Raw Feed

This is the quick version only because my original impulse was to blog detailed descriptions of our days, with pictures.  We’ll see if that idea overcomes perfectionistic frenzy + harsh time-crunch reality enough to happen.  For now, this post.  No pictures, only musings.

Just got back godawful early this morning.  Red eye flights suuuuuuuck.

I learned something interesting about myself this vacation about… well… how I vacation. 

We started off our vacation on the Big Island on the Hilo side — reputedly cloudy and rainy, but with tons of stuff to do.  And oh, how we indeed did tons of stuff.  We drove up to the top of Mauna Kea, over 14,000 feet, to enjoy riding in a totally un-environmental bright red 4-wheel-drive Jeep on a rough road (they tell this city girl that the road was actually in really good shape that day), see the observatories, and flirt with altitude sickness (why the hell would anyone climb to the top of Everest when just walking really slowly up 2-1/2 flights of stairs at 14,000 feet had me panting and seeing stars!?).  We hiked across the Kilauea Caldera (volcano crater), saw some anticlimactic petroglyphs, and watched lava pour into the sea at sunset.  We wandered around waterfalls on paths only reckless local teenagers should have been hiking on and got mud in our shorts.  We shopped in downtown Hilo, including an unusually high amount of Christmas shopping (We usually shop mainly for ourselves. Is that — wrong?).  We even — try not to gasp in horror — bought me 2 pairs of shoes in a very ordinarly mall at Payless.  (They’re for ruining on the lava.  I have really sensitive feet, so I would normally never buy cheap shoes.)  As a crowning experience, we rode in a doors-off helicopter over the lava flows from Kilauea.  I really did “feel the heat” as they promised.  Worth every penny.

After this Type-A vacation, we were exhausted.  So we looked very forward to our next few days on the Kona side — reputedly sunny and drier, and very resorty.  (By the way, I say “reputedly” in both cases because we saw about as much sun in Hilo as in Kona, and more rain in Kona — but we were in frickin’ Hawaii, after all, so I didn’t mind any of it.)  And indeed, we resorted.  We sauntered around downtown Kona, shopped some more (more of it for us this time), swam (Aaron) and splashed around nervously (me) in the pool, took in the utter Tiki tacky of the Royal Kona Resort (clearly built in the 1970s), went on an overpriced “submarine” tour of the nearby coral reefs, and drank a lot of really excellent Kona coffee in various forms. This was a perfect rest from all of our Hilo-based excitement for the next 2 days. 

Unfortunately, we were there for 3-1/2 days.  The last 1/2 day, we were tied to the hotel, because our flight didn’t leave till after 9pm, but checkout time was noon.  We could store our luggage, but our car needed to stay in the lot until we were ready to leave.  We also had a side-by-side massage scheduled for 2:30.  It was fabulously relaxing, but by the end of the day, I was almost chewing my arm off with boredom.

Don’t get me wrong, Aaron and I are almost always able to find things to talk about, and after the “Oh, wow!!!!” days, we were able to have a couple of those “deep thoughts about life” conversations that I could have for hours but, out of mercy’s sake, I keep to around 60 minutes so Aaron doesn’t, well, chew his arm off with boredom.  But we were really done with that after about 2 days. 

And we had books… funny thing, I used to read a lot more than I do now, but at some point I realized that too much reading is actually bad for me.  It numbs my senses and makes me withdraw from life.  Imagine my shock a few years ago when I realized I was an extrovert trying to imitate her introverted father’s lifestyle to keep myself balanced.  Every time I got depressed, I withdrew, felt more and more drained, and wondered what was wrong with me, et cetera….  Now, when I get depressed, I call someone up and it works wonders.  I can still do all the self-analytical thrashing I want (I picked the right friends!), but when I’m done, I can hear about them and focus on something far more interesting than my same old crap.

So anyway, here’s what I’ve learned this vacation:

1. I’m glad I tried a true resort town once, so I don’t have to do it again. 

Don’t get me wrong — I do my damnedest not to cultivate false snobbery: “Oh, everyone does resort towns — I must do things off the beaten path.”  Aaron and I love Fodor’s Guides, and we think Rough Guides and Lonely Planet and other crunchy-granola guides (maybe I’m being a little unfair here ) are more work than we want to put into our vacation.  We don’t travel enough to places to feel we should avoid the things everyone else is doing, because, let’s face it, the reason everyone is usually doing those things is that they’re fun or cool or interesting!

But, all that being said, I’ve learned that what my vacation needs are days or half-days of laziness interspersed between days of full-bore doing stuff.  We hiked 8-1/2 miles total (combining the 4 trails we hiked that day) the day we explored Kilauea.  I remember being really tired and sore the day after that, but also really exhilarated.  I had no idea I could walk that much and live!  Now I know that.  I still refer smugly to how we “conquered” the crater.

2. Schedule the massage sooner. 

I felt so relaxed after our massage the day we left — and then we went and ruined the effects by trying to sleep on a red-eye flight.  The previous two nights I’d been having vaguely stressful dreams and waking up with clenched teeth and a tight back.  So now I’ll be trying to figure out how to schedule another massage soon so I don’t turn back into a ball of twine.  My good friend and regular massage therapist, Julie, fully advocates me “cheating on her” so she doesn’t have to battle my stressed-out back by herself.

3. Take a water aerobics class.

I still don’t know how to swim.  I hate the feeling of water going in and out of my ears and up my nose.  And yet, unlike bike-riding, another childhood skill I never mastered that I have officially and sadly given up on learning (I’m 33, my balance sucks, and falling hurts), I still want to learn to swim and don’t think it’s too late for me.  So Aaron and I came to the conclusion that hanging around more in a pool building up my muscles and getting used to having my sinuses invaded with the wet stuff would be a good first step to really learning to swim.

4. Ignore the bumper-sticker slogan, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.”

Perfectionists like me freak out and freeze up at the idea that this is the real thing! The live performance! Everyone can see what mistakes we’re making! We can never fix them!

No, no, no.  Life is where you try a bunch of stuff and see what works.  Trying = screwing up.  Screwing up = OK, it’s good you tried that, now you know something.  Life isn’t even a dress rehearsal — it’s one of those early rehearsals where sometimes you know your lines, sometimes you don’t, but you’re trying a bunch of different things to see which one works (and sometimes different things work at different times).  There are maybe one or two friends or production members in the audience to give you feedback, but mostly your audience is the other participants, and they’re usually focused more on whether or not they screwed up and less on what you were doing (unless they’re seasond actors who have their parts down pat, in which case their advice is usually worth listening to).

How did this come up? Well, we tried a lot of things this vacation. Some of them worked, and some of them didn’t. My tendency (have I mentioned that I’ve been stressed out a lot at work lately?) is to berate myself for all the things that didn’t turn out as well as I’d like. My other tendency is to ruthlessly problem-solve any area of my life that’s not ideal, like the fact that I live in Issaquah and commute daily to Seattle — nothing compared to my Bay Area friends’ commutes (I keep thinking, “Flee! flee! while you still have life left in you!”), but still mighty tiring. But life is about compromises, too, and this is one of them. If I accept that life is all about trying stuff to see what works at the moment, and about accepting some stuff you don’t want so much (living in the ‘burbs) to get things you do want (a relaxed husband with a shorter commute, working in downtown Seattle, working in a fairly awesome job with a fairly awesome boss — and by the way, Issaquah isn’t chopped liver), I’ll be a lot more relaxed.  But maybe I should also accept that a fair degree of neurosis in my life is inevitable and possibly (could it be?) even healthy.

Amazing the brilliant insights you come up with while watching surf pound and drinking Kona cofee and half-and-half with your husband.  I recommend it… for about 2 days. Then go ride in a helicopter with the doors off, because it totally rocks!!!