Arrival!

More on Maui will continue over the next few days, as I have not had internet access but I'm now in Guam and I'm SUPER EXCITED.

Well Guam is pretty interesting. It's very, very American in a lot of ways that I was not expecting, so I feel weird. This isn't the US, really, but it is at the same time. The currency and language is the same, which is really throwing me off. You'd think that would make it easier but for some reason it's actually kind of unnerving. I feel like I can't possibly be doing things right, since anywhere else I could possibly go overseas would be different. Even if they spoke English it wouldn't be the same kind of English, and no one else uses American dollars, or has the same tipping culture. They also don't usually drive on the right side of the road, or have the same kinds of traffic signs. It has all the symptoms of being America, but it's also so obviously NOT America that it feels unnatural and strange. It doesn't feel foreign enough, I guess, compared to anywhere else I've been, but it's also not American enough to feel like home. If Dr. Saethre really does give extra credit for a tattoo of the word “liminality” maybe he would also accept a tattoo in the shape of Guam. Maybe I can get extra credit just for proposing this idea (note to self, try this next semester) since a tattoo in the shape of Guam would probably just look like a deformed mole to most people.

The dorms are also liminal as all get out, with much nicer rooms than any of the dorms at UH but with what may be the nastiest bathrooms I've ever had the pleasure of using. There's AC in the rooms but not in the halls or bathrooms, but unlike the halls there are no big open windows to keep air circulating. Imagine, if you will, a toilet/shower room that is full of the most stagnant, humid air you have ever experienced. Imagine that the pipes from the bathroom above are exposed in many places and occasionally they drip what you hope to god is clean water, that there are lizards living in the faucets and behind the trash cans, and that the toilets' flush is so impotent it can't even clear out toilet paper in one try. There are also no shower heads and the water rushes out of pipes in the wall like a garden hose, but that's actually kind of awesome and I'm considering taking the shower head off my own shower at home now. Despite everything else, that shower leaves me feeling nice and clean, probably due to the fact that the water pressure alone is capable of taking off a layer of skin. Ahhh.

The rooms are sweet, though. The two beds are separated by two bureaus, one for each person, down the middle of the room. There's a ceiling fan above that, and a window AC unit on one side. You actually can't hear much of what the other roommate does because the window unit is pretty loud-- there are even two separate lights over each side that can be turned on/off independently. UOG 1, UH 0. I will take your funky steamy toilets any day if it means a cold, private bedroom.

While UH has a surplus of wild cats that roam campus, UOG has wild dogs. The cats at UH will run from you if you go anywhere near them, even if you offer them food. Earlier as my roommate and I were walking back from eating dinner, we passed a stray dog laying next to the building. We looked at her and said hi, and she decided we were her new friends and followed us all the way back to the dorm. She picked up sticks and things and wanted us to throw them for her, and a few times she ran ahead of us because she seemed to know we were going to the university. I even saw her look both ways before she crossed the street. UOG 2, UH 0.

Gateway House is the new Free Store

A few weeks ago a group of skinny white guys rolled up in a van and stole all the couches out of the lobby of my dorm. In broad daylight & with the RAs present, who got photos of them and their license plate numbers. We later saw them being chased around campus by security, but we have yet to get the couches back.

Then last night we saw (well, I missed it because I was in the shower, to my endless disappointment) a guy stealing a bike. Oh I'm sorry, did I say stealing a bike? Because I meant being a goddam ignoramus. This slick joker was at the bike racks directly below ALL the windows in one tower of Gateway trying to hacksaw a u-lock. I don't think I have to explain why this is one of the dumbest things anyone will ever see, but there are a few things that make it extra special: For starters, you can hear what goes on around the racks in every room in this side of the building, which houses upwards of 100 people. It was late, meaning not only was everyone home, it was quiet hours in the dorms.

And my favorite part of this whole equation? Most of the bikes out there don't have good locks like that one did. Even the nicer bikes mostly have crappy cable locks, the kind you can take off with pretty much anything sharp that you could find in a tool box. If this maroon had invested in a pair of bolt cutters he could have probably absconded with two or three bikes before anyone noticed.

Instead, he tried to hacksaw a u-lock. So some time after midnight, the entire Ewa tower of Gateway House was serenaded with the scrsh-scrsh-scrsh sounds of saw-on-tough-ass-bike-lock.

Don got up and yelled "HO, WHATCHU STAY DOING?" out the window. There was a short silence... Then faster, scrshscrshscrshscrshscrsh. After a minute he took off, just before campus security rolled up. I was mad that Don yelled at him because I wanted to go down and sneak up on him. Oh well.

With this caliber of criminal, I'm questioning the necessity of a police department. We should just phase it out and use the money to end Furlough Fridays and buy me a shiny new bat. I'm pretty positive I could personally take care of this problem with a shiny bat. They'll call me the Bear Haole.

I should be studying

I SHOULD, but it's so nice today. I think I will go get Chinese foods. Mmmmm.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone because I am a consumer whore.

The moth that time forgot

This five inch wide moth (yes u measured it) has been starring in the window at me for the better part if two hours, so naturally I tried to feed it a sugar cube.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone because I am a consumer whore.

Lizard kitten

There is a wee baby gecko that has taken up residence on my window sill. He's been there for days now. At first I thought it was awesome because I thought he was eating the tiny flies that come in my window at night sometimes but after more observation he seems to just like stalking them. He acts like a cat and will crouch close to the ground and creeep up on one super slow but then just stare at it. If one walks near him he'll step away from it like he's all surprised and offended. I'm not sure what he's eating, but anyway we named him Little Dude and he's my new pet. One of these days I'll try to get some photos of the hilarious bugger as he stares incredulously at his dinner.

Suddenly, bananas! Thousands of them!

I have an upcoming presentation on Monday for Anthropology of the Body and, as of this morning, I am officially tired of reading about FGC. If I have to read one more value judgment about how psychologically damaging it must be for women to be circumcised without any accompanying condemnation of male circumcision I am going to have kittens.

Anyway, went to see Zombieland. It has by far the BEST cameo I have ever seen in a movie ever and I am including Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder when I say that. If you are afraid of clowns, though, I would not recommend it. There are zombie clowns. They jump out and go BOO and it's not funny at all. :| What was funny, however, was the guy I went with making very concerned noises in his throat every time Jesse Eisenberg did something awkward and creepy.

Unhappiness is deciding to finally wash all your dirty clothes late Saturday night only to realize that you don't have any money left on your laundry card and the machine to recharge it does not take credit cards or $1 bills, meaning that you have to wait until Sunday to go to the grocery store to get cash back in $5 or $10 dollar bills so you can recharge the card so you can do laundry.

Also: "You are being shagged by a rare parrot."

Oh Facebook

I love you. You make these things possible. And you make it so easy to stalk spy on snoop about meet new people on campus.

In other news, cover your internet tracks people. You might not want everyone to see photos of you in your underwear playing a snare drum. I didn't want to see photos of you in your underwear playing the snare drum. But now I have. Thanks a lot.

Stuff White People Like

Okay, I have a proposal for two additions to the list of Stuff White People Like... Which, by the way, got me again with the addition of "Hating People Who Wear Ed Hardy." Touché, Mr. Lander. Maybe one day you will convince me that I am white and not Caucasian but that day is not today.

Anyway, Stuff White People Like.

#129 - Wooing. No I don't mean making the ladies swoon, I mean yelling WOOOOOO. After much careful observation I have concluded that only white people woo, and that it is always completely douchebaggy. The two favored places to woo are in a large group of moving people and in a large group of people moving in a car. Apparently being in a "fun" place makes white people much more likely to woo, as I have probably heard five thousand god damn woos from white people over the last three weeks since my bedroom window faces both the main dorm walk and the main street on campus, meaning that every group of moving people going woo as well as every car full of people going woo can conveniently be heard clearly in my effing room. Apparently other people are getting tired of this, too, because today after a few walkway woos another girl on the floor above me yelled SHUT THE HELL UP out her window. The worst times for wooing are definitely on Friday and Saturday nights, as the number of alcoholic drinks a white person has consumed has a direct relationship with how many woos they will throw out in an hour.

#130 - Blasting Hip Hop. This goes somewhat hand in hand with #116 - Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore except that these are the white people that do listen to “Commercial Hip Hop” which I guess could land them in the category of the Wrong Kind of White People. The deal isn't that they listen to hip hop, however, it's that they play it as loudly as humanly possible with the bass turned up so high that my room shakes when they drive by on Dole St. These white people don't seem to actually really listen to or enjoy hip hop, they just pick a few tracks to play extremely loudly in the hopes that it will make them look cool to everyone who can hear it. They seem oblivious to the fact that it actually makes us want to punch them in the nose.

If that wasn't annoying enough, there are about half a dozen particular songs that some group of white people really, really like somewhere in the vicinity of my room. I've never been able to tell where it's coming from, but every day the same five or so songs are played in a loop so loudly that I can hear them in bed with the fan on over the traffic noise even though I think the person playing it is actually in the building next door. On top of that I can't actually hear the song for real, just the bass (in the case of cars) or the drum machine (in the case of my wanker neighbor).

But the thing that is about to make me snap and FIND this guy is one song in particular that he normally plays in the morning while I'm sleeping and at night while I'm trying to work has a track in the chorus of some kind of small child babbling out of tune with the music that for some reason is as loud as the drum machine. So I hear DOON DOON CHCKA DOON DOON CHCKA BLAHBLAH DOON BLEE DOON BLOOBLAH BLAH CHCKA. One weird habit my brain has is partially waking up in the late morning and convincing me that something I'm dreaming about actually happened*. It doesn't tell me OH PSYCH THAT WAS A DREAM GIRL for at least a few hours. On the mornings I get to sleep in that babbling somehow gets into my head while I'm half-awake, so three days out of the week I spend 7am-9am half-dreaming that I am interacting with a lost child and/or have to get my own kids ready for school. To say I wake up confused would be the understatement of the century. I am pretty sure this is going to drive me to madness. I guess the reason he's playing it so loud is because that babbling has caused him to go insane such that he thinks playing the same five songs over and over so loudly that he's causing himself hearing damage is a good idea.



*This is one reason I avoid zombie movies. If I watch one I am probably 98% likely to dream about it all night, and for the first thirty or so minutes after I wake up I am pretty positive that I need to get to a mall fast.

I am a pretty pretty princess

Went shopping with my Freshie friend for SEVEN. HOURS. today for some reason. We were going to go the beach but it ended up being rainy and cloudy. I actually didn't spend very much. Most of it was watching her hunt around for an elusive pair of denim shorts, which by the way are all gone now because the fall lines are coming in. In Honolulu. All the shorts, sun dresses, sandals, etc. are going to clearance and are being replaced with boots and coats. No, really. They are.

In other news we won our pre-season game this last Friday (WARRIORS WHUT WHUT). Then on Saturday I went sailing with a dude from the team. I haven't been added to the roster yet because it requires about a metric crapload of paperwork (the list of types of forms I have to fill out has about a dozen things on it) and I'm hoping that it's not too late because I actually enjoyed it after I got over my fear of being eaten by a shark. That fear comes back when you capsize, by the way, which we did twice.

In other news, sea water tastes awful.

Thanks to everyone who sent me cards and presents. I stuck all the cards up on my gross looking cinder block wall so it's much nicer now. The less you can see of those walls, the better. I think they may have used to be white but I'm not entirely sure about that.

I am now "that neighbor"

Oh well this is just peachy.

Gateway House (the name of my dorm that sounds not at all unlike the name of a halfway house or a rehab center) has a little bee problem. I've heard there are always bees in the lounges and earlier this week I had to kill one that was in my room. I was never afraid of bees or wasps until I got stung by one after it flew into my hair and my hand felt like it was being stabbed for two days solid. Then I learned that bees can call other bees to attack if you threaten them. LOVELY. The whole building is apparently covered in beeeees so tonight there was another bee bonking itself on my overhead light.

Now the last time there was a bee in here, after I ran shrieking, I got my sponge mop and smushed him when he landed on the floor. Then I dragged the thing all the way out the front door and threw him out as quickly as possible since he was actually still alive. This time the bee wouldn't stop moving long enough for me to swat him and I couldn't reach him on the ceiling, so after twenty minutes of trying to trick him into going outside by playing an elaborate prank with the lights I went downstairs to elicit help. It was 12:30am.

So I'm standing in the lobby with wet hair in a sweatshirt and baggy pants waiting for someone to come in. After a couple minutes some guy comes in with groceries and I ask if he can help me reach a bee on the ceiling. The guy is obviously pretty confused but says he'll come help me after he puts his groceries away. So I go to my room and the bee is still there, smacking the light. I open the door and wait and at some point the bugger disappears. He doesn't fly past me to go out, he just disappears. So then the guy gets there and there's no bee. We look around for a minute and I swear that there WAS a bee, it's just not here now. Eventually I thank him and he goes back to his room upstairs.

Ten minutes later I notice the little bastard crawling around on my desk and I NAIL HIM WITH MY NOTEBOOK.

So now I'm trying to figure out if leaving a note in the elevator addressed to "the nice guy who tried to help me kill the bee" letting him know that I found it and killed it after he left won't actually seem crazy by comparison to me standing around in my pajamas asking strange men to help me kill things in my bedroom.

Move in partaaay

So with the upperclassmen move in starting yesterday, this is campus now a combination of this:



This:



And this:



I would like to let it be known that my original choice of example was the Beastie Boys going FIGHT. FOR YOUR RIGHT. TO PAAAAAAARTY in the lamest way possible. No embed allowed. Then I moved on to Prince, who I forgot is a jerk and has a team of lawyers keeping his stuff off YouTube, and eventually I got all the way down to Risky business before I finally found a video they would let me embed. Extra fail, guys. Extra fail.