back from new zealand. yay. i'm exhausted. and a buttload of work was waiting for me when i got in. yay.
i'm just happy to get back to you, blog. and you, surf. and you, bed. and, yes, even you, old beat-up car.
more posting in the next few days, hours, minutes. i feel like i have so much to catch up on.
so i'm here in guam, still. i haven't posted anything because dialup is horribly slow. sorry.
anyway, guam is a great big pool of sweaty, muggy mess. but our project site is beautiful and the fun i'm having here is making the 12-18 hour days worth it.
we begin our workdays (which is everyday) at sunrise. we get up and eat (i make microwave breakfact burritos for everyone), then we head for the dock. we jump into a 30 foot scooner and take the 20-30 minute boat ride out to the lagoon that's next to our project site. we then hop in the water and swim to the inner reef, which is too shallow for the boat to cross over. we walk along the reef 400 yards or so until we get to the little beach area we've set up camp at. we prep for our work and then walk over the small berm to the pond, a 300-foot long tidally-influenced pond that used to be a dumping area for the navy.
we spend hours on the pond collecting sediment or water samples, taking a couple breaks for a ton of water (i've had dehydration headaches almost every other day of this trip). we then pack up our stuff and swim it all out to where the chartered boat comes and meets us to shuttle us back to the dock.
after returning to the dock, we usually spend another 4-6 hours managing the samples or prepping for the next day. it's work, but it seems pretty easy compared with the time on-site.
my job requires jumping off a boat and swimming supplies onto shore and playing with muck all day. things are pretty good.
i rarely know what day it is here. everyday is a work day and it feels like every day is a tuesday. it's both refreshing and disorienting.
i leave guam on thursday, but get back to hawaii on wednesday. then, on thursday, i leave for new zealand (vacation, not work), and arrive on, probably, a tuesday. anyway, it looks like yet another week of sporadic posts. there'll be a buttload of pics up for a while after the trips, though. maybe.
so i'm gonna say something that you'll probably disagree with. i think mike tyson doesn't deserve as bad a rap as he's got. i really like him. that's not to say that i'd like to hang out with him. nor would i feel comfortable being in the same room with him. i just think that he's good at beating people up, and that's what he's paid for. boxing would be far worse off if he hadn't been around. and if my job required me to get punched in the head, i'm sure i'd make some pretty bad life choices, too.
anyway, with all the articles about him being homeless and what not, i thought i'd post about the thing that makes me like him so much: his wide vocabulary range.
some of mike's thoughts:
"My power is discombobulatingly devastating I could feel is muscle tissues collapse under my force. It's ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm."
"How dare these boxers challenge me with their primitive skills?"
"I rushed him and caught him flush on the temple with a titanic right hand he was out cold, convulsing on the floor like a infantile retard."
"Lennox Lewis, I'm coming for you man. My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children. Praise be to Allah!"
"I'm just a dark guy from a den of iniquity. A dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity. I wish I could be Mike who gets an endorsement deal. But you can't make a lie and a truth go together. This country wasn't built on moral fiber. This country was built on rape, slavery, murder, degradation and affiliation with crime."
now if you look past the phrases about stepping on childrens' testicles and ripping out stomachs, you'll see that he uses words like "iniquity" and "impetuous" and "impregnable" and "discombobulatingly" and "infantile". he has a vocabulary far superior to other boxers. or maybe he just makes it a point to try to use as many SAT words as he can.
either way, why can't we look at the good in iron mike? let's say, "hey. ok. so you bit someone's ear off. cut it out. and all that raping and wife-beating. seriously, mike. why don't you just sit there and drop some vocab on us."
and he'd say, "[He] called me a ‘rapist’ and a ‘recluse.’ I’m not a recluse."
indeed.