For years, my friends on the mainland have teased me about
my determination to say Hawaiian words correctly. It isn’t Hawieee, it is Hawai’i with a
glottal stop. It isn’t Kaa-vah, it is Ka’a’a’va. And most importantly, it isn’t carey-o-key,
it is Karaoke or “car a oh keh”. It is usually the worst when I come back to
Seattle after localing out and my accent is the strongest. So today is pretty much make-fun-of-Jen-day. Which
should maybe be a national holiday or something. Then I could go back to bed, which I need to
do because I got about 5 hours of sleep last night and a combined total of 5
hours while I was at home. The other
home. The warm one.
Sleep dep is nothing new in Jenlandia, but it reached epic
levels over the holiday weekend. Whether
it was sand blowing in my eyes during my attempt at napping on Lanikai or
various nieces, nephews and calabash cousins refusing to let me go to bed while
they were on sugar highs, friends calling from the mainland blissfully unaware
they were calling me at 4 a.m. Island Time or just the ever present fear that a
large roach would try to crawl into bed with me at my dad’s house plus I couldn’t
get to sleep until about 2 a.m. this morning and got up for work at 5:30 – I am
officially cracked out.
I love going to Hawaii and I love it for about four
days. After that, my patience is
shot. I was actually asked to leave the
state by the Governor because I was too hyper and it was taking away from the
Island Ambience. That is the official
reason anyway. The real reason is in
sealed records somewhere. Everyone
complains about Seattle drivers, but that is probably only because they haven’t
driven in Hawaii or they haven’t driven in Hawaii and know where in the hell
they are going. I recall being asked on
more than one occasion for directions by tourists, “can you help us? We are looking for our car/a restaurant/our
hotel and it is on a street that starts with a K”. Oh my, we only have 13 letters in the
Hawaiian alphabet and K is pretty prominent, so I believe you are screwed,
sir.
I have a few rituals every time I go home – I walk up to the
top of our hill (about 40 minutes straight up), I drive around the island and
stop in Haleiwa to visit my cousins, I go over to Kailua and body surf or swim
at the beach with my friend Teresa and her son and I go to the far end of
Kapiolani Park and walk the boardwalk that is getting even more precarious with
time that is propped on the edge of the water by the Gold Coast near Sans Souci
beach. Driving around the island is
gorgeous, but always a giant pain in the ass.
This time I had some friends visiting from Seattle and New York, so I
was kind of on hyper mainland adrenaline anyway, so when the min van in front
of me started going 20 mph in the 35 mph speed zone, I actually passed them on
a corner in Hauula which is incredibly dangerous, but I was close to going
insane. I almost got in a fight at the
park because cars were just idling waiting for someone to leave so they could
park and I had the audacity to try to pull around them because I was actually
planning to drive my car somewhere. A
pickup cut me off (so I could wait until the 5 cars ahead of me parked?) and my
friend from NY flipped them off. I told
him, “Do NOT flip anyone off here. I am
probably related to them and if I am not, they are going to kick my ass”. There was undeniable proof of the phenomenon
I call the “Hawaiian break check” which is the tendency of people driving on H1
(the Interstate - tee hee!) to randomly slam on their breaks for no apparent
reason. It is endearing. Not really.
The other thing is that I generally stay with my family. They can’t seem to fathom, after 27 years of
being a vegetarian, what on earth I am going to eat. They usually get really obsessed with it and
start calling me the week prior asking me if there are special things they
should pick up. When we go to restaurants,
my dad always looks over the menu and reads me the things that might be
vegetarian. As much as I appreciate it,
I am 41 years old and not a scrawny elfin woman – I believe I can figure out
what to eat. We nearly had a fight over what
to get on a pizza when my step brother and his family came over. After about 30 minutes of going over what
toppings to get, I finally screamed, “I don’t fucking care, I will just pull
the meat off, but I don’t want to discuss pizza toppings anymore – this isn’t
hard!” They also seem to think that
since I work in biotech, I am a computer help desk person. I actually do employment and immigration law,
but am fairly handy technically. It is
usually because they can’t recall where they stashed their photos from their
last trip to South Dakota or Ohio.
Did I mention Ohio?
Not yet? Really? Because I looked at the photos from their
trip three times. Every time someone new
would come over, they would run the slide show again. Some of the pictures were nice, but they were
generally of places they had eaten or a bridge or something. Once was fine, but after the third viewing, I
kind of wanted to jump off the lanai and take my chances on the rocks below the
house.
I do love going home, though. The food is amazing – in just one walk up the
hill I found mountain apple, mangos, lychee, strawberry guava – all fallen to
the ground and some edible – squished and fermenting like a bad batch of spotee. Three
days in a row I had kim chee fried rice and papaya and li hing pineapple for
breakfast. It is a surprisingly yummy
combination. This time, four days wasn’t
enough and I didn’t get to have any haupia or long rice. In the cab home last night, I was answering
emails on my phone and I kept expecting the car to start heading right, up the
hill, to my house in Honolulu. Every time
I looked up, it was just flat, wet I5.
There are, however, no roaches at my house in Seattle. And cats.
Lots and lots of cats. It is good
to be home.
