My Yellow NotePad: Aloha: 2.0

Traveling by plane weirds me out to a certain extent. When I was taking the red eye back home a couple of weeks ago after about four hours of flight time it occured to me that flying in a plane is almost like time travel. I mean, I don't travel a lot but when I think about traveling 6000 miles in less than a day my brain kind of turns to mush. It just says," Okay...if you say so." It just doesn't compute. Sci-Fi stuff. I brought this up to a couple of people back home and was met with laughs and shoulder shrugs. I may be alone on this one. This feeling of incomprehensibility may also relate to the fact for the previous six-ish months prior to my trip home I could count the number of times I've been in a car on my fingers and toes, without re-counting fingers or toes. That means I was in a car less than 20 times. I can't put my finger on what makes foot and bike travel different, it was just a little weird to me. Perhaps I just feel more comfortable traveling a bit slower than most. Perhaps I just failed in an attempt to come off as profound. Either way, flying's pretty silly.

My ma asked me yesterday what it was like to fly over tons and tons of water and I told her I didn't know because my first trip over I sat in the middle aisle without a view outside and my trip back was a red eye and by the time the sun came up we were already back on land. Watching the sun come up over the desert and mountains and clouds was pretty intsense on that occasion, I must say, but that doesn't really relate to what I was talking about. As I'm now traveling back across the open ocean and I have a view outside I really don't see a whole lot of difference. Clouds block most of your view of the ground so for the most part it looks the same as traveling over land. The was a few minutes where I looked up and the clouds were quite thin so much of the blue from the ocean (remember, I'm in the Pacific now so I don't worry about tar balls. Just giant conglomerations of plastic that collects miles wide...but again, stories for another day..) and I thought it looked similar to what people might see if they flew in a puddle jumper over much of the Arctic. Big chunks of ice separated by deep, blue ocean. I, however, have never been anywhere remotely close to the Arctic so this is really just the Discovery Channel talking. This does make me want to check out Alaska, though. That'd be a good time, I reckon.

It also kind of looks like you're looking down at the sky. This is also a bit disconcerting as you can't actually look down at the sky. But the clouds are there, and you're over the clouds and underneath is blue ocean but it looks like blue sky. WILD AND CRAZY.

--

In other news, while I'm coming back to the islands after a two week trip home I still have another week before I start work up again. I've got a couple days to hang out before I'm taking a trip over to the Big Island to meet up with my friend Jay and her family. Her husband has family on the big island and (from what I've been told..) they have a rather large plantation house where I can lay my head for a couple of days before I have to get back to the office. I expect a swell time, and you should expect some pictures of a new locale. I think it'll be the perfect vacation before I have to get back to work. This will also be my first inter-island travel, so I've got that going for me...which is nice. While this was my first "vacation," I'd be pretty bummed if I had to go back to work the day after a serious flight (Like from Maine...not from the Big Island..) after taking time away from work. I think a vacaction after your vacation is the way I'm going to try to do things for a little while. And by a little while I mean as long as I can, haha. At worst I plan to leave at least a day off upon my return to the island prior to returning to work, just to make sure I've had time to shake the rust off. Going home was stressful, lemme tell ya..

Slight diversion here: As I sit on this 777 typing while I head back to my island I've just begun to realize that while I'm going back to what I call home I don't actually have a home there. I'll be couch crashing for at least a few days and I have no difinitive plan on where I'll be staying. I laughed this off when I was packing up my little bits of junk and storing them at friends' places, but now it's starting to hit me that quite soon I'll need to figure out a place to live. In a perfect world I hoped to be coming back to a 3 bedroom place ready for an August 1 move in...but this does not seem to be perfect world as I have no 3 bedroom place to move into. Zoinks! Could be looking for another room in a random house quite soon, which would really make me feel flat. It'll all get sorted out though, I'm sure. Right?

On the work subject you should all be happy to know that, much to my dismay, I was named Hula's employee of the month for June. Luckily I was in Maine when this occured as I don't enjoy attention being drawn to me in professional settings. Only social settings, I suppose, and that's not so much because I enjoy it but because I tend to be a little bit more ridiculous than most and for whatever reason that seems to attract stares from time to time. So it goes. Anyways, I don't like the idea of coming in and rocking the boat; I just enjoy going about my business under the radar. The book I'm reading is a memoir of sorts of a Brit who drove around backwater towns in America and wrote what he saw. In one Louisiana town he stopped and met a prision inmate who was the editor of the prision's monthly (or bi-monthly...I don't recall at this moment..) magazine, a magazine that, over his time as editor, had been responsible for yard-sale positive changes within the prision, firings of certain people of power within the prison, and the release of innocent inmates. The magazine had an outside subscription of close to 30,000 people around the country (as of the year 2000-ish..), including many journalists looking for leads to stories for themselves. Anywhoo this guy has been locked up for quite some time and has seen many people who committed the same crime he did (murder in the first degree) have their life sentences commuted and parole granted. He felt that he had no chance of being released due to the notoriety he had gained as the edior of the magazine. He feels that to have any success in getting out of prison you have to basically be annonymous within the system.

Man, how I wanted to remain annonymous within the Hula Grill. As Bob Dylan sang awhile back: " 'It's my work,' he'd say. 'I do it for pay. And when it's over I'd just as soon go on my way.' " It's not like I wanted to skate by or anything; it may sound sick and twisted but I do enjoy what I do and have never had a problem working hard. I just don't like people talking about the fact I tend to work fairly hard. I don't sweat it too much if I work with other people who are fine skating by and I have to do more than my share of the work, as has happened in other professions over my years in various crumby jobs. I just do what I do, you just do what you do, and everything's gravy. Hopefully when I return to work August 6th everyone will have forgotten about little, old me. JAG: just another guy. That would be tremendous.