a new yorker’s year in hawaii
Last night I saw my very first shooting star. It’s amazing that it’s taken 34 years for me to see one. It’s likely because I’ve never lived in a place that the sky was so clear and free of city lights. I made a wish after the fact. It was exactly as I had imagined a shooting star would be, only better.
I got to take the car out this morning! Kind of exciting because I don’t drive in New York and I’d resigned myself to being uncomfortable in the driver’s seat. But driving in Kailua is awesome, mainly because you only really have to make two turns to get anywhere. Today I had a meeting at Morning Brew so I woke up early, grabbed the GPS, jumped into the car and turned up the radio really loud to sing along… to drive half a mile.
It was pointed out to me by a friend that there are similarities between my arrival in Hawaii and scenes from Jerry Maguire. The scene where Tom Cruise secures Cush as a client and he’s trying to find a song to rock out to on the radio but he can’t? That was me this morning.
My meeting this morning was with a staff member of the Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF). I was introduced to them by a friend and will likely be helping them out for the festival in October. It was really great to meet with him. They seem super nice and I’m looking forward to getting to know them and working the festival. Visit HIFF
The only other notable event today would be another episode in my ongoing drama with Hawaii creatures. I went to close a screen door and something soft but substantial landed on my head. Apparently I took the gecko by surprise when I slid the door closed, rousing him out of a mid-morning nap. He landed on my head, then my hand, and after I screamed he landed on the ground and seemed as shocked as I was as it took him a few minutes to scurry under the washing machine.
I risked my life to take the garbage out today. There was a pterodactyl-like monster guarding the door. I further risked my life to document this strange and rare monster that was as big as my face.
K said he saw a frog so big the other night that he thought it was a statue. When I asked him how he knew it wasn’t, he ominously said that you could just feel it wasn’t đ
I was procrastinating my writing (as I am now) by randomly searching on google. I found a very interesting video and blog post on how to learn how to swim in 10 days.
from fourhourworkweek.com (excerpt):
My Top 8 Tips for NovicesHere are the principles that made the biggest difference for me:
1) To propel yourself forward with the least effort, focus on shoulder roll and keeping your body horizontal (least resistance), not pulling with your arms or kicking with your legs. This is counter-intuitive but important, as kicking harder is the most universal suggestion for fixing swimming issues.
2) Keep yourself horizontal by keeping your head in line with your spine â you should be looking straight down. Use the same head position as while walking and drive your arm underwater vs. swimming on the surface. See Shinj Takeuchiâs underwater shots at :49 seconds. Notice how little he uses his legs; the small flick serves only to help him turn his hips and drive his next arm forward. This is the technique that allows me to conserve so much energy.
3. In line with the above video of Shinji, think of swimming freestyle as swimming on alternating sides, not on your stomach. From the TI Wikipedia page:
âActively streamlineâ the body throughout the stroke cycle through a focus on rhythmically alternating âstreamlined right sideâ and âstreamlined left sideâ positions and consciously keeping the bodyline longer and sleeker than is typical for human swimmers.
For those who have rock climbed or done bouldering, itâs just like moving your hip closer to a wall to get more extension. To test this: stand chest to a wall and reach as high as you can with your right arm. Then turn your right hip so itâs touching the wall and reach again with your right arm: youâll gain 3-6âł. Lengthen your vessel and you travel further on each stroke. It adds up fast.
4. Penetrate the water with your fingers angled down and fully extend your arm well beneath your head. Extend it lower and further than you think you should. This downward water pressure on the arms will bring your legs up and decrease drag. It will almost feel like youâre swimming downhill.
5. Focus on increasing stroke length instead of stroke rate. Attempt to glide further on each downstroke and decrease the number of strokes per lap.
6. Forget about workouts and focus on âpractice.â You are training your nervous system to perform counter-intuitive movements well, not training your aerobic system. If you feel strained, youâre not using the proper technique. Stop and review rather than persist through the pain and develop bad habits.
7. Stretch your extended arm and turn your body (not just head) to breathe. Some triathletes will even turn almost to their backs and face skyward to avoid short gasps and oxygen debt (tip from Dave Scott, 6-time Ironman world champion).
8. Experiment with hand swapping as a drill:
Itâs difficult to remember all of the mechanical details while swimming. I short-circuited trying to follow half a dozen rules at once. The single drill that forced me to do most other things correctly is described on pg. 91-92 of the TI book: hand swapping. Coach Laughlinâs observations of the Russian Olympic team practice were a revelation to me.
This is the visualization I found most useful: focus on keeping your lead arm fully extended until your other arm comes over and penetrates the water around the extended armâs forearm. This encourages you to swim on your sides, extends your stroke length, and forces you to engage in what is referred to as âfront quadrantâ swimming. All good things. This one exercise cut an additional 3-4 strokes off each lap of freestyle.
I’m not sure what it all means but all I can do is doggy paddle or swim without breathing. Some of the suggestions seem very intutitve. So I’m going to try these tips the next time I’m at the beach.
I’ve only left Kailua two times since we moved here. Once to go into Ala Moana for lunch and the second time to Police Beach on the North Shore. It’s funny, nothing happens here and yet the day goes so quickly. I wake up early (sometimes as early as 6AM) and still the afternoon pounces on me. Today we played frisbee in the park, saw a giant turtle while doggy paddling in the ocean, and then made pancakes, sausage, and eggs for brunch. It was a great day and this is a great town. It’s easy to wile away the hours here. It’s really something to find myself, a hard-milled New Yorker, suddenly so immersed in a town that makes Honolulu seem exotically metropolitan.
Everyday that we go to the beach I want to go to the beach more. I grew up on Long Island and my heritage is Filipino. Beaches are nature and nurture to me and yet until I came to Hawaii I hated going to the beach! I think it’s because I would get caught up in the preparation, the ritual of self consciousness around the bathing suit, and inevitably at the end of any beach trip the sticky sandiness which follows you to the parking lot, into the car, into the house, and all over your tub. Trips to the beach were 80% trip and 20% beach.
Why it’s different here:
I remember when we were going through craigslist looking for a place. We were calling any ad that had the slightest promise. When we got to the ad for this place it listed an outdoor shower as one of its special features. I called and spoke to the owner and she reiiterated before we got off the phone that there was a hot cold outdoor shower.
After a few minutes of worrying over all the details of the various apartments in my head I suddenly said to K, ‘wait a minute, is the outdoor shower the ONLY shower?’ He didn’t know and wasn’t familiar enough with Hawaii property to say for sure it wasn’t. I decided to call.
ME: Uh Charlotte, hi this is Nancy…we just spoke about the rental..um yeah I just wanted to check something…uhhh. I mean I just wanted to make sure….um you know that outdoor hot cold shower..uh well I just wanted to check is their an indoor shower too?
Charlotte very kindly didn’t laugh at me and said yes. The outdoor shower was just for coming back from the beach. There were in fact two additional indoor showers.
Last year, visiting Hawaii for the first time, I discovered Lanikai Beach. Lanikai is the little town next to Kailua made up of mostly private residences and a stretch of beach that is about as perfect as beaches get.
Like Kailua Beach there are jelly fish issues a couple of months out of the year– you have to be careful of Portuguese man-o-war and box jellyfish. Unlike Kailua, Lanikai doesn’t have a lifeguard so it’s not the best water for beginner swimmers. I’m a beginner and very paranoid about beach safety but I’m crazy about this little town and if I had 8 million dollars I would buy a house there.
If you take Kawailoa Rd SE from Kailua Beach you’ll hit Lanikai pretty quickly. Within minutes you’ll be in a charming residential neighborhood that despite it’s quaint feeling boasts houses with million dollar price tags. Find a parking spot on the street and then walk to the water using one of the little pathways between houses.
Hawaii is an ongoing revelation for me. I’m a born and raised New Yorker and even though I grew up on Long Island, I’m not one for nature…much less beaches.
We circled the area for a while trying to figure out how to get to the beach, eventually parking on a little patch of grass between houses. We’d read about Lanikai in the book Oahu Revealed and it had documented a handful of the little pathways to use to get to the beach. We found one of them and at first I was like ‘what the heck is this?’ It looked like an alley to nowhere and there were even some garbage cans lining the way. I was very skeptical. But when we emerged on the other side I was taken aback by the dramatic almost cinematic appearance of this stretch of beach that seemed as quiet and gentle as the quantum space beach Jodi Foster visited in the movie Contact.
Lanikai is soft sand, no crowds, rollicking surf and total perfection. In my harried New York mental state, with my ill fitting bathing suit, and distressed hair, I looked at K and said ‘not only does this look like a postcard but I think this is how I would feel if I was IN a postcard’.
That was last year. Now we live five minutes away from this blessed little place.
Visitors to Hawaii since we’ve been here:
Three One Nine 