O'ahu No Ka Oi (O'ahu Is The Best): This was a good day. I'm still buzzing from it, having only just washed off the whole beach full of sand stuck to me, now fresh-scrubbed and sitting at the table munching leftover pineapple.

For the first time, my day off coincided with both Lily's and The Boyfriend's day off (perhaps a contrivance of them each) and I jumped on the chance for us all to be together. The Boyfriend had made me another of his fantastic mixed CDs, this one mostly to show off both The Who and a group called Faces, which he wanted me to hear because he counts them as The Black Crowes' biggest influence. We listened to it on the way to Lily's house with our beach gear in the back seat, and then snagged Lily and shoved her in with it.

We went to Haleiwa, the amazing and culturally confused little North Shore town, to go to a restaurant The Boyfriend knew. Haleiwa is confused because half of it is made up of cool, fascinating, one-of-a-kind stores and restaurants that are well loved by locals, and the other half is geared toward tourists, kitschy, boring, super-white, with a lot of unnecessary aloha-ness. The place The Boyfriend took us to had, as all Mexican restaurants should, a family of chickens running around outside it. After lunch we went to Waimea.

Waimea is my favorite beach. It isn't the most beautiful like Barber's Point, and it doesn't have the calmest swimming like Ko Olina's Ulua lagoon, it doesn't have the most exotic marine life like Haunama Bay, or the best surfing like the Banzai Pipeline. I like it because it is simply what I think a beach ought to be: soft sand, no rocks, a deep dropoff and sometimes -- like today -- some killer waves.

Bodysurfing is one of my favorite activities for spiritual renewal. Bored? Confused? Heartbroken? Slave to routine? An afternoon diving your way through twelve foot waves with breakneck force and potential to kill will make all that seem petty. Half the fun is watching other people. They dive into the waves, they get rolled, they scream and laugh and shout instructions to one another, sometimes they act like a lolo and turn their back on the ocean, then you get to watch them get swept completely off their feet. It's refreshing and brilliant watching us -- and here you can say us because there is a real unity, simple, unspoken, grateful for the lives we are collectively risking -- really play with the ocean. And the ocean wants to be played with.

Lily refused to go in, and advised me not to do so, for her sake. The Boyfriend echoed her advice but asked that, if I should drown, I leave him my Bone comics. I jumped in.

Ashley Bliss, as well as my sister, has been bringing up the concept of what heals. What is it that makes our bodies and our hearts and our souls and our minds feel better when they need it? What mends the cuts and breaks, physical or otherwise, that we collect through life? We use medicine, touching, food, music, books, pals, goldfish, voodoo. And sometimes I use gigantic crushing waves that pound me into the bottom of the sand then suck me back out to sea only to roll me and kick my ass again. It's dangerous and it's scary, and you get salt water up your nose and in your eyes, and you have three seconds between the time you see the wave rising and the time it hits to decide how you want to enter it, and choosing wrong can have you eating sand. The whole experience feels great.

The Boyfriend came with me for a while, once the ocean had calmed itself temporarily, and we rode a few small waves until the bigger ones came back, at which point he took off.

The waves were the biggest I had ever been in. They were petrifying, large, powerful, and I hit the curl wrong and ate it a few times. I struggled to stay on top of the wave -- the place where you can ride it like a rollercoaster all the way to the shore, harmless and exciting -- but I kept rolling too far beneath it and getting swept. Once I was pounded so hard into the sand that I thought the tiny grains had cut into my thigh and would leave little scratches behind. A huge wave was building and I heard someone shouting, "Go under, go under!" and I saw how I had to hit it: just into the tip of the wave, right beneath the curl, I'd dive in and it would propel me toward the top of the wave where I could ride it.

I love Hawaii.

I got out when the seawater in my eyes got to be too much, and I flopped down on a towel next to Lily and The Boyfriend where they were happily sunning themselves (and where Lily had stolen my new book, which I hadn't even started yet, the wench). I had, seriously, about two pounds of sand in my swimsuit. After I shimmied out of it we drove Lily home, listening to the mix and grooving in the car (which occasionally required me to steer while The Boyfriend played air drums).

At the apartment, he and I made lime chicken with pineapple and rice, shagged, then parted ways so he could get up early for work tomorrow.

I'm out of the bath, munching leftovers and talking to you. Today was a great day.

How was yours?