I almost moved back to Texas last night.

So, I've mentioned to some of you: ninety percent of the time I love it here. The remainder, I [adult word] hate Hawaii. It might only be, like, five percent of the time, but the extremosity of the hate that I feel when I feel it is such that I am forced to bastardize words and write convoluted sentences to express it.

Last night was a prime example. Today is F----It-Friday at work, and I am in charge this month. I decided to make it Tex-Mex themed--margaritas, guacamole, and queso (con carne and vegetarian). Do you know how many grocery stores I had to go to before I found Velveeta? Three. After practically running through Don Quijote at 7:50--nothing stays open past 8, which is also awesome--I finally found it. They had maybe eight boxes. Not like they were out, I mean, that's how much they keep stocked. When I checked out, the girl at the register was like, is this stuff any good?

I mean, seriously. This is freaking America. Baseball, apple pie, VELVEETA. Right? Right?!

Even after three different stores, I was unable to find Jimmy Dean Sausage. For real. The closest I came was some brand of "breakfast links," so I just cut off the casings and broke them up. I was livid. It's the principle of the matter.

Just to get it out of my system:
People suck at driving.
Every road is under construction all the time.
People stand at the cross walk and press the button over and over and over and over and over and over until it changes, as if it won't otherwise or that they are somehow making it change faster.
People really suck at driving.
There is nowhere to park anywhere ever.
People also suck at walking.

--this concludes my ranting and use of absolutes, for now--

Work Update

Semi-exciting news on Friday: my CD told me that he's going to start bringing me along to client meetings so I can start forming relationships with them. Which can only lead to me having me own accounts. Which would be awesome. But I'm trying not to get too ahead of myself. It's still pretty exciting though.

That's all for now, bedtime for bonzos. I will try to be more consistent and less flurry-like in the future, key word being try.

<3
k

Wild(and not-so wild)life Update

Remember that dog I mentioned seeing roaming around near my building, the one with the green ears? I saw him again! And now he's purple! Apparently he lives at one of the eleventeen nail salons in the neighborhood (statement of fact, not a racial thing). At least I'm assuming he lives there, I saw him through the window as I was walking by. Maybe he was just having a fill done or something, I don't know; he does seem fairly high maintenance.

Speaking of dogs, I was driving home in the rain on the Pali, I had just come through the pukas (holes, in this case tunnels), it was getting dark, and I see something moving in the narrow strip of median--that is one ugly dog--and it's freaking huge--then I drive closer--it's a giant wild pig! With two baby (not-so little) pigs! Aah! Those things are scary lookin, man. I would not mess with them.

Other roadside wildlife sitings: a mongoose on the way to the gym in Kaneohe, chasing its tail! I swear. I would have thought maybe it had gone crazy from rabies if they had rabies here. Maybe it went crazy from something else, I don't know. But I watched him while I sat the light, just chasing his tail. Weird. I think the mongoose are pretty cool looking, like I would probably try to make a pet out of one given the opportunity. But the people who live here have a serious beef with the mongeese--apparently they were brought here for the express purpose of killing the rats in the sugar plantations. The mongooses and the rats, however, do not keep the same schedule; the rats are nocturnal, the mongeese are not, giving them very little hunting opportunity. So that didn't go so well, and now mongooses are like squirrels are on the mainland, and some people seem to be pretty touchy about the whole subject.

Moving on, there is a group of chickens that lives off the side of the highway right as you come into Honolulu off of the Pali. Most mornings they're out there, just pecking away, seemingly oblivious to the throng of belligerent morning rush-hour drivers, bumper to bumper mere feet away from them. It never fails to make me chuckle. I mean, seriously. Chickens. On the side of the highway. How is that not funny? I am dying to get a picture, but it's going to be tricky, given that the crux of the hilarity lies in the fact that it's morning rush hour traffic. We'll see.

Food Update

Because it wouldn't be me without one.

So, did I mention manapua in an earlier post? A good blogger would go back and check, alas I am not. In case I didn't a manapua is Korean, I believe, but they are very big here as is most Asian food. It is a fairly sweet chopped pork mixture stuffed inside a fluffy, doughy ball. It looks like this on the outside:


And this on the inside:

They're pretty dang good. Think Pillsbury meets sloppy joe (only not as sloppy and more of a sweet flavor than a bar-b-q one). They're a popular thing for clients to bring to meetings. Another thing we get a lot of are malsadas. They're like doughnuts but without the hole in the middle and very heavily coated in sugar. Sooo good. Clients bring us a lot of food. And I always eat it. Which is why I've been needing to go to the gym instead of just doing it for recreation--too many office goodies.

So at our last office social hour, we were talking about food, and somehow fried pickles managed to bring themselves into the conversation. How could they not, right? As many of you know, I am one of the world's foremost fried pickle aficionados, so I was immediately enlivened by the turn in conversation. Come to find out, no one here knows about fried pickles! It is a totally foreign concept! Agh! So I set about educating the group, explaining the different cuts, coatings, dipping sauces (ketchup mixed with ranch IS the best, don't care how gross anyone else says it is). It was quite the cultural exchange.

Also, I went to Whole Foods on Friday. They just opened Hawaii's first here on Oahu this past Wednesday. It made me fairly homesick, although they have so much local stuff, it didn't even really seem much like Whole Foods in Texas (not to mention it's like a tenth of the size). I did, however, eat chicken tamales, which were not nearly as good as Pedro's from Lubbock, but still the closest thing to a taste os Texas as I've gotten down here.

And I'm ending on that note before I get more homesick. Go eat some Tex-Mex for me!

It doesn't suck.

So, I've been neglectful with the blog lately, partly because I've been busy, but also because I've been a bit homesick and a little down on Hawaii. Not that I'm unhappy here, it's just tremendously different, and I still don't really feel at home or acclimated. But then I happen across views like this, and all of the things I whine about seem pretty irrelevant.

These were taken in Lanikai, not far from where I live in Kailua. I was giving a friend a lift that morning and showed up early, so I hopped out of the car next to the nearby country club and took a few pictures while I waited.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I am going to videotape my drive to work in the morning to post up here. Doesn't sound exciting, I know, but it is so tremendously beautiful. Seriously. Every morning, I drive to work and think how lucky I am to be alive and living here. Words can't do it justice. It's like it shouldn't even be real. And even though I stress sometimes--living on a tiny island in the middle of the freaking ocean among a culture so different it might as well be a foreign country--being reminded of the bigger picture like that first thing everyday seems pretty worth it.

Da Kine

Ever observant, my parents asked what adding "-kine" in my previous blog post meant.

Because I am incapable of explaining it myself, here is what Wikipedia has to say (I was pretty close, just not articulate enough):

"Da kine" is a word in Hawaiian Pidgin, derived from "the kind", that usually functions grammatically as a placeholder name (compare to English "whatsit" and "whatchamacallit"), but can also take the role of a verb, adjective, or adverb. Unlike other placeholder names in English, however, which usually refer specifically to a device (e.g. "gizmo" or "widget"), person (e.g. "so-and-so"), or place (e.g. "Anytown, USA"), "da kine" is general in usage and could refer to anything from a person to an abstract concept. It can be used to refer to something nonspecific, or given enough context (especially when used in conversation between native speakers of the dialect, see Pragmatics) to something very specific. As such, it appears to be unique among English dialects, at least in its centrality to everyday speech.

"Da kine" is probably the most identifying characteristic of spoken Pidgin. The humorous illustrated dictionary Pidgin to Da Max defines "da kine" as:

DA KINE (da KINE) Da kine is the keystone of pidgin. You can use it anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Very convenient. What would we do without DA KINE? "Ey, I no can da kine if you no like da kine, too!"

Trever Cralle's Surfin'Ary lists da kine as "the word you use when you don't use the word."

It also happens to be one of the most frustratingly difficult aspects of Pidgin for non-native speakers to understand. While reports that native speakers of Pidgin can be unforgiving of amateurs may exaggerate, some Hawaiians get a certain pleasure from using the word to non-native speakers.

According to the article Going Native on Oahu by Steve Barth, "[da kine] can mean virtually anything, the salad dressing, a phone number, your uncle Lewellyn. It doesn't strictly even have to be a thing. It doesn't matter how obscure the reference either. A kamaaina will always intuitively know what you mean." While such a claim is often made, in practice it should be remembered that "da kine" is used as shorthand when it is likely the listener will understand what is meant from context (or a combination of context and body language), so that this type of claim is not necessarily as amazing as it might first seem.

Kama'aina means local, btw.

Stay tuned for a picture of Manapua, wildlife news, and shockingly shocking rich point I uncovered yesterday (not-so-shocking hint: it has to do with food.).

k

Hawaiian Word of the Day

manini: adj; small.

The client made some manini-kine changes to the copy.

So my culturalization continues.