In the words of Bourgeois Tagg, trust me when I say I don’t mind at all.  Very humbled.  Thank you.  (Photo taken by @fwmj)

Mermaid Man & Barnacle Boy at McD’s? #AWETHOME

(via thatduck-sureisugly)

Now, a word from Bjork.

Yesterday marked the 29th year I’ve lived on the mainland since my family moved from Honolulu, and there’s not a day that goes by where I wonder whether or not that was a good thing, or whether it saved me.

This means I’ve technically been a resident of Washington State longer than I’ve lived in Honolulu and yet I still call Honolulu my home.  Then again, the person I am comes from the place where I learned everything.  Well, there are things I would not learn until I became an adult, and there’s no true guidebook for it.  I’m sure there are guidebooks, but then there’s something called reality.

I wanted to prosper, I wanted to live well, I wanted to get married and have two kids.  I’m not there yet.  I don’t know if I lowered expectations of myself, or I became my own obstacle.  Or both.  I always used to say, with a mix of pride and ego, that I am better than the next person.  What I truly mean is that I want to achieve things just like that other person, but I want to do it on my own terms. I’ve done a good amount of things, but I haven’t doing enough, to my liking.  But what is enough? Why am I still in this part of Washington State?

I keep on reading memes about goals and dreams, and I’m thinking if it is so easy for so many others, why am I here still metaphorically “looking in the trash for aluminum cans”? It’s not that I don’t want to struggle or work hard to get what I want, but that goes back to enough.  What is enough?

There are days when I wonder if I would’ve ended up a bum, walking around Kapi’olani Park, living in a box close to a clutter of trees, asking for change.  I’m in a place of opportunity. Then again, I realized long ago that the opportunities aren’t here, and I can’t move from here just yet.  I guess the longer I think of what holds me back, the more stagnant I’ll become.  Welcome to my world.

I guess in the words of Tom Petty, there is no easy way out, but I have to stand my ground because I will not back down.  The struggle continues, as they say.  I can’t believe I just fucking quoted Tom Petty.  I know where my metaphorical “promised land” is, and I want that place to be my new home.  Until then, I have to continue to be patient.  When that happens and I get to that destination, I feel it will be then that I’ll be free.

(Either that, or I just need to be near a beach for a few hours.)

To the kid with the ear protection at the Dehaan/@Metallica performance at Orion Fest: may you have a great music upbringing as I did

(NOTE: For those who don’t know the story about this, James Hetfield announced that he would introduce a band at this weekend’s Orion Fest.  Fans received hints and some figured out who it really was.  Hetfield introduced Dehaan, but some fans were ready for what was to come.  Metallica played their Kill ‘Em All album in full, from start to finish.  In other videos caught during the performance, some fans were not aware of what was going on, and ran towards the stage to get closer to Dehaan.

This screenshot was taken from this series of videos.  It is of “bootleg” quality but outside of initial shakiness, it’s a nice performance.

Part 1
http://youtu.be/phJKCyiHiqI

Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBtTpJpZsgA

Part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98gZlxBDdls )

It’s not just Taylor Swift in this avi that is funny, it’s the girl to her left that points at her to laugh.

I’m talkin’ bout BASS!

(via djlowkey)

Sears used to be the great, big department store at Ala Moana Shopping Center in Honolulu.  Liberty House used to mark the Waikiki side, Sears marked the town side, facing Pi’ikoi Street.  Today is the last day Sears in Ala Moana will be in business.  A Bloomingdale’s will be in its place.  It’s hard to believe that this store was the grand place for everything from paint to clothes, electronics to paint.  As a kid, it seemed we shopped there a lot. These are things I somehow remember, some fondly:

1) My mom always bought me Toughskins for school.  I often wore corduroys.  Never liked them.

2) When my parents would do their shopping in the store, I would often go to the toy section and play the Atari 2600, if no one was there.  Or, as it was with Atari etiquette, we would take turns.  The games were usually Target Fun or Sea Hawk, and those games seemed to be in the Atari for years.  Even when the Intellivision was introduced to the store, the Atari 2600 had a lot more people playing.

3) There were brief moments when I would be in the paint section, wondering why so many people were buying paint and our family did not.  One day, we did buy paint, but I don’t remember if it was for the house or something else.  It couldn’t have been for anything but the house.

4) When we were parked in the parking garage, we would always walk through the door and smell the food that was in the lobby.  Most of the time it was warm cashews, and my parents loved them.  I still love cashews to this day, and there was nothing like that walk and that scent.  Sometime in the late 70’s/early 80’s, Wally Amos had his own section for Famous Amos Cookies, where the cookie of choice for us Hawaiians was “Da Kine”, which featured macadamia nuts.  He still had his outlet store on Ke’eaumoku Street, but there were much more people walking through Sears, so I’m sure he made a lot of money that way.

5) Also through the downstairs lobby was a few stand-up arcade games, which for us kids meant “forget Atari, we’re going to play the big stuff.”  What used to be a diner to the right eventually became an arcade room, but I remember playing the arm wrestling game in the lobby.

6) The upstairs/second floor seemed to be where my mom loved to shop, as it had beds, mattresses, clothes, fabric, sewing machines, and all of that stuff.  While she was there, I headed to the record section.  Sears had a very healthy Hawaiian music section, as with most record stores in Hawai’i, and I always remembered being treated well there, or at least a kid who wasn’t going to break anything.  I remember the huge catalogs where one could special order cassettes, as that was the cool thing in the brand-new era of the Walkman.  I know many records were bought for me here, but I don’t remember any specific one.  Maybe Wet Willie’s “Weekend”? Not sure, but I do remember one day going through F and seeing Funkadelic’s Electric Spanking For War Babies. I had liked the group, but wondered why the cover was censored. I would find out much later in my teen years.

7) Next to the record section was the electronics: transistor radios, clock radios, and the like.  It was there I held my first Walkman, or I should say, a Walkman knock-off.  It was a portable cassette player, but it was small and blue. I want to say it was a Sanyo.  For my birthday, I would receive what I thought was that Sanyo portable cassette deck, but it was a knock-off of that.  A knock-off of a knock-off?  Man.

The other part of Sears I did like was the photo department on the ground floor, as one was able to buy not only Kodak and Fuji film, but tourists could also buy three minute 8mm film reels that were souvenirs of their time in paradise.  It’s funny to think back and realize that that was the only option for many to bring home moving images of Hawai’i.  Those films may have been shot in the 60’s or 70’s, but… as a family who had a projector and camera, it made me interested in making movies with the 8mm, but not leading to much.  Also on the ground floor was a candy section, for those of us (i.e. mom) who wanted popcorn or chocolate.  I also had my mom buy me my first and only football jersey.  It was the Dallas Cowboys, but on it had the the word Hawai’i and the number 79.  Those football jerseys were massively popular, as it represented where we were from and what year it was.

As a prank, while my mom used the restroom, I had a quarter and used it to buy a tampon.  She about freaked when I showed her my gift. I didn’t know exactly what it was for at the time, I just knew it as “a woman’s thing”.

The point is, Sears was packed with stuff and one could go to Ala Moana and spend a good half hour to an hour did, as I’m sure my parents did many times.  When I came back for visits to Honolulu, Sears would become “the old people store”, one to ignore, one to neglect. It wasn’t as hip as I thought it was as a kid, and while I would walk past it, there was no reason anymore to go in.  There were more exciting stores in Ala Moana.  Even here in Washington State, a Sears was a store of last resort.  Lots of hardcore, lots of washing machines.  For a short time, it was a place where one could buy a region free DVD for about $50, back when that was considered a major find.  These days, a Sears may be just a store to walk through to get to the rest of the mall/shopping center, and perhaps that’s why the one in Ala Moana has closed.  Too much precious real estate, so why not replace it with something else that will be worth the land and earn money?

Thank you Sears for some great childhood memories.  Thank you to the cashew sellers.

This house across Royal Elementary School in Honolulu (Vineyard Blvd.) was where I became a good friend of Kimberly in the 3rd grade.

The circumstances of our brief friendship remains a mystery, but this is how I viewed it. Her and I were in Ms. Luke’s and Mrs. Ito’s class, and she seemed very cool to me.  Very bubbly, always happy.  Keep in mind that she was in the 3rd grade, and the only thing I could compare a girl to was my sister, bubbly and happy in her own way. I would always say hello, and perhaps she saw me as friendly. One day, she asked me over to play, and I thought “me?” I’m sure I wondered why she didn’t have any girls to play with. Plus, I lived next door to my best friends, Chris and Ryan, so why in the world would this girl want to play with me. I’ll be honest: I’m certain I wondered what kind of things would I be playing with a girl.  Girly stuff? Holly Hobby? I honestly did not know.

Outside of her smile, I definitely remembered her very curly hair.  She was a black girl, or at least part black.  Most of my friends in Hawai’i were mixed, but this was different because she was a black girl and I had never had a black friend before.  Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, Samoan, Tongan, Caucasian, and of course Hawaiian.  In Hawai’i, the thought used to be that the black kids would only hang out in military schools or the barracks.  I don’t know if that perception existed because of what my grandparents taught my parents, but I was someone who thought “why does that happen?”  I honestly didn’t question it that deeply, not in the 3rd grade, but here was a mixed girl asking me over, and I said yes.

I don’t think we actually played in the house, or if we did, it wasn’t for long.  I walked up the stairs and I believe her mom was inside either watching TV or cooking.  It was around 3:30pm or so, which for me, meant that Checkers & Pogo was on TV.  Visiting a girl during Checkers & Pogo time?  My time?  I just remember the house being clean inside, I believe she was the only child but our conversations never lead to me asking if she had brothers or sisters.  I also never got a good look at her mom, and I was curious because as kids, knowing about our ethnicities, we wanted to know who was what.  Then again, I also wondered if she was adopted, but never got the chance to ask.  I do remember her mom making Kimberly and I a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, grape jelly to be exact.  Then she gave me her View-Master to look through.  We played a bit outside, maybe for half an hour, and then she said she had to go inside as it was time for her to do so. I said that I would see her tomorrow, and that was that.  I walked back home, going through Royal, up Queen Emma Street, and down the road to Lusitana.

We never really interacted at school after that, and I seem to remember that she and her mom would move away soon after.  Was it a military thing? Simply a move to a new residence? A move to/back to the mainland? I honestly don’t know.  I do know that I ‘borrowed” her View-Master and my mom told me to return it the next day, which I did.

Kimberly was not a long lost love or anything, just the first girl who asked me over, which weirded me out. I’m sure we did more than look through View-Master, maybe play a few toys or a board game but I guess I managed to single out the sandwich and the View-Master.  It didn’t make me any more confident with the girls that I thought were cool.  Then 4th grade came and it was like “oh”.  5th grade: “ooh”.  I had always liked a certain girl named Jennifer, but I also liked Louise, Pamela, Christine, Kristine, Rochelle, Dashia, Elizabeth, Karen, Julie, Kaya, Melissa, Mary Jean and her sister Marsha, Vanessa, Alana, and others whose names I do not recall. Yet Kimberly would be the cool one, or “the first cool one”.  I’ll never have the chance to know her story, but things in life happen that way sometimes.