On Writing 'Milu'

Ok, so I didn't want to be all gung ho about it, but I figure it's best if I share with anyone interested why I've failed to make a post to my blog in a month and a half, and I promise I have a good explanation. So here it is: I'm writing a book

Those in the know know that I've written another book ('The Right Hand of Justice'). Currently, I'm working on a piece of fiction, a novel entitled 'Milu.' I was perusing the book of Hawaiian Idioms called `Ōlelo No`eau, (the cover of which is pictured here) when I came across mention of ʻMilu, the God of the Underworld.ʻ I didn't even know there was a Hawaiian underworld, let alone one with a cool sounding god. Unfortunately, the book only offered two such idioms, both bland: Aia me Milu, kēlā mea i lalo lilo loa. With Milu, that one gone way down below (as in death); I lalo i Milu. Down in Milu.

Confusingly, Milu is both the god as well as the name of the Underworld, also called Lua-o-Milu, or Miluʻs Pit. To keep things clear, I call the god Milu and the Underworld--or the Afterworld, as I call it--Lua-o-Milu. However, things become less clear when you consider that my protagonist, a young Hawaiian woman, is also named Milu. To me, the name has a more feminine ring to it. Anyway, the short of it is that a young girl loses her entire family in a very short time and becomes possessed with the need to be reunited with them in Lua-o-Milu. Along the way, she discovers that it isnʻt so easy to enter the land of the dead when youʻre still alive. She finds a way, however, gaining the aid and skill of the great prophet Kupaianaha, who bestows upon her the mana (spiritual magic) for the task.

Thatʻs a very simplified account of a very convoluted book, but there you have it. Iʻm quite far along, at 177 computer typed pages. At this rate, I believe it will be far longer than ʻThe Right Hand of Justiceʻ which I also intend to revisit, edit, and submit for publication, after Iʻve finished with Milu.

Working on this novel, so concerned with the Afterworld, got me thinking about what I myself thought about it. Not necessarily Hell, which is a place to vividly emblazoned into even the most atheistic mind. I mean a world after this one, where the dead go to live peacefully, eternally. I found it hard not to think about it in religious terms, and I even resort to the idea of Purgatory in ʻMilu.ʻ But for me, the idea of nothing after life, a true void, that is something that religion didnʻt need to foster in us. Itʻs what fills the void that is determined by the outsider.

Does anyone else have ideas about what the world after this is like? Forget Hell, reincarnation, Purgatory, and the laws of physics, mathematics, reason. Where would your protagonist go if she were going into the Afterworld?

Pride 2007

This year's Pride took place this past Sunday, June 24.


On June 23, my best friend Mika (with me above) threw his annual Pride Party. Last year, he didn't throw one, which I guess calls "annual" into question, but he's thrown one every other year in the five years I've lived here, so I think I'll let that one slide. Monetary reasons, he sited last year. This year, however, he's back where he left off two years again, only this time, the venue was his ex-girlfriend's house in Bellevue.

The simple noun-phrase "ex-girlfriend" should, in Mika's case, be briefly described. Kate (the girl in this picture with her boyfriend du jour, Charles) and Mika dated for a year and a half a couple of years ago. This is odd only in the sense that Mika is the gayest person I know, and is himself gay. But his longest long-term relationships have been with girls, one with whom he has a son (11) in Kentucky. So this gay gay man has had two girlfriends and has a son. But things get more complicated when we throw polyamory into the mix. Kate is polyamorous. And when Mika was dating polyamorous, he was too. Kate was also dating Chris, whom she had been dating for years before Mika. She was also dating other people on the side.

William found it quite fun describing Chris as my best friends's girlfriend's other boyfriend. Now that Mika and Kate are no longer dating, though still friends, William can describe Chris (in the rare event that he should) as my best friend's ex-girlfriend's husband (since they're now married).

But I digress. So the Pride Party was in Bellevue at Kate's house. It was fun. There was drinking and maybe I made out with someone who is not William. But Pride Weekend is set aside for that. I had fun.

Pride Sunday was pretty low-key. We were going to take a bus, but we missed the one we were gonna take, so we drove. We met a friend, Teague, on 4th and Pine in front the Century Square 1501 building. We often meet up with Teague and his husband, Nick, for the Pride Parade. Nick was out of town this year, so it was just Teague. Another friend of ours, Ian, also came to watch with us.

The Pride Parade was downtown again this year, repeating last year's festivities at Seattle Center, despite how very bankrupt it left the Pride Committee (a new committee is putting on this year's festivities). For the first time, Mark "Mom" Finley (in drag on the right in the pic on the left) emceed the event, adding his/her dark double entendres to gay up an already very gay event. This year's numbers did not mirror last year's, however. Thousands and thousands showed up for the parade, but not as many showed up to the post-parade celebration at Seattle Center as last year. And the odd thing about it is that there was only a portion of Seattle Center partitioned off for celebrating Pride. So the turnout looked kind of small. The weather certainly had something to do with it, I think. It rained this year, which I hadn't seen once in the five years of Pride I've had the great fortune of celebrating here in Seattle.

We reconnected with friends as we often do at these shindigs. We spent the majority of the time hanging out with Mika and some other friends, and also with Teague and some friends, as well as with Ian. When the rain finally came at around 4 or so, we went to Ian's job with him and hung out until the rain passed. Then we took a bus to PacPlace, where we had parked, and drove home.

Originally, we had planned to post-post party at the Cuff, where we ended up last time around. But we were just too tired, as we had gone hiking the day before. We climbed up and down Mount Walker on the Olympic Peninsula. My body is still sore.

All in all, it was pretty fun...

SIFF 2007

The Seattle International Film Festival for 2007 has come to a close. This year we were extremely lucky to have only suffered once or twice at the hands of an overambitious director. And what's more is I chose most of the movies we saw this year. Usually William chooses what he wants to see, I choose what I want to see, then we figure out which ones are both want to see by seeing where the overlap is. We were satisfied with the results before, but I'm not so sure we would continue to be after this year's great line-up. Half the time, we regret our choices.

Well, my choices... For some reason, I have a knack for choosing horrible movies. Just so reference, the movie genres I like are as follows: gay cinema, Foreign cinema (by language: French, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, among others), martial arts, anime/animation, horror, dramedies, etc. I also enjoy watching movies about sex and directorial attempts to integrate sex into a worthwhile film--which hasn't been very rewarding, until last year when we saw "Shortbus" in Paris. I thought that film was successful in mixing sex into the storyline.

So we were lucky this year, and I want to share my list of movies so other people can see them too. They are listed alphabetically:

2 Days in Paris: Gala, June 2
Angels in the Dust
Bad Faith (Mauvaise Foi)
A Battle of Wits (Muk Gong): Gala, May 26
Black Sheep
The Bubble (Habuah)
A Cottage on Dartmoor
DarkBlueAlmostBlack (AzulOscuroCasiNegro)
Death at a Funeral
Delirious
Evening: Gala, June 16
Fido
For The Bible Tells Me So
A Friend of Mine (Ein Freund Von Mir)
The Missing Star (La Stella Che Non C'e`)
Moliere
Nomadak TX
Out at a Wedding
Paprika
Poltergay
Son of Rambow: Opening Night Gala
Stealth
Tell No One (Ne Le Dis A Personne)


There were also four Secret Festival movies, one of which was of the screenings that was tormenting. The final count is 27, which ties some former year, but still, considering I only regret a couple of screenings (including the secret screening and A Cottage on Dartmoor, which isn't bad, just a little too slow for me--plus we woke up really early that day for something). My favorites were Fido, For The Bible Tells Me So, and Evening, among others. As I said, we were lucky, so all of these movies were enjoyable to me, some more than others.

Mac for life

I've never owned a mac before, desktop, laptop, or other. I don't consider the IPod a mac per se, no more than a Sony CD Player is, say, a Sony computer. In my first post, I mentioned that William bought me a MacBook for graduation. This post is about that mac.

I have a 13", 2.16 GHz MacBook, v. 10.4.9. It's very nifty and spiffy looking. Despite it's considerably small size, the keyboard is wide enough for my big Hawaiian hands, which is of the utmost importance. It has many cool features readily available that I've never seen on other laptops or desktops for that matter, such as ITunes, a built-in webcam, a music mixer, DVD movie mixer, I could go on. Of course, I won't use all of the features, but they're great to have.

And possibly most important, I was able to use it right out of the box. You just fill in some information, much of further facilitated by my pre-existing ITunes account, and follow the instructions for installing things.

Also very cool is the magnetic power cord thing, so that, if you trip over it, instead pulling the entire Mac off the table or your lap, the cord just comes smoothly off.

I guess that covers the ways I love my new MacBook...

"Used to to"

I had an interesting conversation today with William, my partner of four years. He shares my fondness for language, if not to the same extent. We got to talking about my family's use of Pidgin, among other things how it seems my parents communicate for the most part in Pidgin, while my sister and I generally speak English, though we speak to our parents in Pidgin. My sister says her sons don't speak Pidgin in general. This is further evidenced by William's assessment this past week that Kealaula, my oldest nephew, doesn't speak Pidgin at all. While I agree in part, I also maintain that I heard him use some idiomatic phrases from Pidgin ("stay" for the stative verb "to be," i.e. "Where you stay?" Where are you? and also "get" for the possession, as in "I get two dollars." I have two dollars). I was, however, hard-pressed to find solid and consistent examples of this.

The title for this post references such an idiomatic expression used in my family and church in Hilo, HI, if not everywhere in Hawai`i. English speakers use the idiom "used to" to mean "to be accustomed to" and the same goes for Pidgin. The difference lies in the intrusive superfluous "to." (This might be almost comparable to the extra "is" found in utterances such as "The problem is is that I don't care.") The usage is the same.

We were debating what could lead to the superfluous "to." I considered two approaches, the second more extensive than the first. The second probably concerns too many hoops to be credible, but I wanted to follow this thread to its logical end. What it boils down to is how Pidgin resolves consonant clusters. I originally thought mixed voicing ("use" has a voiced final consonant, the [z] sound, while--I thought--"-ed" has a voiceless consonant. In IPA, the underlying form might be transcribed /ju:z+d/) was the culprit, but the more I thought about it, the less I thought that "-ed" could be underlyingly voiceless; it's probably voiced. This was actually the bulk of our conversation/debate, where I tried to reason it out, unsuccessfully.

So what I actually proposed is vowel epenthesis, inserting a vowel to separate two like sounds. But this approach yields a form very different than what we might expect. Considering the underlying forms /ju:zd tu/, a complex (onset/coda) resolution could easily yield [juzdutu] (where the quality of the inserted vowel mirrors that of either the preceding or following vowel, for reasons as yet unknown to me). However, what actually surfaces in often more like [justutu], where the voicelessness of "to" regressively assimilates through the preceding consonants. This would require (in derivational terms) crucial rule order of regressive consonant voice agreement before vowel epenthesis.

All of this seems too complicated for one single nuance, none of the foregoing evidenced in other idioms or borrowings. Which brings me to the adhoc solution that a friend, Jeff, suggested, he having just finishing LING 200 and passing with flying colors:): When the idiom was "borrowed in" from English, nonnative speakers considered the "to" as part of the phrase "used to" and not part of the infinitival verb that followed, which would inevitably require the infinitival "to," as in "to be," "to have," etc. The end result would yield sentences like "I'm used to to live here"* Except that's not what we say. What we would say is "I'm used to to living here."

In light of this, are we back at square one? The intuition seems to be that the superfluous "to" retains something for Pidgin speakers that simple "used to" does not. But what?

New blog!

I decided not too long ago that it would be a good idea if I started to blog for fun. For kicks. I don't write anywhere near as much as I used to, and that's kind of unsettling. It's mainly because I consider myself to be pretty creative, only I haven't been lately. I'm a self-proclaimed songwriter who hasn't written a song in over a month, maybe two, and although I wrote a lot as a child and young adult, I hardly do any more... Though there was that novel...

Anyway, I figured a blog was a good way to channel some of that creativity and also talk about what's really interesting to me: language! Anyone who knows me knows how obsessed I am with language. And I have a degree in Linguistics now to prove it. Mainly, I note little quirks that people have when they speak. I'm especially interested in other languages though, namely Hawaiian, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Italian, all languages I've studied (some more than others).

My boyfriend William's gracious gift to me for graduation, this beautiful MacBook that I'm beginning this blog with, will serve to facilitate that. Actually, he'll note that I feel I've hit a creative drought in my introduction. He's been talking about being more creative lately, and I can't help feeling it too.

More to the point, my family just went home to Hawai`i after spending eight days in Seattle with me and William in our small-ish two bedroom apartment, and among them is my sister, Camille. She's always been my inspiration in music and now she's gone and taught herself how to play the `ukulele, which is great. Actually, growing up, she and I (or "me and her" as we might say in Pidgin, our other native tongue) never cared much for the instrument introduced to the Hawaiians by the Portuguese during the times of the sugar plantations. Our brothers, DJ and Nathan have been playing it, among other instruments (mostly stringed) for most of their lives. Now, however, my sister has found its simplicity to be conducive to her artistic side, the keys simple enough to keep the creative juices flowing.

So, naturally, I want to take it up also. She's been playing now for almost two years, having managed to learn the covetable art of singing and playing simultaneously, which is second-nature to some and unattainable to others. I know a number of people who have played the uke for years and still can't sing and play at the same time. Now, Camille says she can't sing without it.

Anyway, as first posts go, this one is long, so I'll end it here.