Pacific

I have never particularly paid attention to the ocean before. But being in the middle of the pacific is a whole new experience.  I noticed the waves for the first time in a long while. It was very interesting to fly over the ocean between Oahu and Hawaii, because you could look out the window and just see water forever in every direction. But the water out there in the open ocean is just so calm. Like the water is peaceful. My dad said thats why they called it the pacific, and i think that i believe him. But sitting on beaches around this island, the rhythm of the ocean is very clear. There is a wave front that washes up on the beach and as it falls back into the water it runs into the next front which struggles to overtake it before reaching the beach again. The ocean pulses with energy just like our voices fill the air with energy. The ocean is talking to us. When the weather is calm, the ocean is peaceful. When the weather is rough, the ocean cries out to us.

I also never really paid attention to streetlights before our trip to Hawaii.
One of the most striking things about the island that we weren't expecting is how downright dark it as on the roads. Away from cities, there are no lights. And inside of cities, the only lights are dim, yellow LPS lamps spread rather thin around the road. I showed my family the craziness of the single-spectrum LPS light by showing them different colored soda cans in a walmart parking lot. The light turns everything "black and white" looking, as in, the color disappears.
I did some quick googling and confirmed my hunch that the yellow-only light is due to a law that supports all of the observatories on Mauna Kea. As in, the work of the astronomers on the island is so important that public policy has allowed them to control what kind of outdoor lighting is in use across the island. I find this quite fascinating. It makes me want to live on Hawaii, because Hawaii is awesome and cares about scientists. But the absence of light pollution made me think about light pollution. Why do we light up everything so brightly? Why do we make our planet glow at night, spending gobs and gobs of electricity just in case we want to see something?

I've also been thinking about airports.
Every time we went through an airport or got off of a plane during our vacation, I sincerely wanted to work in the airline industry. There are so many things that are just plain broken about it. I became acutely aware of the amount of time people waste in airports. You have a connecting flight with a 2 hour layover. Well, that's 2 hours of your life that you want to be traveling, but you are stationary. Airports have figured out this apparent 2-hour time suck. You spend twenty minutes waiting to get off of the plane, twenty minutes trying to figure out where your next terminal is, twenty minutes getting yourself there, twenty minutes in line for another TSA checkpoint, twenty minutes in line for a bagel... and sure enough, after you're done being lost and confused and angry at the people who design airports, you are just in time to board your next flight.
Whether intentional or not, airports are designed to waste time.
In fact, nearly all of them very much resemble malls on the inside. There are overpriced shops all over the place, and at the very end of your miserable walk through all of them, your terminal awaits you like an anchor store. I think that malls are also designed to waste our time, only instead of travel, they waste it with shopping. There ought to be some statistic out there comparing how much time people spend in malls and how many things they actually buy.

Being in Hawaii made me very aware of how we were spending our time. We spent a lot of time driving places. Sometimes it felt like a waste of time, like when we were driving back and forth between places. But most of the time it was an adventure. We were exploring Hawaii. The goal of driving was to get somewhere, leave the car, and experience the island. We therefore spent many hours tromping around on frozen lava flows, hiking a volcanic crater, snorkeling, eating at restaurants, and visiting with family. When it comes down to it, the time in the car wasn't wasted at all because there was always some incredible scenery outside the window, and always some conversation happening inside.

I thought about how back home, I spend countless hours on the internet. I waste so much time not doing anything in particular. I think we all probably spend far too much of our time not telling a story. Somehow, Hawaii didn't fall victim to that. We spent as much time as possible exploring and having an experience. With 60 days until my college graduation, I can't recall the last time I was able to spend a week just experiencing things. I hole up in my room tricking myself into thinking that i'm doing homework. Or maybe I actually do school work. We don't notice the ocean because we're too busy working. We don't think about our streetlights because we're too busy driving.
It may be that I noticed so many things during this one week trip because I wasn't distracted with anything else. I didn't work on my senior project, I just enjoyed being.
 
I'm trying to figure out how to use my time like we did on Hawaii.
I don't want to let any of it go to waste.

A Million Miles

I just got back home from a one-week family vacation to Hawaii.
The last time we took a family vacation, I think I was 12, so it has been about 10 years.
The background is that my aunt moved to the Big Island over the summer for a new job and my mom decided that during spring break, we should all go down and visit and see hawaii. Hawaii!

I can't possibly sum up the week as a blog, other than stating that one week is not long enough to visit Hawaii. But I do have lots of things I've been thinking about.

First, time.
There is a 6 hour time difference between the East Coast and Hawaii. This means that our 11-hour plane ride there from new york was actually only 5 hours long. Subsequently, we left Hawaii at 8pm saturday night and arrived at our house more than 24 hours later.

But time is so much more than just the numbers on our clocks.
That week in Hawaii was a trip that stopped time.
Perhaps because of the jetlag, none of us could ever keep straight what day of the week it was.
By the time Friday rolled around and we were exploring Volcano National Park, Wednesday's coral reef snorkeling felt simultaneously  an instant and a year in the past. The Island is so diverse and varied, and we saw so much and did so many things that it all became a blur of the past. I have immediate, happy memories of this vacation.

And yet, this was a family vacation.
Every moment of it felt like I was 12 again.
School disappeared and it was just me and my brother sharing the backseat of a rental car while Mom and Dad carted us around to all the things we had to see. These memories became memories of a time that was literally 10 years ago, and may be 10 years into the future, as well.

I left hawaii absolutely dreading to have class tomorrow morning. Vacation should last forever. There are too many mountains to climb and too much lava to see.

This trip is also significant because I started and finished a book on the plane. Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years has been in my pile of books for a while and I figured I'd finally give it a go. And that book sure did speak to me.
It's significant because Don's point in the book is that we need to be using our lives to live stories, interesting ones. Hawaii is a story to me. But this trip isn't the whole thing. I feel as if that little (big) island started a chapter of a story in my life. I feel almost how people talk about feeling when they come home from missions trips, all bubbly about how such and such a country changed their life and everyone needs to go there to experience the wonderment. There is some sort of inexplicable pull and draw for me now. Like, now that I've been there, and spent a week trying to pronounce the names of places, and driven all over and shopped at their walmarts, that it is a familiar place to me. That I should want to visit any chance I get and be exited any time someone mentions the Big Island. The same way I feel about Troy, where I called home for 9 months and spent uncountable energy exploring and habitating.

But most of all, it drops me off back here, at UNH, with 2 months left before I have the great and sincere privilege of beginning a life so expectedly boring that I am honestly quite frightened about it.
Don reminded me that I never really wanted a boring and regular desk job, but has left me asking myself what I could possibly expect myself to do about it.

Don also has me thinking that I need to start recording my memories, so that I can't forget them and so that I can figure out the story of where I've been.

2 months

Sometimes, you go through a season where time just straight disappears. I returned to my dorm room just now and realized that it had been 12 days since i crossed off a day on my calendar.
2 months from now, I will be graduating UNH with an engineering degree.
There might be some blogs here shortly.