Post 7: Missing home

 

What follows is kind of an unorganized spew, lots of I statements & not a normal post, but I felt like writing it anyway. You don’t have to read it.

   A big decision is coming up. Next week is the deadline to turn in my form saying I intend to attend the university of Hawai'i at Hilo next semester. I really don’t know if I'll fill it out. I just really miss home. I love exploring and seeing new things and far away places, but being so far away from everything I know is really hard. My grandfather died a few weeks ago and I couldn't go to the funeral because I'm so far away. That's tough.

    In a way I feel like I left Kansas for the wrong reasons. I'd idealized Hawai'i as a far away, beautiful place where I'd be surrounded by beauty. I learned about the plight of the endemic birds and thought "I need to go there and do something! I need to see those birds!", but I have as good a chance of seeing a lot of those species as I did seeing a pronghorn when in Kansas. It's absolutely possible if you get lucky, but not easy, and not in most parts of the state. The state of Kansas had lots of ecological problems also, species that needed a little help too. Why did I think Hawai'i was more worth my time? Just because there's endemics and the weather's good? I guess so.

    I feel selfish and naive for failing to recognize the quality of where I already lived. The weather and terrain did not transport me into a magic happiness. I fell into a trap that of thinking that home is boring, too cold, too hot & somewhere to leave. It really isn't though, Kansas is wild and beautiful and incredible, just look at my old posts for evidence. I guess I did recognize those things, but not fully. I feel like a hypocrite. There's enough people who can appreciate the beauty of Hawaii, there's a lot of people fighting for it. The jobs for being a scientist here are in very high demand. I don't want to be here, I want to be with my prairies and wetlands, even the man-made lakes. 

    I really miss the bike rides, the endless miles of dirt road, mostly to the north of town. I never got to carry out my plan of getting a 650b wheelset for my bike. I'll miss the mid-winter rides, thinking "Oh boy! I need to get a good ride in, the high is 40!" Then putting on 2 sets of gloves and my thickest wool socks & heading out for an hour or two to go see a bunch of brown fields and leafless trees. And I'll miss the fall colors that should start appearing soon. It was a real treat to walk to & from school, surrounded by bright fireballs of foliage lighting my way. A last hurrah before the gray winter. 

     And I feel like I don't really have a hometown. I've lived in 4 states now, and I just really want a place that I can get to know well, somewhere I can call home & live for more than 7 years. Maybe my wings need a break. It's tough. I miss my friends too. I've already moved far away from a place and had to start over, and I just don't want to do it again.

      I participated recently in a survey for a collaborative study about college students & connection at the universities of Hawai'i & Wellington. There were lots of questions about friends, actually msot of the questions were about friends, and it made me realize how lucky I am to have friends like I do. I have never felt support & acceptance from my peers on the magnitude I do with my six closest friends. I really miss them. 

    I want that connection with a place that my favorite writers such as Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder talk about. I feel like I was just getting settled in, then tore myself away from the opportunity to develop my relationship with my location.  I have unfinished business in Lawrence.

    One thought I had, as I was sitting in a plane going over the pacific ocean, was that maybe the reason I'm here is just so I can come back and appreciate Kansas more. Maybe I'm just going to be here for one semester or one year, then I'll come back with a renewed appreciation for home. Like when you lose something for a while then find it again, & you realize it's importance.

    The thing is though, that may not be the reason. Most kids who leave home and go somewhere far away for college feel homesick or very homesick, and they just keep on trucking and work through it. I really haven't been here that long at all. It could be that in the next 12 weeks I'll discover that this is the place where I feel like I belong, make great friends and I'll go on to spend all 4 years of college here. I know that great people can be found anywhere in the world, & a lot can happen in a semester. That's a scary thought, that uncertainty. Maybe I’ll be at KU or something next semester, but don’t get your hopes up.

     All I can do is ride it out and see where things are in mid-December. Then I'll make a decision. I can still live here next semester if I don't do that form I mentioned earlier, I'll just have to get a new room + roommate.

    But you know,  It's a good sign I miss home, home meant a lot to me. Wherever there is grief there is love. I just need to get through the semester first. And think a whole lot.

Post 6: Down by the bay... & the mall

    Went to the bay with my buddy Mars. We didn't really know what to do so we just got on the bus and rode until we felt like getting off. That spot ended up being the bayfront, Liluokalani gardens. We also went past the ocean,  around Richardson beach park, but didn't stop there. I'd like to sometime.

    

Never seen the ocean out the windows of a crusty 90s bus before

It was nice seeing the bay, I really hadn't spent much time around the water despite being so close to it. There were little outcrops of rock with a determined tree or two growing on them. I thought that was neat.

Grrr.. Lens Flare >:(

 There were also some old guys with old cars hanging around, I liked this one a lot. There's still a tiny bit of residual car kid in me I suppose. This was a '32 Ford, the most iconic base on which to build a hot rod. The color is great too, a very Hawaiian color. 

    There was also the actual gardens, those were cool too. I didn't see any ducks, which saddened me, I really wanted to see some ducks. They've been there the other 2 times I've gone. The main event was the trees.

     The trees at Liliuokalani gardens are just incredible. There's these ancient ones with incredible aerial roots. Those were my favorite.  I didn't get a photo of the entire tree, which I really regret, because it was so gigantic and humbling, totally unlike anything you'd see back in Kansas. These shots of the roots are cool though, even though they don't do do the tree justice. I wish it had a plaque or something saying what it was.

Mars encircled by the tree

     There were also some big stout trees with huge limbs that branched out all over, creating a ceiling which shaded the passersby. These had some huge epiphytes growing on their huge branches, the epiphytes were quite a sight on their own. Epiphytes, mostly epiphytic bromeliads are all over Hilo, but most aren't even close to this big.

 

You can see some of those epiphytes in the leftmost third of the photo, they're the dark silhouettes with different shape leaves

    On Saturday I went to the mall with Kalela, but really all we did was eat sushi. He was surprised I knew how to use chopsticks. (Another thing similar to that happened a few weeks ago, I was asked if I had ever eaten mango.) Us Kansans are more cultured than they think.

     Then we went to Target real quick so I could get a bowl and some cookies. Honestly I wasn't super impressed with the sushi. It didn't taste a whole lot better than the Dillon's sushi. Actually, I think the rice was worse than what they put on Dillon's sushi, dryer, the fish was just as good. I also got some udon, & that was great. It was my first time trying udon but definitely won't be the last. It's like ramen a little bit, but better. They had hot dog nigiri, that was pretty fun, & cheap. The hotdogs were weirdly red though, but they tasted good, like a totally normal hot dog. I don't know what the red tinge was about.

    Speaking of foods, the fresh fruit I eat regularly has definitely changed. I've been eating more papaya, pineapple, honeydew, & cantaloupe lately. I haven't had apple, raspberries, or peaches in weeks, which I used to eat all the time. I still eat lots of oranges, that hasn't changed.

    On another note, pacific golden plovers can be seen around campus. In Hawai'i they're called kōlea. In March-April they'll all leave to go to Alaska. Kōlea generally subscribe to one of two schools of thought: fly from Alaska and winter in Hawai'i, or fly from Alaska and winter somewhere south of Hawai'i, then go to Japan for a little while to store a bit more fat, then go to Alaska. Personally, I'd just go to Hawai'i, much easier & no need for a refueling stop. And the kōlea here usually get to Alaska a bit earlier. 

    Sorry I don't have a photo, I'll try to photograph the next one I see, birds aren't very easy to shoot with a cell phone. Look up the pacific golden plover though, so you can see what they look like. They're neat.

    

Post five: Hawai'i, and "cooking"

    

view from the parking lot

    It's taken me quite awhile to write this post, probably because I was miserable the first few weeks. Things are better now though, not incredible still but okay. Sometimes I can't believe I'm really here. I don't have a bike and it sucks, I probably maybe could buy one, but I don't know if I should. Hilo is really beautiful.  Exploring has been really fun, walking around town, trying new foods, discovering new plants and animals. There will be some field trips for my geology class, which I'm really looking forward too. I've only been down to the ocean once, but I'd like to take the bus to one of the farther away beach parks someday, it's free. There's a bus that leaves at 5am and goes to the south Kohala resorts, about 2 hours away.

    Right now I'm just taking three classes, chemistry, geology, and calculus. They're going okay. Calculus is hard. It'll get harder. Hopefully it'll be okay. I like my professors. They're all nice people, except maybe the professor who teaches chem lab. I'm still not sure about her. She's not extremely mean or anything though.

    The botanical gardens are pretty close to my dorm, which is awesome. It's a great place to go when you just need to get out of the house. There's a bunch of really rare plants there, some are critically endangered with less than 200 plants out in the wild. The garden is kind of split in two, there's a palm-centric part and a bromeliad-centric part. The bromeliad part has a nice table. I've never seen anyone sit there except me, which is a shame.  It's a little spot I can count on to go and be alone though, which is always nice, especially if that spot is a garden. I've been spending more time introspecting than I normally do.

formatting is hard  

     I haven't seen any endemic birds except the 'io (Hawaiian hawk), which I've seen twice. The first time I saw one it was the dark colored variation, and the second time it was the light colored. This island is the only place in the entire world where the 'io lives, it went extinct on all the other islands, or was never there in the first place. So that was really special. Mostly though, all the birds around me are introduced birds and in order to find the endemics I'll need to go deep into the wilderness, which isn't easy without a car or a bike. 

    Around campus there's tons of zebra doves, which are like the mourning doves native to KS except smaller and with stripes. That's probably the most common bird. There's also lots of waxbills, saffron finches, chickens, and mynas. The mynas are very noisy and gregarious. Java sparrows, house sparrows, and Japanese white eyes are around too. I saw a male Kalij pheasant the other day while on the phone with Joscelyn, that was a really neat bird. I saw it in this little area that's kind of like a woods but it's not very big, which is just across the street. I think I might make a post dedicated to that area sometime later.

Sorry about the finger

    It has a huge cliff at the end, whose depth really doesn't come across on camera at all. There's a well maintained path until said cliff, and then at the bottom there's sort of a trail, but not really, I haven't gone very far past the bottom of the cliff yet, but I will at some point. I want to get some bug spray first.

     Me and my roommate Kalala took the bus to Target on Sunday. I got an electric kettle, and it's really awesome, it heatz water so much faster than a pot on top of the stove does. I bought a bunch of green tea, and some oatmeal. Since I have no fridge it seems like breakfast will be mostly oatmeal until December 17th. That's fine, I like oatmeal. I got raisins and sugar for it too, should've bought molasses. One day I'll get more stuff to add in, when I'm bored of the same flavors every day. 

 

There's my little kettle

    The oatmeal got me thinking a lot about what other things I can cook using just my electric kettle. I could probably heat up some kinds of soups. I could make instant ramen basically the same way I make oatmeal. Mac and Cheese too. 

    My big idea though is beans. I could get some dried beans, soak them overnight in the kettle, then boil the water and they should cook. Adding a stock cube to the water, a little bit of my oats & maybe even chopped up SPAM, along with black pepper and ketchup appropriated from the dining hall could get me a humble bean soup that would probably taste fine. The beans could be swapped for lentils. Or I could do beans with lentils. Another idea I have is dumplings, like the kind that are in chicken & dumplings, but my kettle has an automatic shut off, so I'm not sure I'd be able to boil the dumplings long enough. Maybe if they were small. 

    Anyway, I really don't need to do any of this. Kalala has a microwave I can use as long as he's awake, (Which he usually isn't when I leave for my 9am classes, that's why I can't make my oatmeal in it.) & I have a meal plan which I can use to get all kinds of food that's better than anything I could concoct in the dorm, but I love a good culinary exercise. 

I hate SUVs, goodbye.