Thank goodness for summer!

Spring term just ended last week, and already summer has been full of night-swimming, a multitude of four am chats with friends, trips to town, nail painting parties, afternoon beach hours, reading for fun, field trips about food sovereignty and makin' money. I'm living in what is probably the best house in this little town with some wonderful roommates and am just so glad to have this six week break free of homework, quizzes, exams, three hour lectures and all those other school things. I now have a chance to immerse myself in nerdiness for sheer enjoyment without concerns about deadlines and bedtimes and such.

I make no guarantees about posting at any interval, but I do promise that I think about posting at least twenty-seven times for every time that I do actually find myself wandering onto blogger, and all of those thoughts are deep and awe-inspiring, of course.

As for a picture this post... On Memorial Day, some friends and I drove down to town to check out the Lantern Floating Festival without any real idea of what it would be. We certainly weren't expecting the thousands of people that were packed into Ala Moana Beach Park, or the huge projection screens showing what was going down on the stage. Needless to say, we were a little surprised upon arrival. There was a bit of a concert before the speeches and ceremony and all that and then the two thousand lanterns were set out on the water. I wish I had more mad skillz as a writer so that you all could feel it, but I don't, and this picture will have to suffice. Trust me, it was beautiful.

 

And now, off I go to get some sleep before a very early wake-up to go catch the first game of the World Cup. I think I'm rooting for South Africa in this game, and for Brazil in general. 

Somehow in the past three weeks, I managed to survive finals, work approximately a million hours, go to graduation, go to a funeral, go to a wedding reception, start classes again, finally get some beach time, some rest time, some friend time and visit Waikiki for the first time.

With all of those activities going down, I haven't been doing too much with my camera. I did go and take some engagements for friends up at Pupukea, but that was pretty much it.

After this past semester, I needed a break and am taking fewer classes and working fewer hours this term, which should hopefully translate into more blog posts.

For now, a favorite from last summer.

Here's to another summer of rest, fun, music and adventures with friends.

Elfelejtettem!

Some how I missed posting about Culture Night.

It was epic.
The end.





...Just kidding.

I took pictures, lots and lots and lots of pictures. I'm mentioned it a bajillion times, but I love my school, and I love the diversity and the cultures and the opportunities it presents for us to learn. Totally rad.

Fijian Club always tells a folktale with their dances, and this time they had some adorable kids with them. 

I was planning on dancing with African club, but the semester was a bit busier than I'd anticipated. They did an awesome job!

For the last few performances on Saturday night, I handed my camera over to a friend. Samoan Club ended the night, and there couldn't have been a better way to finish the event off. 

There's one week left in the semester. This past week, I had one of the more miserable days of my school career, but to make up for it, I also had one of the best, that just so happened to include two incredibly successful presentations.

Um, thanks?

So last night, one of my housemates handed me a couple of packages. One was from Amazon (Got the book, ma, I'll read it over break.), the other was this rather innocuous looking flat rate box sent from home.

 

Harmless, right? Let's take a look inside:

 

Things are a little stranger now. It was filled with a gummy hand (with real crunchy bones inside!), a couple of mustaches, an emergency blanket, lots and lots of napkins and no note. To say the least, I was a little confused. I texted my sister and the conversation went a little like this:

Me: Any explanation for this box I just got?

Sister: Ummmmmmmmm... merry christmas?

Me: Theme gifts?

Sister: Yep.

Me: Who is the hand from?

Sister: Uncle 3's theme.

Me: The napkins? And the Christmas napkins?

Sister: Lol step dad was out of packing peanuts.

Me: And popcorn? I have to say those were the most confusing part. Did you do the mustaches?

Sister: I don't know about the popcorn and yep.

My mom's side of the family has this super fun tradition were we all try to spend the least on the strangest or most entertaining gifts for the whole family. I remember blinking red noses one year, pencils with "1998 theem gift" on them, and some interesting band-aids, among others things. This exchange happens whenever most of us can get together. My mom and two uncles are all in the same general vicinity, so it's usually them now and I think they had Christmas sometime in mid-January, and naturally, the box just got here at the end of March. I had kind of guessed that's what it was, and wasn't the least surprised by most of the contents, but the napkins threw me off a bit, those aren't typical theme gift things. My family is awesome. My housemate who brought me the box also witnessed me opening it and is probably convinced that side of my family is on the top ten list of "Strangest Families in the World who Don't Participate in Illegal Activities."

Also, this is the closest thing I will ever get to one of those mirror self portraits with a big camera type shot. I call it "The artist as an angry mustachioed man." I even wore my man glasses for the occasion. Actually, I wear my man glasses a lot, so that's not really a big surprise. 

I have several posts that are sitting half-way written that will hopefully be posted soon. Maybe even sometime today seeing as I have been meaning to go hang out at the library to get a couple of papers written and now it's three and that still hasn't happened. 

Portrait of a Pineapple

I'm feeling the need for a little more positive in my life right now and thought I would write an ode to the farmers market, (Kid you not. I'm such a hippie child.) but didn't know which form would do such a thing the most justice (my iambic pentameter is a little rusty), because farmers markets are indeed things of beauty. 

Instead, you will get to look at portraits of the deliciously fresh pineapple I purchased that were taken shortly after said product of paradise came into my possession. 

I'm such a sucker for texture. 

We have an on campus farmers market every other Friday where we can get locally grown produce for a heckuva lot cheaper than Foodland offers. I may have gotten a little spoiled while I was home last summer because most dinners included at least a couple of veggies that were grown in the back yard or purchased at the farmers market, and I miss that. My diet is lacking in awesome most of the time, but for a couple of times every month I can enjoy fresh pineapple, pears, peas, tomatoes and whatever else catches my eye and I am happy. There are very few things in the world that beat fresh produce, and none of those are other food items. 

Almost.

It's hitting that point in the semester again where I have an easily quantifiable list of things I need to get done before finals, and there really aren't that many things, but what is left is BIG. And it might be just a teeny-tiny bit stressful. And I may have been walking down the hallway on my way home while thinking about things that still need to get done and haven't been going as well as I would have hoped when I fell and hurt my knee and it just topped everything off and I might have been very grateful to have a good friend with me who didn't mind that it took twenty minutes to walk home when it usually takes five. And it may be one in the morning and I am still up because my knee hurts and I want to get a paper written before I go to class tomorrow.

Thank goodness that there are only three weeks left and then I can finally breath again.

 

Right now I want nothing more than to sit and watch the waves at Pupukea, and I'd totally take a trip down Kam Highway this weekend to do it, except I have a meeting all of Saturday morning and a couple more papers due next week that need to get written. Someday. 

Tsunami Tsaturday

Goodness gracious, what a day. I got home from adventures Friday night at a none-too-early time, having heard a little bit about the earthquake in Chile and the chance of a tsunami coming our way. No big deal, right? Au contraire. One of my housemates was still up at one-thirty/two-ish as I was on my way to bed and she was super worried, so I stopped and talked to her for a bit. Remember the tsunami in September that hit Samoa really hard? That hit her hometown super hard and so anxiety was completely understandable. I ended up going to bed at 2ish and being woken up by a text/phone call at 3:45 saying that the on campus kids were going to be evacuating to the second story at six and that we should probably pack up and head to higher ground. Naturally, the news was a little alarming, so I wake up my roommates and we all pack up and head to campus to wait out the seven hours until this monster is supposed to hit. In the mean time, I call family to let them know what's going on and to spread some love in case I drown or am attacked by the mutant huge crabs that certainly will overtake Laie when the waves come this far in.

In case you were ever searching for a way to wake up a whole dorm of college kids, a tsunami tscare is a very effective means of doing so. This is six am on a Saturday morning. This was not fun.

The following few hours were spent seeing how many people we could fit into Rachel's room before we would get yelled at for fire code violations (eight, in case you were wondering), snacking on whatever food we had stashed away and watching the news. The last hour or so before the tsunami was supposed to hit we were glued to the live coverage that mostly showed the waves at Hilo Bay going in and out and in and out, and it was incredibly exciting. Not. Eventually, the fact that I was on my second day of approximately two hours of sleep a night caught up with me and I crashed before our fair city was destroyed. ...That didn't happen. Apparently they never really called off the warning, they just switched over to the Olympics. Also, I apparently answered a phone call from my mother that I don't remember in the least. What can I say, I was tired.

I have to admit, I was a little bugged that with all the hoopla, nothing happened, but then I think about how terribly things could have turned out and I couldn't be happier. It also makes me realize how completely unprepared I am in case anything does happen, which is a little scary. As a college kid, there really isn't a huge amount of food storage or such that I can accumulate, but the fact that the only things I grabbed were my camera, laptop, a couple of changes of clothes, my old journals, an apple and a jar of peanut butter... that's a little ridiculous. We'll see what all I can figure out so that should we actually have something happen, my arrangements are not such that I will have to eat pages out of my journals to survive.

Mini-Muffins at Midnight

Some days, you wake up and go to class even though you really don't want to because it's a bit of a joke and you know you're only watching a movie because the teacher hasn't really planned the semester but you get up and go anyways because you've already missed two classes and missing class is a dumb reason to get your grade lowered.

Some days, you make an appointment to see your academic advisor after having made one the day before and been told that she was going to lunch and you'll have to come back some other time so you're back and she's in her office with another student for an hour and you have to make another appointment to come back later because class starts in ten minutes.

Some days, you hope that you'll be able to make a trip to town to work on a project that you're really looking forward to even though you know it probably won't happen and when it doesn't you're still disappointed.

Some days, you get papers back that you really didn't do that well on and even though you knew it really wasn't a good paper you're still a little disappointed that you didn't spend more time on it until you realize that it was due that one week that you also had a unit exam, two other papers and a hundred plus pages of reading due on top of class and work time.

Some days, you come home and take a two hour nap even though you really didn't mean to and you spend the rest of the night vegging out until you realize that you have no food and a trip to the grocery store is necessary unless you plan on eating instant potatoes for the next three days.

Some days, at those trips you're really hoping that by some miracle the soy milk will be on sale enough for it not to be absolutely ridiculous and out of budget to buy enough to make this recipe for vegan muffins that you just found and really want to try out.

Some days just don't go like you'd hoped they would.

Those are the days that mini-muffins at midnight are a good idea.

Those are the times that a little bit of goodness might remind you that things don't have to go like you'd hoped they would for them to be good.

And those mini-muffins just might help you remember that it's okay to veg out on a Friday night, and that spending a little time looking at recipes online will probably help you make healthier choices when you're at the grocery store.

They might help you remember that it's okay to use milk in a recipe that calls for soy milk if it means you're being a little more responsible and sticking to that budget you laid out titled "Because I am attempting to be a responsible adult."

They might help you remember that it's okay to not get As or even Bs on everything and that you still have time to bring that grade up and do well in the class and now you know what the expectations are and can better plan for the next paper.

They might help you remember that even though you didn't get to town, you still got that proposal in that really needed to be submitted so that the ball can start rolling on bringing speakers to campus for a project that you think is really important and worthwhile and that if you'd gone to town, that probably wouldn't have happened.

They might help you remember that even if it was a pain to actually go see the academic advisor, once you were there you finally got some questions taken care of and now you have officially postponed graduation which means you're actually doing that peace building certificate you were so excited about and that you will actually have all summer off to go do your own research and that the academic advisor who may or may not be notoriously grouchy seemed a little less grouchy when you were leaving than when you walked in and that you like it when people aren't grouchy.

They might help you remember that professors are people too and that sometimes they get caught up in other things and are busy and might not like planning quite as much as you do and that they have get to up and deal with a bunch of kids who pretty obviously don't want to be there and that probably isn't very fun for them either.

They also might make you write in incredibly long run on sentences and wonder if it's entirely insane or only kind of crazy to blame everything on mini-muffins at midnight.

Recipe found here. Obviously with milk instead of soy milk, and made in mini-muffin form (which probably made all the difference).

First, agitate in developer for two minutes.

All through high school and out in Washington, I took as many photo classes as I could and would spend hours in the darkroom, rolling film, developing it, then going through the printing process- adjusting the enlarger, testing exposure time, developing the test strips, readjusting everything a couple of times and then putting the picture through all the chemicals- first the developer, then rinse, the stop bath, another rinse, stick it in the fixer, then the last rinse before you squeegee and set it out to dry. If I was lucky, I'd only go through that a couple of times before I got a print I was happy with, but there were many occasions where that wasn't the case and I would leave the dark room after three, four, maybe five hours unhappy with what I'd gotten done during that time. It happens. Often. As long as I stuck with it long enough, I'd end up with a print I was happy with turning in to my teacher or showing off to friends.

Even though it was time consuming and frustrating at times, I loved it. There was something incredible about being able to look at a picture and say I made that, all by myself. The smell of the darkroom, at first strange and unpleasant became an aroma I looked forward to encountering again because it meant that for the next how ever many hours, I could focus on the enlarger, the film, the paper, the chemicals and nothing else. I knew the processes to go through to reach that final product.

Now, I'm at school and I would kill to have a set process to go through again. I know some of the steps- sleep, classes, work, study, trips to town to visit the mosque for projects, practices for Culture Night, eat- but how to fit them all together is a little befuddling at times. It would be wonderful to have a step-by-step guide for all of this, set timings and adjustments to make for the correct outcome.

There isn't.

I muddle through as best I can, fitting in homework where I can, getting home before eleven at night if I'm lucky, working, and trying to stay sane by going to basketball games or watching Moulin Rouge at a study party. I guesstimate the amount of time I'll need for various assignments, and have gotten up at five more than a few times recently to get things done in time for class (or speaking assignments for church, which are a whole 'nother post). Even though it's not the easiest right now, I am loving it, even though there isn't a set procedure to tell me how and what to do, I'm making it, and I'm going to stick with it, until I have my diploma, or a published article, or a grad school acceptance later to share with teachers or show off to friends. There are doubtlessly dozens more papers to barely get in before the deadline, and countless late nights and early mornings, and grades that I won't be thrilled with, but in the end, it will be good, and I will be able to look back and say I did it.

Sadly, I don't have any of my old prints with me anywhere, but this is a shot taken with my trusty ol' totally-manual Pentax K1000 for a photo assignment back when my darling little sister was just a baby. 

Nerd to the nth degree.

I adventured up to the Punahou Carnival today.

I enjoyed some delicious carnival food.

I filled up a bag with all sorts of fantastic books like Pippi Longstocking, Ruth Benedict, Jonathan Swift, Freud and some others. This is the nerdy part. There are no pictures to explain it. 

Rather serendipitously, as I was trying to find the bus stop to return home, I caught the tail end of a Chinese New Year parade. 

(Tail end. Get it? Ahaha. I am so punny.)

I also ran and caught the head of that particular dragon. Apparently it is a tradition to stuff the dragon's mouth with money. I think I'll volunteer to be the dragon next year.

That was pretty much it for adventures today. There is an excess of pictures today to make up for the lack of posting last week, due to junky internet access, a silly computer and being busy beyond belief. 

Life is good.