have a few side study groups with friends off island, where we are presently reading a lot of shakespeare. my hhg finally arrives after two months this friday. i swim at the local outdoor pool twice a week and want to get up to distances far enough that i can be comfortable swimming to small islands up to a mile off the beach nearby; i run pillbox loops near sunset and purposely leave my phone at home and instead watch all the tourists take their photos for instagram while i wheeze by; i take ákos to the unofficial dog park on thursday nights; i found a pullup bar in a park near the beach and now almost always workout outside.
i don't see people much, generally at my grad seminars and a few random meet-ups in the evenings or after class. the people i do see are insane caricatures of the absurd: my barber is former navy and a hasidic jew who talks to me about the subtleties of hebrew and why jesus could have never been the messiah; my landlord, tuan, is a 5' 4" vietnamese import who waters his plants in the morning while smoking a cigarette and yells at his youngest son while i'm over for dinner telling him to come to the table, to talk to the adults "like a real man." i've gone mostly sober, "mostly" being that i only drink alone and never with other people...it makes for some nice 2-3 drink nights with a book at a bar nearby at the end of the week and then a quiet walk back to my house before part of a movie and then bed. there's something warm and lovely about nights in the tropics, like a blanket that folds over you and around you and which helps to convince you that you're completely alone, that your solitude is natural and real and worthy, all of which lasts in a beery haze before you walk back inside and the air conditioning ruins the moment.
even though water is the primary element here, i think more about air. i find myself wondering how quickly the things around me will rust, and if it will be fast enough that i will be able to see it happen. and if i could, would that somehow inspire me to try and stop it?
also--I eat far less fish than I imagined.
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
gummygunk
jimmyeatworldofficial
