Hazelnut

I am sitting at a tiny desk covered in computer equipment, in an office with four other slightly more spacious and less sharp desks, in the second story of a building at the top of a hill overlooking Hilo Bay on the Hamakua side of the Wailuku River. All this is lovely. The problem is, there are owners of each of the other four desks, and none of them are in the office today, or for the rest of the week. And so this spacious office is full of many, many machines and me. And the machines, of all sorts, keep beeping, chirping, binging, or otherwise sounding alarms at me. Every ten minutes or so, a watch will beep, a computer bing, a small unidentifiable machine chirp, and none of it with any apparent meaning. Even my computer is tinkling at me. I don't know why. I can only assume aliens are trying to communicate with each other. Or that I just consumed a very tasty soy hot chocolate with hazelnut with a lot more caffeine and sugar in it than I am used to.

Plus sometimes the phone, which is on the other side of the office, will ring once, and then my boss will decide she no longer needs to talk to me. Or she will use the speaker phone and so her voice will come out of the ether at me even though she works two floors down in another building. Which is startling.

Then there's Doug, the rogue office employee, who should not be working in a bureaucracy because he doesn't seem to like rules. He works in the office across the hall and likes to talk to me every time he walks past. He is very friendly, but he gives me the same feeling I always got in elementary school hanging out with the kids who got in trouble a lot -- the feeling that somehow, I am about to be implicated in something without even realizing it.

Also, I have a rollerball mouse which is unergonomic, and annoying.

Too much non-coffee, I think.

harboring

Most people rarely have occasion to read boat names. Usually a profusion of boats indicates a wealthy marina sort of place. In Southern California, such a place is Newport, which has boats with pompous (quasi)American names like the Whispering Wind or the the Santa Bella. In Camargue, they either have semi-drunken French names (Le Vin Rose) or pompous British names (the Jolly Archer). In Hilo, they are about an eighth of the size and have semi-sexual names (the Foolish Pleasure) or names referring to fish, which I suppose goes to show the duel purpose in Hawaii of owning a boat: fishing for ahi and ono, and having lots of sex. Or, if having a nice fishing boat doesn't get you all the girls, some good masturbation fantasies (e.g., the Wet Dream 1).

In any case, I think it may be a sign of dissociative fugue (which is at least a very symphonic sounding name for a disorder) when you begin thinking in forms of public media. As in, "That would make a good blog."

So I'll stop here, and go back to staring at my computer screen.

Vog on the Water

In one of my elementary school social studies textbooks -- second grade, I think -- was a page with three pictures on it. A City, a Town, and a Farm. We were taught new words for these places: urban, suburban, and rural. Looking out my office window to Hilo Bay, the view of the port, hotels, and church, looks very much like the picture of the Town. Less the palm trees. I find this very ironic, since this was a textbook in suburban Indiana, and this is the first time I have ever lived somewhere that I could identify as matching one of those pictures. In suburban Indianapolis, we were technically in a Large City, but all that was around us was housing developments and strip malls, and the occasional, randomly situated corn or wheat or strawberry field. Now I see the water, the steeple, the port, the tableau of multi-colored, tree-covered hills. It's very idyllic, just like that picture in my textbook. I just have to be careful not to look too much in the foreground, with its palm treet, or too much to background, where beyond the tree-y hills, there is a vast (oh, so vast) expanse of ocean, or two far to the south-west, where I can see the vog (volcanic fog) rising from the cindercone at Kilauea.

I also work at the most American of institutions, the US Department of Agriculture. As a federal employee, I help protect my country's ability to farm food for itself, protecting dairy cows and corn from poisoning and locusts. Or rather, since it's the Hawaii field office, protecting orchids and macadamia nuts from rats and liwi.

And then I will go to protect America's right to obesity, at the Coldstone Creamery.