10 Things I Learned In Hawaii

1. I am making a mistake by not living in Hawaii.

2. Hawaii is Disneyland but without rides. By this I mean that it looks like a fake version of real things. The palm trees, though real, look like fake versions of what real palm trees look like. Same with the water. It looks like a Pixar-created representation of water. Too blue to be actual water. I guess I'm just so used to everything looking shitty, that once everything looks natural and clean and nice, the only way my mind can justify it is to think "This must be Disneyland".

3. "Mahalo" means "thank you". On the way to Hawaii, my sister incorrectly guessed that it meant "cheese". I told her the two words she would hear the most would be "aloha" and "mahalo" and so she surmised "cheese" must come in 2nd only to hello/goodbye. I'll say this about my sister: she is pretty.

4. If you spend a week sleeping on the foldout couch in the communal living room of your family's condo, you will spend 80% of your day enjoying Hawaii and 20% of your day figuring out when the hell you're supposed to masturbate.

5. When you are talking to people on the phone while walking the beach and they say "I can't hear you", and you say "Oh sorry, that must be the crashing of the waves at my feet", they won't laugh, even if it's clear you're trying to sound like a jerk on purpose. Jokes about being in Hawaii are never funny; they are grating and awful.

6. There are only two career paths I can take as far as my extended family is concerned: I can either be on Saturday Night Live one day, or I can not be. There is no in between. I tried explaining I'm more of a writer, to which one uncle said, "Y'know, we all turned on the SNL last week to see if you were on it. You weren't." That sentence, which doesn't make sense for reasons innumerable, is all that is repeated at me when I try explaining what I DO do for a living, which I still think is pretty interesting.

7. It is illegal to pet sea turtles. I learned this lesson after spending my afternoon petting sea turtles. Breaking the law has never been so fun! Except every night that I spend smoking marijuanna.

8. I am the annoying liberal asshole in my family. Which is still better than being the other 99 conservatives, but still, I did have several out-of-body experience where I found myself looking down at me and shuddering. For starters, I spent the week reading "The Audacity of Hope". I would bring it to the beach, even when I knew I wouldn't be reading it, just because I enjoyed the idea of my family casually seeing it on my towel. I would place it face down though, so it would look like I wasn't trying to show it off. Plus, that way, they had to say something casual like, "Oooh, whatcha reading?" I was very careful about getting in debates with my family; every time anyone made any sort of comment that remotely seemed political, I had to bite my tongue so as not to be that annoying Obama supporter. And a lot of those moments came up; if someone asked someone else to pass the salt, I would quickly figure out a way to bring up Obama, then immediately squash that urge.

9. Parasailing is fun. Especially if you can calculate exactly what time is on the East Coast and mentally picture all your friends either bored at work or cold on the street at that exact moment.

10. I will never be this tan again in my life, and I have to constantly fight the urge to lift up my shirt at people and say, "Look! Can you believe this!?!" It seems cocky, but it's more genuine surprise that my body was able to do this. I have to hold onto it while I can; already today I saw a little bit of peeling on my left arm, and literally whispered to myself "Oh no."