I wish I were outside today, riding round the North Shore in a little boat with a sputtery motor, feeding sharks and watching for whales to fluke near the boat. This morning, Wahiawa was freezing cold, gray and rainy, and it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed, wrap myself up and get on the even colder bus (why they insist on cranking the A/C full blast first thing in the morning when it's still sludgy cold outside is beyond me). Still, in spite of all that, I can see the sun now and I bet it's a good hot day out there in the real Hawaii, on the water, under the sun.

I am in the office, with more detestable air conditioning, feeling like a creature on exhibition, looking outside through glass in a Lysol-scented terrarium.

Today, I wish I were a fisherman. Or something.


Happy Wednesday, 'roos! I have another rerun for you. This was one of the earlier Finn strips (funny how different he looks now) where he's trying to assert his demonic nature. I guess I was still playing with his personality, but I still am. Enjoy!

Say what you will about the insanity of downtown and the virtues of staying home in your PJs and watching Star Trek. Any other day, I'm right there with you with a caramel apple and no inclination to step out there. But on Halloween night, which I first experienced only a week before the Boyfriend and I became official nearly two year ago now, the city is a good place to be.

Nevermind that that year we saw two different guys open their respective car doors and puke on the street as well as a rhinestone Elvis giving me the eye all before we even got to the center of Waikiki; it was wicked good fun.

This year, Sue drove me up to meet The Boyfriend with his homemade Day of the Dead mask as he got off work, and while Sue went home to chill and pass out candy, Skullface and I drove to the heart of Honolulu, into a giant music and art festival taking place in Chinatown.

All the bands were fantastic, just plunked down at different areas of the city and rocking out, but in particular this New Orleans-derived blues/rock group that would make The Black Keys pee their pants. They had a man on tuba who was using it to play the bass part. Have you ever HEARDA that shit? Well it was great. Band was called Anders Osborne. During their performance two different guys, Cheech Marin included, spilled their beer on my same foot. But it was chill.


( Rock the Casbah... )

I've been slacking off on writing for a while. I used to write constantly, dozens of pages a day, I had at least eight stories going on at one time. When I moved to Hawaii I wrote less fiction and more personal essay. Since starting the comic up, I've been writing less and less. I'm trying to get back in the habit.

I've started up another journal, specifically for articles I'm writing on living in Hawaii, from the perspective of a white chick. It's called Haole If You Hear Me.

I'll be posting new writing as well as a few of the older things I've written on the subject of Hawaii and being in it, and hopefully it'll be interesting and funny.

haoleifyouhear (that's me) will be adding all of you to the friend's list, and of course you don't have to add me back, but hey, it's always there to be read.

Love you guys!

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?

I've been back from Kauai for a few days, and have had time to arrange all the photos I took with my spiffy new digital camera, second-hand from my dad. I know I always railed against digital cameras, claimed that I adored processing film, and declared that I would never be drawn into an age where you can't actually hold your own pictures in your hand, but hey... it's a free camera, and it's good. And this way, you can all see them better.

I've cut it down considerably from 154 photos, but there's still sixty or so, so my dial-up friends and neighbors may want to sit back with some cocoa and sandwiches before beginning the journey. I can promise some spectacular views.

( Island hop: a photomentary )

It is one in the morning and I am lonely.

My sister is asleep, though I accidentally called her and woke her up. My boyfriend is at his own house, also asleep. My fish are winding down and sleeping beneath their false fern. My cat is curled up on my sweater. My mum is sleeping in her room next door. My father, back in Ohio, is not up yet. Even the loud, drunken idiots next door have settled down for the night.

Lonely lonely lonely.

I stayed at home from work today because my allergies were so bad that I kept hitting my head from sneezing too hard and was beginning to lose my eyesight. I made use of my time at home. I painted with my new paints on my new small canvas piece, and I'm going to give it to my sister for helping me with my rent this month. I inked two drawings then drew two more. I broke my Finn statue for the second time, attempted to glue him together, sneezed and broke him again. I made spam fried rice. I did bicycle crunches. I thought about rolling up my coins, but didn't.

What is this inclination we have to fill our lives with noise once we become used to it? Up till a few months ago, I was alone all the time. I had hours and hours of By Myself Time and I never got this itch. Now all my time is split between work, family, boyfriend and comic strip, and if I ever do get a few hours to myself it's a rare liberation. I've become so used to being with someone, being surrounded with people who want my company (never mind that there are only three or so of them, quality not quantity, after all) that now, when everyone else is at rest in their own little spaces, my space seems entirely too spacious.

There are issues I'm dealing with these days that are too adult for me. What happened to last month when I first came to Hawaii as a young girl and all these grownup things were far into the future? Oh... that was two and a half years ago. Actually. Hey.

But I remember it, nights like this, and I was right here, typing on this little screen (on a different computer, in a different bedroom, in a different house) and saying pretty much just what I'm saying now.

Lonely lonely.

But you were listening then. And you listen now. You occupy this space in my life, this square foot of words and pictures, and you've been with me for a few years now, listening to these words. There you are: the only bit of elegance, propriety and wit I can manage to scrape together out of my life, in this square foot.

And because of that (which I didn't even realize when I started writing this) I'm not so lonely.