Midaregami

For the past two years I’ve been living here in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I have had a largely excellent time. I have learned a lot, despite some rough spots, and both Herself and I have flourished here, initial misgivings notwithstanding. I think I could legitimately describe the two years here as the best in my life so far.

Thus, if asked about my plans a month ago, I would (with some effort, it bears saying) distanced myself from late-semester panic enough to say that I was in fact quite looking forward to Hawai’i Year Three, wherein I expected to write my MA thesis on the poetics of consumption in Tawara Machi’s Sarada Kinenbi, which I planned to translate as an appendix to the thesis proper. It was going to be grand.

But there has been a twist. A monumental, shocking twist.

That same late-semester panic, inspired largely by a certain graduate class on Edo-era Literature¹, spurred me to spend a couple of evenings doctoring up my resume and sending it into Newtype USA. I have engaged in similar folly before², but this time I had a couple of honest-to-god gonna-be-published notches on my freelancing pistol, so I wondered if my inquiry might have credibility it previously lacked.

Turns out it did. To compress the long and frequently agonizing process of interviews and indecision down to a few words: I got the job.

On Sunday I am flying to my ancestral home of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a week later I am driving to Houston, Texas. A week after that, hopefully after finding an apartment, I start my new job as a staff translator for Newtype USA.

At this point, all I can really think to say is: Holy Fucking Shit.

¹ It turned out that I received an (extremely generous) A-, and ultimately wrote a paper of which I am actually quite proud—in any case, my panic was unfounded. (“Like it always is,” Herself long-sufferingly points out.)  

² Amusingly, last year I sent my resume to ADV Films, Newtype USA’s parent company, in response to their job posting for a translator. They never replied, and the posting remains up even now, a year later. Maybe they forgot about it.

We watched Breaking Away last night; now I want to quit school and ride my bike full-time.

In other bike nerdery news, old-school friend Warren is visiting from his deployment in Iraq; he brought me a present:

Guitar Hero II is easily the only game enjoyed by every single occupant of the Undisclosed Location. Our band names:

• The Eschatones
• Absynth
• Arockalypse
• Barock ‘08

Excellent.

• Crush my enemies.
• See them scattered before me.
• Hear the lamentations of the women.
• Eat more vegetables.

My trusty Braun electric razor finally gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and as my stubble grew beyond “rugged” into “vagrant” (bringing with it a marked lack of approval from She Whose Opinion Matters) the need became pressing enough that I finally started looking at replacement razors.

I recalled that my 5-year-old Braun had been in the seventy dollar range, so I warned Herself that it might well cost a pretty penny. “I don’t care,” she told me. “Just get one.”

So I investigated the Amazon reviews of various razors, and was introduced to an intriguing concept—the self-cleaning razor.

Cleaning my razor is something I don’t enjoy, so the idea of having it done for me sounded attractive. It had a certain Jetsons-style “Life… in the future” appeal. My razor would also be a robot—that cleans itself! Boss!

My 28th birthday was yesterday. I turned eighteen a decade ago.

… which doesn’t really bother me. The fact that I’m looking a bit older than I looked even a few years ago is fine, too—it gave me pause for a second, but only a second. I still look smashing in a fedora, so continuity is preserved.

Oh, things? Things, they are going extremely well. This year, I have:

This last Sunday, I rode my bike 100 miles up and down the southern and leeward coast of O’ahu. It was a blast, insofar as 3 hours of intense exertion followed by 4 of raw pain can be considered fun.

Oh, I’ll be doing it again, and soon.

Highlights:

• I had heard that there was a significant contingent of riders who fly over from Japan specifically to ride the event. I was unprepared for the spectacle of 4000 people, at least 2/3 of whom were Japanese, lining up for the ride.

• There were a lot of very nice bikes out there. Good ol’ Buster the Wonder Bike is no slouch—but once you’ve seen your third or fourth $9000 Cervélo/Kestrel/Pinarello superbike, you start regarding the $5000 Treks as mere dross.

• Speaking of Buster and of bicycles, I did a pretty solid round of maintenance on Saturday: New tires (cha-ching!), disassembled and cleaned chainrings and sprockets, cleaned and lubed chain, cleaned, greased, and tightened bottom bracket, minor wheel truing—the point is, somehow I got my bike in a state of tune I can only describe as “perfect.” It was nearly silent on the road. I had to laugh at the hyper-pricey carbon bikes with misadjusted derailleurs and creaking bottom brackets.

• Fellow messengers K. and Rob (who I don’t feel uncomfortable mentioning by name because he’s the the second-fastest messenger in the world) decided to crash the ride by going unregistered. Rob wore a ridiculous skintight time-trial suit, and K. wore an unbuttoned purple aloha shirt, skateboarding helmet, and motocross goggles, and rode his beat-up single-speed. Their buddy C. also rode a single-speed, along with a ridiculous ancient helmet and shirt and tie. What’s important to understand is that these three guys are three of the fastest riders on the island, and they dressed specifically to snub the road geeks. They passed me about 40 miles out, and they were hauling.

• Roughly 60 miles in, just past the turnaround point, I started hurting. Shortly thereafter I discovered an entirely new level of pain and suffering, but vowed not to give in. The final major climb saw lots of riders getting off and pushing; I dropped into my granny gear, but so help me, I rode up and down that hill.

• I wrote “Nihongo OK” (Japanese OK) on my jersey number, and had a couple of very pleasant conversations with out-of-town riders as a result.

• Muscle soreness on Monday was negligible, but my right knee was not amused. It voiced its complaint, loudly, every time I attempted to use stairs.

• I’m thinking of doing 70 miles or so this weekend. Just for yuks. I need a bike computer.

• Final time: about 7 hours, an hour more than I’d hoped. That’s okay. There’s always next year.

11:44  up 3 days,  3:42, 2 users, load averages: 0.08 0.25 0.43
09/11   Terrorists destroy World Trade Center in New York, 2001
09/11   Anniversary of military coup in Chile
09/11   Ethiopian New Year in Ethiopia
09/11   National Holiday in Chile
Calcifer:~ pstarr$ 

I really want to use TextMate. I mean I really, really want to use it. It seems like it would solve a whole litany of minor problems I have in using LaTeX as my primary environment for academic writing.

But there is one absolute dealbreaker. It doesn’t support multibyte character input. That means no Japanese.

So frustrating.

Spending as much time in the downtown milieu as I have been recently, one becomes acquainted with all manner of eccentrics. Here are a few.

The Bike Molester

In many ways, the worst kind of weirdos are the ones right on the borderline of normalcy. They possess only a thin veneer of sanity, and all it takes is eye contact to shatter it like the glaze of a crème brûlée. I discovered one such specimen, and comrades, let me tell you: this guy was a piece of work. I’d guess him to be early 30s, baseball cap, bad teeth, but mistakable at a distance of a few yards for a sane human. He coasted up to the bike rack on Bishop where I frequently stop; I was sitting there in front of the Starbucks, daydreaming between runs.

“Hey,” he says.

”’Sup,” I reply by way of greeting.

“Girl problemth.” Oh god—the lisp of the socially maladroit. Also, at close range now, I see the glint of madness in his eyes. I should have run.

“That sucks,” I say.

“Yeah, she won’t let me talk to her anymore, she’th crathy!” The gentlemen begins yammering, and even through his incoherent relating of his “girl problemth,” I can pretty much peg the fellow as a man for whom the word “inappropriate” carries no heft. I start to worry. I still have no idea of the horror that is about to ensue.

“Chicks, man. What can you do?” I say.

“Yeah, she’th like…” I am vague on his monologue, because it was incoherent and I was rapidly becoming terrified. He starts to lock his bike to the rack where mine is, and begins wrenching my bike around to make room for his. Unacceptable. He doesn’t know it’s mine, but still—this I cannot abide.

“Yeah, well, good luck with that, man, I gotta go,” I say, and jump up from my seat, proceeding to unlock my bike.

“Oh, that’th yourth? I’m thorry, man…” and thus saying, he leans down lovingly and nuzzles the top tube of my frame, whispering some vile apology.

“WHOAH WHOAH okay buddy, I gotta go see you later” I hastily say, getting on the bike, sprinting away, and praying I never see him again. I haven’t so far.

The Weirdest, Saddest Delivery Ever

Recently I went on a run to cash a check for an old woman in the hospital. How would that work? Well. I don’t know this lady’s story, but she needed some cash from her account, and she was in the hospital. So my job was to go to her hospital room, where she would write a check to me, which I would take to her bank, cash, and return to her. Needless to say, this is a suboptimal solution to the problem of getting cash, because it involves complete trust in a total stranger.

I did this run, and the woman in question—I don’t know if she was homeless, probably not—but she was certainly alone and in poor health. She was probably a little crazy. She fished out a check from her purse that was tattered and water-damaged despite being blank, and made it out to me for $100.00. A hundred bucks. I had really expected it to be more, for some reason. I rode the few blocks over to the bank and cashed it, and returned the money. No big deal, just a slightly weird run.

But then I got to thinking, how lonely and desperate would you have to be to resort to such a roundabout way of getting money from your bank account? There must be nobody in the world who cares enough for that old woman to run a tiny errand for her, so I did it, and made ten bucks in the process.

I was depressed for several hours after that run.

Sudden Inexplicable Vulgarity

I’m unlocking my bike, and a shambling, dirty old woman in a black dress that must once have been alluring walks by, grinning. She is missing her front teeth, and it is not a pleasant sight. She leers at me as she passes, and yells—really shouts—“Blowjobs, extra extra! Blowjobs, extra extra!”

This was near the end of the single most exhausting day I have ever had in this job. All I could think was, “Huh?” In retrospect, did she think I was a paper boy? Was she impugning my supposed profession, or making some kind of unthinkable, horrific proposal? She sounded amused, like she had cleverly insulted me with a real zinger, as if she expected me to be really insulted. Or maybe it was just hilarious to her.

Whatever it was, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Um, so to speak.

In Conclusion

Insane transients of Honolulu: leave me alone. Thank you.