for UTB

Kerplow

I'm sitting in the yard, minding my own business, eating more than a single-serving of Safeway Cinnamon Graham Crackers, when, kerplow, a crash, the sound of bouncing metal and maybe broken glass.

A kid driving by our house hit a parked Jeep, knocked his own bumper clear off and scattered auto parts into the street. He's unhurt, but freaked.

I had looked at the Jeep not ten minutes before. It was for sale, and much more expensive than I would have guessed. It was in good shape, a convertible, and it's still in remarkable shape given the number of parts of the kid's SUV that are in the street.

And now I hear a siren.

Best of the Big Island

With my time on the Big Island now quite definitively limited, I've been thinking about the best establishments it has to offer. Not surprisingly, they're mostly places to eat. They are not in the tour books.

1. Garden Snack Club, Hilo. The Garden Snack Club is ostensibly a Thai restaurant, though "Thai" is an understatement and "restaurant" an overstatement. It is a hole in the wall, maybe 15' by 10', with an electric wok for a kitchen and a tiny window that looks out on a van parking lot. It's not a dive, though -- there are houseplants and Asian chairs and embroidered table cloths, and incongrously, a terrifyingly massive for-sale television that literally takes up most of one wall. The waitstaff consists of one beatifically calm and slow-moving hippie waitress per night, and owner-chef Tina cooks every dish, two at a time, on her tiny counter. It's not the place to go if you're in a hurry. But why hurry? The food is outrageously good. Favorites include a Thai tofu tortilla-pizza covered in about three pounds of some sort of wildly-addictive cheese, peanut-sauce drenched rice noodles (declared "too intense" by Aidan), beautiful fresh veggie salads, and mango sticky rice. Two entrees will run you thirteen bucks and will be more than two of you can eat. The patrons are happy laidback hippie types. And it's BYOB. And it has homemade ice cream. Magnifique.

2. Kawamoto Store, Hilo. Kawamoto closes each day when it runs out of food, sometime right around noon. They've got pretty ridiculous sushi, a rice and seaweed roll covering tuna drenched in sugar, plus 15 or so other variations of fried sugary meat. It's the peak of local (note: not the same as Hawaiian) cuisine. You can order bentos (lunch in a box), costing from $2.50 to $6.00. You just go up and say "I'd like a $4.50 bento, please," and they put in the right amount of food. I like pretending I know exactly what's in a $3 bento and ordering it with supreme confidence. I was quite disappointed to see, last time I was there, the explanations for each one printed up on a menu. It shot a hole in my theory that the incredibly numerous and busy countergirls use a hive mind to figure out how many rice balls to dish out.

3. Bamboo Garden, Hilo. The Bamboo Garden is a bar that's always crowded with locals, though you can't tell, since they're hidden in high-backed brown booths. A after you fruitlessly look for a place to seat yourslf, a massive but genial Hawaiian guy finds you a spot. There's no menu, no beers on tap, and you shouldn't try to order any kind of complicated mixed drink. But the patrons are there to sing karaoke in Japanese and make crazy side-bets when Hawaii football games are on, the Coors Lite is cheap and cold, and best of all they deliver you a staggering plate of pupus with nearly any purchase. If you like free, fried, and unidentifiable meat smothered in thick gravy, this is the place for you.

4. Na'alehu Fruit Stand, Na'alehu. Na'alehu is in the southern-most settlement in the United States, and it's really remote and empty and (I suspect) drug-ridden. We always stop at the Fruit Stand on the way to the nearby Green Sand Beach. It's not really a stand, though it is a big, dusty, wood-panelled room, sort of old-west style. The cakes, cookies, and sandwiches are great, and they now pipe in East Coast NPR on satellite radio. My favorite thing, though, is how empty it is. They have a little bit of decent but quickly-aging fruit, some tofu, maybe three loaves of bread and a bag of chips, their baked goods, and a couple of sodas. That's about it. And I don't think it's ever fully stocked. Probably the least on-hand inventory of any store I've ever been to.

5. Hilo Surplus Store, Hilo. The Surplus store, on the other hand, has an absurd amount of stock on hand. Camouflage, weapons, camping gear, packs, spiked boots, scale-model replica bazookas, bandannas. Obviously, stuff is spilling out into the aisles and you need to sort of forge your own path. A not-so-fine layer of dust coating everything adds to the ambience. This place should be run by a wild-eyed, bushy-bearded white man, but no, the proprietress is a nice little Asian lady.

6. Sauces Propane, Honoka'a. I don't even know what this place is actually called, but they have a big sign out front that says SAUCES PROPANE. They sell sauces, propane, used kayaks, shockingly high-end kitchen appliances, lawnmowers, and yummy ahi jerky. Their dog is very old, is missing a leg, and growls at strangers. It's also perched on an extremely steep hill. Awesome.

Last Night, Or So I'm Told

We saw the movie Sin City last night. It was absurdly violent, seemingly neverending, and visually stunning. Lots of eye candy for me (Jessica Alba and a very naked Carla Gugino) and for Eisa (Bruce Willis? She likes Bruce Willis?). All in all, an uncommonly memorable film experience. Or so I'm told.

According to Eisa, she got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom (this part of her story, anyway, is completely plausible). Upon her return, I said, "You wouldn't make it."

"What?" she asked, knowing I was still asleep. "Where wouldn't I make it?"

"Sin City," I said. "Sin City."

Eisa laughed, both at the time and this morning when she got to tell me about it. I have no recollection of either the dream or the conversation, but I wish I did. I'm sure I was having some sort of violent and sexy film-noir adventure, and I'm also pretty sure I won't have one of those today.

Testing the New Picture Upload Utility

It Does Snow in Hawaii

That seems to work.

We Need A New Word

We need a new word that means "his or her". I'm tired about talking about a person in the abstract and struggling to find a possessive pronoun. To wit:

"A nurse can't go to the hospital canteen without someone commenting on [insert new word here] outfit."

See my problem? Some people like to solve this condundrum by just picking a gender. In these politically correct times, it seems like writers choose the gender that breaks the stereotype about their subject. In the answer above, they'd put "him" in; when writing about doctors or programmers or people in general, lots of writers stick "her" in. Every time I read that, I stop thinking about the writer's point in to ponder how [insert new word here] gender-labelling decision was made. "One's" works in some contexts, but I shun "one's" and anyone who uses it. It reeks of awkward and inappropriate formality. I'll use "their" if I'm not being careful, but I don't think you can just introduce a plural willy-nilly. "His or her," though a mouthful, actually might work the best.

But I'm not going to settle for whatever happens to work the best right now. Language evolves constantly. If "doh" is in the OED thanks to Homer Simpson, can't I just have this little pronoun? I say yes, and I'm going to do the English language a service by inventing it right here. Acronyms seem to be turning into words all the time (perhaps I'll SCUBA tomorrow)...let's see...Singular Possessive, Gender Neutral. SPONG, or spong. Jackpot!

I hereby declare that spong is a new gender-neutral possessive pronoun, accepted for use in all English communication, written or otherwise.

Me and the Children

It's been a weekend for new infant and toddler friends.

Episode 1: Our front yard, Friday afternoon. Frank, Srita, and her daughter Kailani come over after work on Friday for a picnic and a swim. Kailani starts out too afraid to give me a hug or even a high-five, but the ice starts to break when I get her a guava juice from the fridge. After eating and badmintoning, we go down to the water. The adults start talking to a prospective neighbor, Kailani comes over to me. I learn she's not four, she's four-and-a-half. She picks up a big pile of dried seed pods and brings them over to where we're sitting on the rocks. She shows me that if you rub the seeds on the lava rock, they'll start to fray. I profess to be interested, and rub some seeds on the rocks myself. This is very fun, and soon we're planting seeds right in the lava rock. Then Kailani tells me that she's my kitty and starts crawling all over the lava rock. She hides and finds seeds and tells me to call for her. I'm flattered by the attention, but I soon claim a need to go the bathroom and I return to the yard. In due course, everyone else comes back up from the water, and Kailani beelines right for where I'm sitting playing guitar. She picks some grass for me and informs me that we're going to play "Farmer". She picks grass, I pretend to eat it, she picks more, we go to sleep, we get up the next day, become horses, gallop around, and pick some more grass. The game ends when Srita says it's time to leave, and not even promises of more Farmer and another picnic will raise Kailani's spirits.

Episode 2: Episode 2 is the best. We'll do it last.

Episode 3: Carvalho Park, Hilo, Saturday afternoon. Nanea Wong-Yuen's first birthday luau. We arrive late, and with gifts more appropriate for a five-year-old than a one-year-old. There are approximately 200 people at this party, thrown by Nanea's parents, Eisa's family friends. We're immediately welcomed by the hosts, then we dive into the buffet. Kalua pork, sushi, chicken, desserts, mmmmm. After eating and contracting someone to come trim our coconut trees, we're out of things to do. We sit down near a baby stroller that's being pushed around by a small child. The child gives us a flower then runs off, leaving us with a pudgy little Japanese baby. I proceed to make funny faces at the baby for the next 30 minutes, inducing toothless smiles and overall-soaking drool. The baby is adorable, all unblinking stare and top pony-tail. She especially likes it when I turn my head so far to the side that it's almost upside down. Her dad comes by and reclaims her, maybe a little worried for the baby's safety. On the way out of the party, I play three-on-three basketball in barefeet, much to the chagrin of my soles.

Episode 2, revisted: Bayfront Park, Hilo, Saturday midday, Eisa's cousin Koa Colton's u-14 soccer game. After a scorching first half of watching from the bleachers in the sun, we move to a more removed but shady spot for the second half. I smile at a three-year-old girl next to us when I sit down. She smiles back and then tries to hide under her blanket, even though it's lying flat on the ground. I turn my attention to the game. A few minutes later, Eisa elbows me and tells me to look to my right. The little girl has been standing there for a few minutes, trying to get my attention. She's holding a bouquet of clover and grass out to me, freshly ripped from the ground. She gives it to me, and then runs away. I don't know what to do, so I take it and smile and ask her name and hold onto it after she runs away.

It might be the first time I've ever received flowers from a girl.

High Tide, Part II

I'm inside now, but I can feel the ground shake when the waves crash on the rocks. Yikes. And it's not even that big here.

High Tide

The tide is wending its way up the path to our front yard. It's as high as I've ever seen it, something that's probably related to the 40' swells on the North Shore of Oahu today. I went down for a dip this morning and it was another world. The tide obscured the shore I'm familiar with and the water was opaque with dirt and grass and other drifters displaced by the water's extreme incursion. My slippers even got dislodged from their post high up on a rock, though I found them both. And a school of little fish jumped out of the water, twice, right in front of me.