White Ninja

I’m in Hawaii. I’ve learned how to surf. I also scuba dive and eat freshly picked pineapples for breakfast. Currently, I am sitting in a café sipping margaritas with a shy girl underneath my arm who dresses her arms with tattoos. No one is wearing shoes.

Right about now, I’m thinking that this is what this post should sound like.

Instead, I remember when my plane arrived, my taxi driver told me to relax, you're in paradise. Now it’s been about a month and life is not so much like the impressions I get from Lilo and Stitch or even 50 First Dates.

Yet although being hit on by more gay men than women, there’s certainly a charm attached to this place and its people. Most of the locals I meet are eager to get off the island, as if decades of claustrophobic isolation have given life to their dreams.

The other night a friend takes me to a local BBoy competition. We rush into the third floor of a shoddy warehouse and suddenly find ourselves in a scene of Step Up 2. No…Not Step Up 1. Step Up 2: The Streets.

But I was impressed. I was shocked by the dancers who manipulated the crowds with huge flips and strange alien moves. I was having fun until I realized that these kids were hardly in high school, whereas I subsequently had one of those terrible what the hell am I doing with my life moments.

You know those moments. You felt it when Lebron James entered the NBA and when you hang out with an Ivy League kid. You’ll also probably feel it at your high school reunion.

And when the winner of the competition (who hardly came up to my neck) walked by me, I started to wonder if I was getting too old to still have aspirations to one day be a great person.

I attempted to alleviate this sickening moment with bumper sticker mottos. And it started to work until the talentless group of guys, well over 30, started battling. One of their names was White Ninja.