Surf’s Way Up

Well, this is embarrassing – last night I’d invited some friends out, including an old classmate who had just moved here, thinking that the Chinese New Year block party would be the happening place to be.  Well, we arrived at a fairly empty Chinatown in Honolulu, discovering that most of the New Year celebrating had happened the night before and now everyone was down in Waikiki at that other block party.

Happy Year of the Horse, here’s some NFL mascots.

The Pro Bowl is pretty much the only big sporting event that happens here, if you can call a fake football game an event.  Hawaii has no professional sports teams of its own, nor are most of the college teams any good at the moment, so unless you’re a die hard fan of the University of Hawaii women’s volleyball team or are really into high school sports, you’ll just have to settle for this.  (This isn’t a diss on UH volleyball, by the way.  I’ve heard that they have a following akin to a religious cult; my friends who have attended the games have reported fights breaking out in the stands and everything.  I guess that’s what happens when your football team is 1-11.)  At least it’s usually pretty easy to score tickets, especially if you or someone you know is affiliated with the military since ITT has pretty good deals every year, and it can be a good opportunity to get autographs.

In other news, we got hit with the largest swell in decades last week, which had brought 50 foot waves to the North Shore.  I’d wanted to drive up there after work to check it out, especially since I have yet to see any of the big surf that comes in the winter (I’m always reluctant to fight the traffic to get to the surf competitions, since there’s only one two-lane road and parking is difficult even on a slow day.)  However, since I’d gotten roped into a mandatory fun work function that afternoon, I had to skip the road trip.  In retrospect it had been a good thing: apparently everyone else on the island had made the pilgrimage to the North Shore, and people had gotten stuck in gridlock for over two hours on Kamehameha highway.  Additionally, parking had been nonexistent, and the giant waves had washed sand up onto the road.

Boom. (Photos from Hawaii News Now)

That can’t be good for the car.

Hope you didn’t have any plans for the rest of the week.

Of course, that didn’t stop everyone.  All together now:

You IDIOT!!!

The experienced big wave surfers had been smart enough to stay away that day, since the weather had been pretty bad with lots of strong wind gusts and choppy waves.  But of course some amateur still wanted to get his surfing street cred or whatever – you know, the same guy who thinks it’s a gnarly idea to go paddle out in a hurricane.  Ah, Darwinism.

The (Radio) Gods Must Be Crazy

I had intended to make my first real blog post about the horrors of driving in Hawaii, but I soon realized that I’d have to write a dissertation in order to capture just how painful of an experience it is.  And I’ve lived in SoCal and the Deep South!  So I figure I’d better start small.

One listen to the radio – and spending at least an hour each day stuck in traffic affords plenty of opportunity to do so – reveals one of the many ongoing themes of Hawaii life: this place is way behind the rest of the world.  Some may be fine with that and consider it a part of the charm of living here.  I’ve even found myself thinking along those lines when I’m in a generous mood… and then I’ll turn on the radio to find something to sing to while I’m crawling along Nimitz highway, and upon hearing fucking Bruno Mars again any warm fuzzies of island life fizzle out like my afternoon plans.  (Confession: I actually don’t mind Bruno Mars – his music isn’t my cup of tea but I’d much rather listen to him than boring Jack Johnson, who was the “local boy who made it big in the music world so now we must play one of his songs every 20 minutes” the first time I lived in Hawaii.)  There are only a handful of Top 40 stations here, and I’m pretty sure they all have the same ten songs in their inventory.  It’s horrifying how often one can switch between two (or more!) stations and hear the same song being played.  The worst part?  The songs they play ad nauseum are the ones that were big on the radio for the rest of the world 3-6 months ago.  So if you’ve just come from a visit to the mainland, or if you regularly download the latest hits onto your phone or iPod, be prepared to be assaulted by the songs you’ve already heard played to death and have gotten sick of hearing.  Why am I still hearing “Blurred Lines” on the radio like it just came out yesterday?

Power 104.3 is by far the worst offender, in my opinion.  I’m pretty sure they have fewer songs than anyone else in their inventory, are shameless about playing the same artist several times in one hour, and have a terrible habit of picking one several-months-old, not-so-great-the-first-100-times song and playing it incessantly.  (Currently “Clarity” by Zedd, which I swear comes on every time I get in my car.)  They also do this annoying thing where they latch onto a song that came out ages ago – but not so long ago that people are nostalgic to hear it again.  A while back I was guaranteed to hear Akon’s “I Wanna Love You” at least once a day during my drive home.  Ugh.

The other station I listen most often to is Star 101.9, which is better about mixing up their music but not by much.  Being an alternative/90s station they generally have more of a selection, but they tend to get caught in the same trap of playing the same artists repeatedly (Third Eye Blind?  Come on, man.)  To switch it up, I’ve been listening to the dance station 95.9 even though I’ve never had a huge interest in EDM.  It’s been a nice change, to my surprise, and oddly enough I’ve found it kind of soothing to listen to while stuck in traffic.  Certainly more so than hearing “When I Was Your Man” for the umpteenth time.  The only problem is that they need to get a better broadcasting antenna or something, because the station cuts out almost as soon as I leave the Honolulu city limits.

Eh, oh well.  I suppose I could just download more music to listen to in the car, but when you’re stuck in traffic all the damn time you tend to wear out your playlists pretty quickly.  I guess the other alternative is to learn to like Island Music…