At the last minute, I decided to take a break from teaching English at Northeastern and start a Summer Staycation. It feels great to have the next eight weeks on my calendar wiped clean.
However, instead of sitting around playing Wii all summer, I’m gonna throw my weight behind some volunteer organizations in my neighborhood.
Just the other day, I attended an orientation for 826 Boston and their storefront Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Center. I’m really excited about this, and I hope my teaching experience will come into play.
I’ve also contacted The Food Project about volunteering on their farm, but unfortunately they don’t need help until August because of a youth program, so I’m looking around for other Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) opportunities.
Bikes Not Bombs is also on my list of places I wanna join. I bought a bike from them a few months ago, and it’s become my main mode of transportation, but I need to learn more about bicycle maintenance & safety.
If anybody reading this knows of other organizations around Boston that may need help for the summer, please leave a comment and let me know.
I don't know how to write about my recent family trip to Aruba. People might think I'm making it all up. My mother, stepfather, brother and I went to a destination wedding for two people I'd never met.
Should I write about the day we were leaving, and my brother was driving down from Asheville? He went to pick up his car from the downtown lot where he'd left it the night before and found his back window broken out and Sirius radio stolen. Then, he went to get gas and drove off with his wallet on the roof of his car. Luckily, he had his passport, so we all made the flight to Aruba, but Delta lost his luggage. The most unbelievable part of this is it all happened my brother's birthday!
On the other hand, maybe I should write about our second night in Aruba when my brother, mother, and I sat around a lounge bar by the beach drinking frozen bugaloes and mango martinis while having an intense family disagreement until 3 o'clock in the morning. The third time the security guard came by to ask us to be quiet, he had to remind us we were on vacation in Aruba and should relax.
Perhaps folks would rather read about the father of the bride hosting a yoga class on the beach early one morning. He was so hung over he could barely think of any standing poses for people to do and kept falling over in the sand while attempting the tree pose. Later, he went parasailing and vomited on himself while his wife refused to reel him in because she said, "He'd want to get his money's worth out of the ride."
I know… I can write about the wedding itself. The beautiful setting by the water as the sun went down, the flowers, the music, the girl in a thong that walked by the bride and groom while they were exchanging their vows, and the absent minded preacher who continuously lost his place in the prayer book and completely forgot to give the newlyweds their rings!
Possibly, it might be best to write about the reception party by the hotel pool. While the father of the bride danced nonstop to the cover band and somehow managed to sweat what looked like a smiley face into his dark grey T-shirt, my brother was taking bets on who would be the first to jump in the swimming pool. After asking the maid of honor to jump in with him, "You be Thelma; I'll be Louise," I took off and dove in. My brother picked up the maid of honor and carried her in; the groom and his best man were right behind, and eventually the all other groomsmen and bridesmaids followed.
In the end, I guess it doesn't matter what I write about, at least there was a happy ending.
This post is long overdue, and I just got some pictures up online. Check 'em out here: Hawaii Picture Gallery
Originally, I wanted to write about my departure from Nagoya; the quiet drive with Fumio to the airport on the Nagoya expressway past the twin towers of the station and the new Toyota building. My last view of Nag city came from an almost aerial viewpoint with surreal qualities.
I wanted to write about arriving in Honolulu and getting whisked through immigration because a family of twenty Samoans was in front of me; only to get outside with my giant green duffle bag holding six years worth of summer clothes and be told there's no storage facility at the airport now because of 9/11.
I wanted to write about my Uncle Teddy, a guy from Macon, GA that caught the Southern Rock swell of the early '70s and rode it all the way to Waikiki. In the middle of that tumultuous tidal wave, he married a young Hawaiian woman, had a baby boy, and experienced a religious awakening which bore him again. He spent the next twenty years with a Bible and no secular music. Just last year, he had another religious experience at a church in Harlem, NY, where he was ordained, and he's now on a mission from God to start his own church in Waikiki.
Let's just say, Teddy didn't show me the light... but he did show me a home video of him meeting James Brown in 1968 at the Macon airport. Does that count?
But I digress, I wanted to write about sleeping on Waikiki and overhearing someone point out the exact place where Cameron Diaz learned to surf, and I also wanted to write about Teddy's friend Dr. Wes, a fast talking, fast thinking, fast photo taking guy who married a young Japanese girl named Tomomi in the Ilikai Penthouse suite two weeks prior to my arrival. They still had the keys and wanted to show the place off while I was there.
I still feel like I'm digressing. I wanted to write about flying to Maui and renting a small economy car and paying $125 for a room at the North Shore Hostel; the car nor the room were needed because I met my buddy Dane, an ex-English teacher from Japan who works construction and was renovating his basement apartment. He set me up in a nice condo and didn't charge me any rent.
Dane's girlfriend Yumi arrived the same day as I did (06/06/06), and he proclaimed he was her low calorie sugar daddy. I wanted to write about hanging out with them on Big Beach, going surfing in Kihei and getting a bad rash on my belly and chaffing my nipples, going to a Hawaiian house party full of Dane's host family members and unknowingly meeting Richard Chamberlain.
I wanted to write about driving at 3am to the top of Haleakala, the highest mountain on Maui, to watch the sunrise and nearly freezing me feet off because I was wearing a pair of Dane's oversized work boots and my socks somehow managed to come off my feet inside the boots.
I wanted to write about hiking through I'ao Valley and getting lost, so we tromped through the woods to the river where we stumbled on a nude photo shoot, and Dane ended up jumping off a bridge into a shallow river with some local Hawaiian guys and making new friends.
All these things would have made a great storey, but as soon I landed in ATL, I hit the ground running, and it's hard to look back. Maybe someday, I'll get around to writing all those things up, but in the meantime please take a look at the pictures: http://web.mac.com/heyheygig/iWeb/heyhey%27s%20Site/Hawaii.html
At the last minute, I decided to take a break from teaching English at Northeastern and start a Summer Staycation. It feels great to have the next eight weeks on my calendar wiped clean.
