Category: personal update

On Way

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A few years ago K and I spent four months living in a hotel in Vancouver for a project he was working on. When we got there we had no idea it would be as long as it was. Our time was a long frosty blanketed meditation.

We spent days and days doing who knows what… ordering room service breakfast, making sandwiches, crafting homemade Christmas cards, visiting the bookstore, figuring out how much to tip the various hotel services. Gray rainy days stretched out ahead of us. Paradoxically, dotted among these days were larger than life characters and a handful of unique experiences–like chillin with Don Rickles…

One day, months after we got back to Brooklyn, K was looking at pictures of our room at The Sutton Place Hotel. He muttered to me–we’ve gotten along in some pretty small places.

Which is very true.

Our time here in Hawaii couldn’t be more different and yet we’re left with long stretches of not having a routine even though we feel we should. There are moments in a day when everything stops and there’s nothing that I have to do. It’s jarring. Today we made the best of it and took a long walk and jumped into the ocean at the end to cool off. Now, what to do tomorrow….that’s tomorrow’s story…


Relax Relate Release

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After a week of long late hours working, K is home again.
The best part of this week was when Bethany stayed over to keep me company. She showed up early Friday evening with three seasons of The Office on DVD and half of a Baskin Robbins birthday cake. Can one ask for anything better??? We heard a loud bump on the lanai and Gabi the cat appeared–gave me a fright.

After arming the security system, we fell asleep in the living room on our respective couches, laptops close by and season 2 on the TV.

Speaking of which K and I accidentally set off the alarm this morning and 2 police cars showed up–one was an SUV! I was so embarrassed yet impressed at the same time. I had to show them ID and they looked all around the house before leaving.


A little house in the sky.

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It happened.
We moved this past weekend.
I was instantly more comfortable in this house than places I’ve lived for years and years. Normally when I’m alone, I have to manage all kinds of irrational fears–including those of the supernatural realm. I spend most of my time looking over my shoulder… mulling over unfamiliar noises. I like to blast the TV to drown out any potentially alarming sounds. When K was here in Hawaii and I was back in NY, I went to bed every night with the TV turned up high. Every morning I would drag myself bleary-eyed into work at the museum with a venti coffee. I was so tired that many times I contemplated buying two ventis at once.

Revelation!

This house is free of bad feelings–free of dark corners or suspicious sounds. I was describing it to a friend and came up with a good metaphor. The house is like a labrador retriever: golden, warm, and solid. It’s like a big dog that embraces anyone entrusted to its care. When we’re out, I’m excited to come home. And when we’re home I’m constantly discovering new things. The other day, bringing in groceries, I peered into a giant pot which I thought was just a pot. Inside it was filled with water and tiny lily pads. Beneath the water I could see movement and when I focused I saw schools of tiny fish and tadpoles. In the morning a lotus blooms and emerges from underneath. As the day goes on it disappears only to come back the next day.


I love it here. All other places have dissipated.


Slow burn

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We had friends in from out of town recently. Last year only a couple of people came to visit. This year there’s a steady march of people coming in from NY.

My friends, at our suggestion, came into Kailua one afternoon and because of a combination of unfortunate circumstances lost their wallet, iphone, license, money, and credit cards. We felt terrible for them.

They believed that they were bamboozled by locals that had the stereotypical signs of being crystal meth addicts. I have no reason to disbelieve them–they’re very reasonable, level-headed people. I’ve been thinking about it alot because it’s so different from our experience of Kailua. Would I feel the same way about this place if I hadn’t had the opportunity to slowly develop a love for it?

Their misfortune left me a little sad about Kailua but more sad that they would leave associating it with unhappy things. My friend encouraged us to get a guard dog in our new place. His wife added that we might consider a pitbull.

On the flip side we went to a dinner party the other night for a writer that was also visiting from out of town. He and his family had spent his two year sabbatical on Oahu. After his sabbatical ended they came back a couple of months later. This visit is their second vacation here in less than six months.

I asked K if he thought we would be like them after this year is done– coming back to Hawaii every few months because we miss it so much. He answered that he thought we’d probably be busy trying to establish a real home for ourselves in NY.

In the meantime, Kailua continues to be a revelation to me. I’m pretty certain that wherever we go and whatever happens to us I’ll always see this time as key in shaping my idea of home.   Despite bouncing from place to place, I feel a sense of belonging here that I haven’t felt anywhere else.


Something

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Yesterday morning I realized that I suddenly felt at home in our temporary sublet. I thought the shift was worth noting because it’s not an unfamiliar feeling. I’ve felt it before –pretty much every time we return to NY.

A couple of days ago when we arrived at the rental, I felt a little nutso. I kept asking myself how I could feel so uncomfortable when my circumstances are basically like I’m on a permanent vacation. I’ve mentioned that the place felt cold. But it’s more than that. All my germaphobe tendencies were kicked into high gear and I hardly wanted to touch anything. Much less put any of my belongings in the drawers or closets.

It happened yesterday while I was sitting on the couch sketching and watching CNN. All of a sudden I realized I was comfortable. I spent the rest of the day making macaroni salad and putting things away as if we’re going to be here for more than the week we have left.

I guess the good thing is that since we don’t really have a place that our things can stay for more than a few months at time we don’t feel homesick for one place. The closest place we’ve felt that way about was our rental last year, which was very much someone else’s home.

I said to K a couple of days ago that for two people that need such specific circumstances to feel comfortable we sure do challenge ourselves to constantly adjust.


Lost in Transition

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We’ve been in our hotel for a week and two days. Our hotel is perfectly lovely. It’s comfortable enough and everyone here is very nice to us. They also serve this juice at their continental breakfast which is basically like a non-alcoholic pina colada–pineapple juice with a little coconut flavor. It’s yummy. Every morning as soon as it turns 7:30 I put a dress over my pajamas and go downstairs to fetch a coffee, three pastries and this juice. I’ll miss it when we’re gone.

K and I are no strangers to hotel living. Once in Vancouver we lived in a hotel for over three months. Our apartment in Manhattan is smaller than alot of hotel rooms. I feel it’s a testament to how good we get along that we can live in these tiny places and not kill one another. In fact we take alot of comfort in each other’s companionship.

I used to say when K was my best friend and not yet my boyfriend that we would be ok in a cardboard box together. We’d never run out of things to talk about.

With all of this said, this week has been at times very frustrating and hard on us. We can’t wait to move into our new place. We can’t wait to cook our own meals. It would simply be great to unpack our bags.

It’s far from a bad life. But believe you me, I’ll be psyched to write a post in two weeks announcing that we’ve arrived and we ain’t leaving for awhile.


No Mad

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We’ve found a home! But we can’t move in for a few weeks. I think it has the potential to be a real home in that, unlike every other place we saw, it doesn’t feel weighed down by it’s prior inhabitants or their lives in it. It was built fairly recently (less than 10 years) and it has an airy feeling of possibility about it– it’s a happy home.

The other night I dreamed about moving in. But that’s days and days away. Until then K and I have a couple of days left here at the hotel to figure out where we go next.


Oh give me a home….

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We’re back in beloved Hawaii. We came back a few weeks early so that we could find a home before K started working. Five days later and eight rentals visited we’re, as the English say, knackered.

Last year, the first place we visited ended up being our home for nine months. It was such a great experience–in some ways the best home K and I have ever had together. We thought that this time around it would be an even easier process.

Not so.

We’ve visited a pole houses five miles up a mountain, condos in gated communities, a sweet little beach house on Lanikai; and an A-frame on lush Kaneohe bay. Each place was lovely on one hand and completely not right on the other.

We see our time here as an opportunity to really live a happy life. Manhattan is so rough, so challenging–it’s like living in a game show. But it’s our home and probably where we’ll live for many years to come. In contrast, we want to treat our limited time here in Hawaii as a real experience with as little compromises as possible.

It’s been an adventure. We’ve met such a range of people. One lovely woman let us drink beers on her lanai and then handed us fluffy towels so that we could take advantage of their private beach access. Another woman took a break from her store to show us her home for rent and then left us there with instructions to enjoy the space. One woman told me, when I politely said we were going to keep looking, that I could call her anytime to chat if I needed a girlfriend on the island.

Remarkable.

Even more remarkable is that K and I have no place to show for it. For now we remain in a hotel using baby bottles of shampoo and conditioner, eating at restaurants for every meal, and occasionally reminding one another that wherever we are together is home.


It’s 6AM. Where am I?

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K was out of the house at 5:50AM this morning– another early call. When we first moved here I would often wake up around this time to answer emails from NY and chat online with friends–even when K wasn’t working early.   I believed that I could continue managing projects there from here.  The time difference is so extreme that I would aim to wake up at 5AM just to respond to people before lunch time.  I’ve come to like the feeling of being up while it’s still dark outside; the sounds of everything waking up around me, particularly the birds chirping around the same time every morning, the sky getting lighter and lighter.  Across the way, our neighbor leaves at the same time everyday, 6:30 their wood gate slams.  It’s a comforting sound.

When I was little, there was a time that my parents would leave me with a babysitter on Long Island and commute into the city for work.  My parents were fastidiously punctual.  We would leave the house in the wee hours so that they could make it to work before 7AM.  I never slept after they left me.  I would lay awake in whatever guest bedroom I was kept in, trying to think of comforting things, listening for any sound that would indicate that my caretakers for that day were waking up: a bathroom door, slippered footsteps, muted conversation, someone beginning to work in the kitchen.

Even though I still wake up with K every time he has an early morning, I don’t try to keep up my life in NY.  It’s been 8 months.  At some point it occurred to me that we live here now.  Which is funny because in few weeks we’re headed back to NY for the summer.