People who help people, and the rest of us

The Irish Rose in Waikiki is surprisingly hard to find at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. I've only ever gone there on my way home from other bars on payday, when it's very dark, very late, and it seems like a very good idea to eat too many Louisiana hot links with spicy mayonnaise.

"Yeah, I'll eat the street meat from here." ~ Rachel making good decisions.

Mum seems to have been secretly drinking there--with MY friends!--in the years since I left, because like a homing pigeon, she walked us right up to the stairs and into the only bar in Honolulu where it's still acceptable to smoke. The blackout curtains were drawn to keep away the sunlight and the shame, and we were the only women in the place. It was Veterans Day, so Mum bought a round of drinks for a biker gang that came up to the bar after one of their bikes broke down on the street outside.

Dean mixed us his famous bloody marys, which we felt okay ordering because there weren't that many people there on Tuesday morning and he had time to mix specialty cocktails for us. He even brought out his special stash of super-spicy olives, because it was my birthday week and he expresses his affection through alcohol.

For you, my friend.

 Dean and I had worked together at Honolulu Weekly, back when newspapers were still a thing. The Weekly is gone now, as is the magazine I wrote for when I moved to New York. So now, I work at a college and he works in a bar. There's an odd symmetry to our career choices. We're catching the youth at both ends.

He's also going to open a bookstore, the natural habitat of the misanthrope. We came up down a lot of possible names for the store for him, each funnier to us than the last, on account of the bloody marys. We laughed for an embarrassingly long time about "Hard Backs and Soft Covers"--or maybe it was "Hard Covers and Soft Backs." We also liked "Book 'Em, Deano," "Books on Beretania," and "Hana Hou Books," though I think he'd stopped listening to us by then.

I get along with Dean because he's one of the very few friends in my life who, like me, doesn't much like other people. I'm not saying we don't have friends. Dean actually has a very wide social circle, with many people who love him enough to come down to his workplace and tell stories about their worst, sleaziest acts ever done in theme parks. He'll even officiate at your wedding, if you're dying to have the officiant read the most violently misogynistic parts of the Bible during the ceremony.

I myself am moderately popular, especially in Honolulu, where the slower pace of life made it easier to nurture human relationships. But while I like individual people, humanity as a whole kind of freaks me out. I dread meeting new people, and even having people I know over to my home makes me nervous. What if they want to use my toilet? What if they want to spend the night? What if they never leave? 

So I was surprised, on my whirlwind of visits to Honolulu friends and colleagues, to learn how many of my loved ones have careers in health care and social services. Sunday night, I ran into the old president of my college hiking club, who teaches high school science. Monday, we spent several hours visiting with a good friend who does social work in an oncology unit (though she's taking time off for her new baby). Tuesday night, after spending a few hours day-drinking with Dean and then wandering through Ala Moana Mall trying to make bad shopping decisions, we had dinner with a high school friend who's studying nursing. Friday night I met up with college friends, one in nursing and the other busy preserving watersheds with an environmental non-profit. (Mum and my sister had no idea how close they came to being dragged out into the wilderness for a guided hike with him. I love hiking.)

My feet hurt, I'm tired, I'm getting sunburned, can we take a cab?

The BF preserves neighborhoods, my brother-in-law is a drug abuse counselor,  a college friend teaches high school English, another high school friend is a psychologist for troubled teenagers--all these people in my life are Pinky Thompsons, and I can't take a cab home without wondering if I should have the driver drop me off a block away so no one will know where I live.

And then we have Dean, who has alienated every employee at Disneyworld, though they should have known better than to put "Sit On My Face" on the karaoke machine. There's just something about his black and shriveled heart that calls out to my own and reminds me that it's okay to be a private, anti-social asshole.

On Saturday, Mum, my sister and I were drinking at the airport bar, surrounded by our luggage. The vacation was over and it was time to bring back souvenirs and Liliha Bakery coco puffs to our respective partners. My sister looked at our heap o' crap and worried aloud that no one would be able to sit at the table next to ours.

"Fuck em," sneered the person on her way back to New York City. 

Mushrooms, Car Bumpers, and Aging Punks for 2010

And for your New Year, here is a double helping of everyone's favorite game, "What the hell is that?!" It's more difficult to play now that I live in my own apartment and don't have roommates, but fortunately, this is still New York, and there are many opportunities to wonder at life's great mysteries.

First: a Christmas Eve puzzler. Where did this come from? Why was it dropped here?

And does the wine bottle have anything to do with this situation? Writer for scale.

Second: from under my window. Is this edible? Will it aid my "spirit quest"? Why is it growing inside my apartment? Wine cork for scale.

Finally, here is a wonderful article in Honolulu Weekly, my old employer, written about and by someone who would say something sarcastic if I called him my good friend. Dean Carrico reunited with his old punk band, Preachers That Lie, over the winter season and opened for the Misfits last night at the Pipeline Cafe in Honolulu. Seems like as soon as I move to the coolest city on the planet, all the cool stuff starts happening elsewhere.

Oh, well. Go Dean!

Happy New Year.

GreenerPenny and knitted beings

My first job in New York was working as an editorial intern at Plenty Magazine. I'm not linking to it because it's no longer there; print and digital magazine are both gone, vanished into the Interwebz-ether (Intetherwebz?), a victim of the Great Economic Collapse of 2008, along with hope, the taxes of my firstborn son, unicorns, rainbows, and any modicum of dignity I may have had leftover from my days as the Warlord of Honolulu Weekly (to the right, Rachel holding court with my fellow newspaper folk; note how everyone's head is turned toward me, except Travis, who was punished for his transgression).

Now I pass out condoms. More to come on that fun development in my life later this week.

Plenty was the first and only professional magazine I've ever worked for. Mostly I wrote blog posts on the Daily Green Bit section of the Web magazine about how to be more environmentally friendly in your daily life: apple picking, bird counting, urban foraging, chemically safe cookware, composting, wind power for your home, flower power for your dog--if it was hip amongst the hippies in late oh-eight, I was on it like Blue Bonnet.

Savor that last sentence. That's why I used to get paid to do this.

I'm writing all of this as an introduction to my good friend and fellow environmentalist-feminist (environfeminist?), Mindy Pennybacker. She was my mentor at Plenty, a fellow island girl in this savage city, and she taught me everything I now know about blogging and almost everything I know about the environmental movement. She didn't teach me how to water the garden with leftover bathwater, that was me mum, but she did teach me about industrial chemicals and hormone disrupters in baby bottles. Oh, the times we had!

Those who have been following my life more closely that I'd be comfortable knowing about may remember when I completed the acquisition of my dowry. Well, that lovely table and chairs came from Mindy, who couldn't take them with her when she moved back to the islands. And now I finally get to repay her, in a manner of speaking, by linking to her website GreenerPenny.com and encouraging everyone who reads this to become a fan of GreenerPenny.com on Facebook. Because if you love da earfs, you love GreenerPenny.

Right now she has a post up on the FB site about the Union Square Farmers Market in New York City. So I'm going to sync up our websites by posting my own pictures of the Union Square Farmers Market. Make of them what you will. Happy writing, Mindy!