Meme Me Interview

I had a lot of fun reading Thistle’s responses to some interview questions that are a type of meme going around the internet. Since Thistle is one of the first bloggers I met, and she reads and comments on every post I put up, I figured she would have some fun and make me think questions. And she did. A couple tough ones (my actual response was holy fucking shit) but here we go…………..

1. At what age did you start surfing and what would be your ultimate surf destination (other than Hawaii)? Why?

Well, first of all, I don’t “surf” per say, I body board. Over here a lot of people lump that into “surfing.” I can long board, but I’m not any good at all at that. Several of my girlfriends took up long boarding about ten years ago, when they approached their forties and when their sons started learning to surf. I started to learn along with them, but I didn’t get far. I hated the board hitting me when I fell off, I pearled nearly every time. Plus, my friends mostly live in town and surf in Waikiki, long boarders haven. I live on the west side of Oahu with bigger waves that can do more damage.

I’ve been catching waves in some way since I was a child. Our family vacations when I was little were at Carpintaria Beach, where we rode canvas rafts and caught waves all day long. Then we moved to Malibu where we body surfed and continued to ride rafts. I played on body boards with my kids over here when they were little. When my son started surfing seriously, about eight years ago, my husband bought me a body board that is the real thing and not from a toy store. I loved going out, great exercise and you don’t even feel like you are exercising. I haven’t been going out much since the cancer incident. I was too weak from chemo for awhile and worried about my breath. Then, by the time I was stronger, son had become fairly good and goes mostly to the North Shore and out in waves that are too big for me. I hope to buy a helmet camera like this (the video) and strap it on, go out, and post videos of me in waves for my blog.
I have little desire to take a surf vacation. I’d love to go to Bali, but other than that I crave vacations that offer different experiences than here. New York. Road trips across the desert. Snow and ski trips. Europe, India, Africa, Asia.

2. When you were a little girl, what did you imagine would be your 'career'? If you were able to magically change careers now and be transformed into a wildly successful and fully trained anything-other-than-a-teacher...What would you be?

When I was a young girl, I thought I’d grow up to be a horse trainer. I lived for getting to the stables where we kept our two horses.

If I could “magically change careers now and be transformed into a wildly successful and fully trained anything-other-than-a-teacher” I would be a writer, screenwriter, and movie director.

3. Who is the one person (alive or dead) you would like to have 3 hours to have coffee and chat with, and what are the most important things you would want to talk about?

At THIS moment I would say Barack Obama. I would like to discuss public education, Hawaii connections, his writing processes, and where ever else the conversation went. Oh, and I would mention that when he works on the economy, to make sure credit card companies stop offering my nineteen year old lives at home goes to college full time and works 10 hours a week daughter a platinum credit card.

4. What is the one thing, either personal or global, that you would like to have the 'finger of God' ability to fix right this minute?

This is the question that made me curse Thistle through the internets. ONE THING? That is SO hard for me that I am going to cheat, a little, and pick out one personal and one global. For personal, I would like an opportunity to live in a better location on the island. Like be able to afford to rent a house and rent out ours. Where we live is a bit rough, my kids have never liked it, my friends don’t live close by…. I’d like to live somewhere that my kids did not have to drive so far everyday and I could hang with my friends without having to make elaborate plans.

Global…I’m going to go with an immediate shift to clean energy usage and non-dependence on oil. I’m not savvy enough to understand the full effect of this, but I would hope this would positively influence a lot of the other problems that Thistle didn’t give me the finger for.

5. How did you meet Mr. Psuedo and was it love at first site? And tell us about the wedding, was it a low-key beach affair or were you a Bridezilla?

I met Mr. Pseudo at a restaurant job at a place called Bobby McGee’s. It was the wildest place in the world to work in Waikiki back in the eighties. Most of our close friends today come from this place and time of employment. The servers all dressed in costumes and did a lot of schtick at the tables. Mr. Pseudo was “Joe Paniolo” and wore a cowboy costume. I’ve always had a thing for cowboys (my dad’s family was from Texas/ plus the horse thing in my younger days). Mr. Pseudo is a handsome guy and really looked good in that costume. I was a cocktail waitress in the adjoining nightclub and wore the French maid costume. Mr. Psuedo says it was love at first sight. For me, I’d say it was lust. I think we had noticed each other, but the night we first felt the zing and the zap was a night we both had gotten off work and were hanging out in the club. My two college roommates (who also worked there) and I had entered the “tight jeans dance off contest.” We were pretty sassy back then and figured one of us would win the prize, a gift certificate to another restaurant and we would all go out to eat (none of us really cooked back then). Weren’t we surprised when Mr. Pseudo swept the crowd into a frenzy (yes, it was male and female contest). Mr Pseudo is an excellent dancer, has the best butt ever, and worked those jeans like nobody’s business. He took first place, I took second, we danced and hung out together the rest of the night, and had our first official date a few days later.

I had no intention of ever getting married due to a horrible view of marriage caused by a childhood with parents who tortured each other in both marriage and divorce court. I was an undergrad at UH when I started dating Mr. Pseudo and had vague plans of taking off and traveling after I graduated, then going to grad school, then obscure plans of either writing for a magazine like Time or Newsweek ( I was a Poly Sci major/English minor with grandiose ideas) or applying to work in foreign embassies . By the time I was a senior at UH, Mr. Pseudo and I were happily living together and things were going well. I was applying for a scholarship to Sophia University in Japan in my last semester and I almost got it, I was one of three finalists. Mr. Psuedo drove me to the interview. Later he told me he spent the whole time while he was waiting praying that I would not get it. And I didn’t. Long story short. Eventually he sold me on the idea of marriage and staying in Hawaii.

We got married in Lake Tahoe. Small wedding, only about twenty close friends and family. Neither of our parents were going to help us out financially (neither are also the babysitting type – we’ve always been on our own). But Mr. Pseudo has a huge extended family here and we have a lot of friends. We could not afford to throw a wedding for all these people and we love traveling. So instead of a big wedding, we married in Tahoe and took a month long road trip through northern California all the way to Mexico. It wasn’t quite an elopement, we told people we were going to get married, and it turned out my family, his grandma and sister, and some of our friends wanted to come. It was a blast. We all stayed in the same hotel. Lots of people went skiing the day before and the day after. We had a small reception in our hotel suite, then the entire party went downstairs and gambled Our wedding was very lucky and most everyone won money that night. My older sister, who was married and had two children, her husband won enough money at the craps table to pay for their whole trip plus spending money.

And there you go.

And now the rules for this little meme…which is a challenging one by the way cos you just don’t know what’s coming your way….

If you want to participate…

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. (I get to pick the questions).
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.