Category: Practical Life Issues

Learning about myself

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This is what it looks like to sleep in Kailua:

This is different from the city.  And it’s made me realize that I like sleeping with street noise and in a bedroom half lit by streetlights.  I really don’t like the dark quiet.  It’s kind of weird.  It’s what I imagine being dead is like.  I spend most of the night (after K has fallen asleep) reading the news on my phone in the dark and noticing every random noise.  I wonder if that’ll change after being here a few months.

I got an email yesterday from a poet inviting me to be on a Bamboo Ridge panel addressing Filipino diasporic literature.  I get really nervous about these kinds of things but I’m trying to think of this period living in Hawaii as an experiment.  I’m trying to push myself to re-imagine my identity, my path.  So to panels:  Yes!  I’ll do it!

JUSTICE!

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Weeks ago I got a ticket for an expired parking meter when I met my friends for dinner. It was the first time I drove by myself here in hawaii and K carefully told me how to get where I was going and where to park.  I put in enough quarters for 2 hours.  I ended up being about 10 minutes late and there was a big orange ticket for $35 waiting for me.

K wrote the check and I was feeling really bad that my first time out I get a freakin’ ticket. So I wrote a scathing letter saying that the cop must’ve been standing there waiting for my meter to expire and given the fact that my car was one of TWO cars in the whole empty parking lot that I felt the ticket was EXTREME JUSTICE.  I didn’t expect them to answer.  We even included the payment.  I just wanted to have my say.

So today I got a letter from the District Court in Kaneohe:

and a CHECK!!

I’m elated!


Errand Day

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it's fo real

it’s fo real.

Today was errand day. Here are my notes:

BLOOD

K and I learned from the lady posted in front of Foodland that Hawaii needs blood!  So we signed up to donate blood.  It seems that they have a monthly blood drive at the Bloodmobile at Don Quijote Kailua.  You can call 808-845-9966 to make an appointment.

Here are other people parked out in front of Foodland:

YOGA

When I got my hair cut at The Fix there were fliers for a yoga place in the same complex.  I’m trying to find a good yoga school and as far as I’ve assessed Koa Yoga is as good as any of them.  What it seems to have above the other schools is Sunrise Yoga with breakfast on Lanikai Beach.

KAILUA SHOPPING CENTER & GIFTS

Under the Hula Moon at Kailua Shopping Center in Kailua Rd. is a great place to find odd little gifts like hula mouse pads, turtle drawer pulls, handmade Kailua cards, and starfish.

Today we also bought a birthday present for my mom at Lanikai Bath and Body.  I haven’t personally tried their products or even heard about them but they seem to be all natural products made in Hawaii.  I particularly liked the Pikake lotion we got for my mom which is a combination of kukui, noni, and macadamia.  As we were leaving a curious shopper came in to check the place out.  I asked her to pose for a picture:

Finally we went to Lanikai Juice in the same strip of stores.   Matthew Fox took Oprah and Gayle there as one of his favorite places in town which naturally gave the place a higher profile.  It was fine.  I’m not crazy about complicated juices.  I like plain pineapple and kalamansi juice or sweet soy bean milk.  I got the Ginger Snap which was perfectly fine.  Maybe I’ll try the popular Monkey next time.  K got Coco Champ and he said it was good enough for him to finish the whole thing.

At Lanikai Juice we ran into some Aloha overload:

Afterwards we went to Kailua Public Library.  It was quite nice. Though I don’t know many libraries that aren’t.

The Fix, Boots and Kimo’s

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it's not a myth! Hawaiians loooooove Spam. This was the lady on line behind us at Foodland

Today was a Kailua-rich day. I finally got my haircut–thank goodness. The head of the hair dept where K works recommended this woman Dana at a Kailua hair salon called The Fix. I spent hours online trying to do my normal sleuthing separating the best from the rest to no avail. There’s very little editorial coverage of Hawaii services and talent that isn’t tourism based. It’s like looking for a good piece of Wagyu in a town that only advertises Outback Steakhouse. The ‘Wagyu’ exists but it’s not being written about online. As opposed to New York you’ve got people in Idaho writing blogs about a clothing store on a remote corner of Billyburg Brooklyn.

What I’ve come to understand is that this is a word of mouth town. You have to talk to people to navigate your way past the layer of generated for tourist services. I had had an appointment at Salon Blanc in Honolulu on the recommendation of Sarah from HIFF. She didn’t have personal experience with them but she had heard good things. Unfortunately she didn’t have a stylists name to recommend so I had an appointment with ‘Sam’. I felt wary of that so I asked Ken to ask his colleague and that’s how I found Dana. The Fix is a tiny salon in Kailua Square. It’s spacious, quiet and pretty busy for a small town salon. Caddy corner to it is the Kailua Paul Brown Salon, arguably the most distinguished hairstylist in Hawaii, though pretty franchised.

Dana was great. She’s technically skilled and a good listener. She took my comments seriously, made an assessment and basically delivered what I pictured. My hair looks 75% better and based on one visit I would go back to Dana again. But if I get another haircut in Hawaii I’ll try someone new for comparison. Dana’s very likeable and definitely skilled, but her style is a little 1st generation Asian for me- less curl more straight with a bit of flip, assymetrical bangs. I like hair stylists that are technically on point but more loose and poetic with their approach: shaggier, messier, imperfect. With all of that said my hair does look dorothy hamill-ish just as I wished for yesterday.

After the hair cut we FINALLY went for breakfast at Boots and Kimo’s. The macadamia nut pancakes are about the most pospular thing in Kailua second only to the beach. If you look it up it’s catgorically popular–people even claiming to drive from the leeward side of the island just for the pancakes. Well, they’re freakin’ right. Those pancakes are GOOD. K took a bite and said ‘is that ice cream?’ 😀 Sweet but not too sweet. rich buttery macadamia nut sauce over thick fluffy pancakes. We also had a portuguese sausage omelette which was delicious.

I like the word Calabash

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This morning I found a dead baby gecko under the table I work on. It was so tiny! On the opposite end yesterday while I was working on HIFF fliers I heard a lawnmower buzzing from far away. Then I realized that’s not a lawn mower! I walked to the back door and there it was a GIGANTIC bee that was as big as a gob stopper. I tried to take it’s picture and totally missed it.

I’m getting my haircut tomorrow. I’m nervous as hair is such an issue for me. Sarah at HIFF recommended 2 places beyond the two that I’d found from user reviews etc.

Hair Salons in Honolulu & Kailua

  • Paul Brown
  • J Salon
  • W Salon
  • Salon Blanc
  • Chop
  • The Fix

I’m going with Salon Blanc and we’ll see how it goes. I was talking to Sean at HIFF and he said that he’s getting his haircut on Saturday and he goes to the same person that Barack Obama’s sister goes to. Sean has great hair. It’s like Sean Cassidy circa Hardy Boys (sort of shorter). Which is coincidental because my hair is in an awkward growing out stage I was going to tell the person I’m going to that a Dorothy Hammil-ish style might work for me.

Two great recipes:

Macadamia Nut Crusted Mahi Mahi

Basic Hamburger (delish)

Hawaiian Word of the Day, from answers.com:

In Hawaii a calabash is a large serving bowl. It is usually made from a hardwood, rather than from the Calabash Gourd as in Maroon cultures. It is used on a buffet table or in the middle of the dining table. The use of the calabash in Hawaii has led to terms like “Calabash Family” or “Calabash Cousins”. It indicates that an extended family has grown up around shared meals and close friendships. Food is very important in modern Hawaiian culture. “Komo E Kaukau”, meaning “come and eat”, it is the most expected greeting in a Hawaiian home.

A 319 Day/ Ahoy!

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Today was by my definition in the sidebar a real 319 day.  I took care of a lot of things as well as came to understand alot of bureaucratic garbage that had been dogging me.  The issues I solved today:

Mobile me

I switched to Apple’s Mobile me email service two months ago before we came to Hawaii.  It was brand new and had ALOT of bugs.  I basically couldn’t sync my computer with Mobile me.  Apple was horrendous to me.  I say this being an Apple super fan.  The service costs about $80 a year.  I have aol, gmail, and rocketmail accounts.  I didn’t really need Mobile me but their marketing campaign of all your ‘things’ happily coexisting together and accessible anywhere on a fluffy cyber cloud totally won me over.  So I paid the price even though I had just quit my job.  In the couple of days before we flew out I frantically tried to work out the kinks.  I had sent an exit email to all of my contacts using my me.com address as my new address. First of all mobile me only provides support through articles on apple.com and when you’re totally desperate online chat with a representative.  I was on hold for two days once for 2 hours another for 4 hours.  Granted Mobile me had just come out.  The representatives had no clue.  They referred me back to the articles and forums I had pored through that lead me to chat support.  After that I called Apple care and even went to the genius bar to no avail.  They all had no clue.  It was staggering.  After a few days the me.com website was operating properly and synced all my information.  I got an email while in Hawaii from Apple saying that they were crediting mobile me members with a month free service.   It wasn’t great but I could send and receive webmail and from my iphone.  The only remaining problem was the mail application on my computer.

I have Tiger which retained the .mac program which mobile me was an update to.  I could recieve mail but I couldn’t send mail.  I really didn’t want to deal with Apple so I just let it slide.  This morning I said ‘no more!’.  I decided to confront it head on.  And after screaming at people (not very Aloha) for about an hour I finally got a tech person to agree to help me without charging me.  Initially they insited on chrging me $50 for help because I hadn’t purchaced the extended Applecare warranty for $250.  I screamed so loud that I was worried the neighbors would come thinking that I was being murdered.  It took a couple of times calling them using this method to actually produce results.  When I would yell at someone they would put me on hold and never come back.  Eventually I got someone and said ‘let me preface this conversation by saying that if you don’t find a way to help me on this call I’m going to spend my whole day writing user reviews about how crappy your products are and how I didn’t get any help because I didn’t pay the extra money for Apple to be nice to me.’  This seemed to work.  I got a real tech person on the phone. 

I am a huge fan of IT people.  I love how they think and how they solve problems.  My admiration for them is similar to how I love film and theater production people.  They know their shit and they get it done.  Until Dustin, the tech support person at Apple that helped me, all the other people were flacks.  Do nothing, know nothing, bureaucratic, out-sourced hacks that speak in some indistinguishable accent and sound like a robot.  I HATE THOSE PEOPLE.  They rarely solve anything.  So Dustin got on the phone and stayed on the phone with me for over an hour–maybe even an hour and half.  When he couldn’t figure it out he told me so and he said he had to do research and call me back. Unlike the gentleman at the SOHO Genius Bar who was so obviously not a genius because he decided that it was my operating system and I needed to wipe it clean and reinstall.  Oh the Hubris!  I digress.   An hour later Dustin the Apple IT angel called me back, wiped the application clean and walked me through adding mobile me as an IMAP account which worked like a dream.  He’s a stand-up dude in a sea of people getting paid to do nothing.  NOTE to APPLE when you stink you really stink.

HEALTH Insurance

I’m on a COBRA health insurance plan.  The original plan was no great shakes so I have been considering switching to an individual health plan.  My boyfriend has great insurance through SAG which I learned is basically Blue Cross Blue Shield.  So after being lead around by the nose calling unhelpful brokers and a whole mess of numbers from different websites I finally found Gerry at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield.  And he broke it all down for me.  What I learned is that unless you are RICH it is not easy to get a comprehensive individual health insurance plan in this country. He outlined three plans for me and though I’m not going with any of them I thought Healthy New York was the most interesting:

Healthy New York
state subsidized 263.86 a month
incoming gross monthly has to be under  $2167
must be able to prove that you worked one day in the past year

IPhone App TEXT GURU

I downloaded a new app the other day called text guru.  I find it to be really great.  It is a wireless filesharing application for the Iphone like Airsharing but you can edit and SEND documents from your IPhone.  Totally great.  So my problem was that my firewall was blocking the port that Text Guru was using.  The chat support walked me through how to make an exception in System Preferences and allow acces to a specific port.  I didn’t know how to do that before!  So basically for the other do-dos out there like me you go to: System Preferences>Sharing> firewall and from there you click ‘new’ choose ‘other’ and create an exception. It took 2 seconds and my text guru began connecting beautifully.

Mold on Concrete

It’s been raining like crazy here in Oahu.  Our patio which is made of concrete bricks was staring to get a gross green sheen which I can only imagine is mold or fungus.  I looked up some ways that you could clean concrete and found all kinds of concrete cleaning products.  I thought well I guess I’ll have to wait for a trip to Home Depot.  But it kept bothering me to an OCD level.  So I gabbed a bucket and clorox.  I mixed in hot water and just scrubbed the patio.  It didn’t work amazingly but it worked well enough.  At least I don’t feel like we’re living in a slimy aquarium tank’s pirate treasure chest.

Corn on the Cob

I made corn on the cob to go with dinner tonight for the fist time. 

  1. I husked the corn. 
  2. brought a big pot to a rolling boil
  3. added Salt
  4. put the corn in and let it cook for exactly 7 minutes
  5.  took a big pad of butter and coated the ears thoroughly before serving.

It was delish.

Kailua Bird and Fax

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Hawaiians are very into 'garden goddesses'. Not sure what that's about yet.

I woke up this morning and heard ‘tschicka-tschicka-tschika-tschicka’. I walked to the stairs and saw by the window a fluffy gray and black baby bird on the ledge of the window repeatedly flying against the glass as if to come into the house. It lasted for a long time. I even tried to walk past to get my camera and it left only to come back and tschicka-tschicka some more. It was surreal and cute. I was sort of still half asleep.

A local cat stalks rats on the roof. Crazy.

The creatures in this place are crazy. The other day we saw a rat CLIMBING A TREE. Sheesh. And as I reported earlier a gecko dropped on my head IN OUR HOUSE. And while K and I were benignly reading on the couch a gecko pooped on my arm. Crazy.

Despite this, I love our home. I love Kailua Beach. We drove to Ala Moana Beach to swim in more placid water and hone the swim strokes we’d been practicing at Kailua Beach. We hadn’t been to Ala Moana in weeks. I didn’t like it so much. I couldn’t swim for some reason even though the waters are 80 % calmer. We came back to swim at Kailua Beach a couple of days later and I realized the higher salt content of Kailua Beach water helps me float better and makes swimming a much nicer experience.

Practical issue note: K had to fax some papers today. I didn’t find anything on yelp but we found that The UPS Store on Hekili across from Foodland does copies and can send faxes.

Also as an Asian American looking for community here in essentially the most Asian American rich land in the whole country, I find this very interesting!

Application

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We went into Waikiki today and the day before.  It’s very strange to find how living in Kailua has made me  soft.  The normal bustle of Ala Moana beach felt very exciting  🙂 I mean that’s hysterical.  K and I live on a street in New York that is non-stop noise and activity.  Meanwhile I felt like a bumpkin walking around Ala Moana Mall.  I had to stop at every storefront and peer at the merchandise displays.  Even the koi pond was more entertaining than usual.

We went to Ala Moana beach to practice our swimming.  At Kailua Beach the surf has been a little more active and when we try to practice we get tossed around.  K had alot of success with his swimming in Waikiki.  I mean he basically swims well now.  I, on the other hand, had a harder time swimming in calmer water.  I still haven’t quite figured out what the deal with that is.

top rated swim goggles from slate.com

  • Speedo Speed Socket $24.99
  • Tyr Nest Pro Goggle $20.00
  • Swedish Goggles $5.00

Today K drove me into town for my first meeting at HIFF–which was great.  I met some of the staff and went over some of the outreach process.  I was telling K that the HIFF people are like New Yorkers just more gentle. That’s pretty much the speed I want to be at for now.

After HIFF, K and I went for lunch and a movie at the Dole Cannery.  Recently there was a NY Times article reviewing and summarizing iPhone apps that were great for travel.  I’ve been downloading apps like crazy this past week.   Local Eats and iWant helped us find our lunch place which was delicious and our movie directly after.

my favorite iPhone apps:

  • Air Sharing
  • Feeds
  • White pages mobile
  • Yelp
  • Pageonce

I had macadamia nut encrusted Mahi Mahi at Sam Choy’s Breakfast, Lunch and Crab.  It looked like a very standard sort of lunch place but it turned out to really hit the spot.  There was a luau plate that looked so delicious but definitely a ticket to the town Fattsville.

We went to see Tropic Thunder afterwards and I was so surprised at how much I liked it.  I love Robert Downey Jr. but  I heard all the bruhaha about the use of the word ‘retarded’ and was pretty indifferent to seeing it.  It turned out to be oddly touching and I’m glad we went.  I actually cried at the ending even though it’s basically a big spoof.

K noticed that their was a recurring snowflake theme at the Dole Cannery Theater.  A bit random but I like snow flakes.  I told K that maybe it had something to do with Dole and he said, ‘you mean pineapples?’ and I didn’t have anywhere to go after that.  When we came out of the film it was raining so hard that there was a waterfall running through the elevator shaft and down the stairwells.

Another way my new iPhone came in handy was this morning.  At 7:45AM I was jarred out of sleep by what sounded like a 20 piece brass band.  The grade school by us was having an early assembly for the students.  I looked up grade schools in  my zip code through the white pages app and I found the school’s phone number.  I didn’t call this morning but I got their number now.  Brass bands beware.

HIFF and I love driving!

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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.

one of my many gecko friends.
one of my many gecko friends.