Trusting the Tiger

Blog No. WHATEV: Kayaking

An excerpt of JT’s journey as notated by JT:

…So it came to be that I got on the road late on a Saturday to once again travel this land, the destination: The college of Sai-err... Right, UC Santa Cruz... I didn't make it, not with my sagging eyes; I pulled along a small stream and rested awhile letting the cool air rush past me in the night. As the sun chased the night, hinting at its presence with a small horizonal glow, I once again rose and continued my journey finding the horse I sought... my multi-day adventure was just beginning... but finally, I got to sleep. The story continues now however, and as such I must bid you goodbye oh souls of the net. Until our paths next cross, fair-well and peace be upon your soul!

Guess who the horse is.

JT said he was going to arrive at a late hour, so I stayed up… Little did I know that he would pull over to the side of the road and snooze for a couple of hours and then arrive on campus at six in the morning!

After I gave him directions to the parking garage, I gave him a huge hug and walked him to my apartment, where the both of us plopped down on my bed to sleep. His phone kept going off, so I didn’t sleep the entire time. JT, however, the sleeping beauty that he is, slept through his most annoying alarms. I had to climb over him and fall off the bed to turn off his phone. When I returned to the bed, however, I find that he laid fully onto his back, taking up the bed. Trying to salvage some sleep, I just decided to lay on JT and close my eyes for the following three hours.

At noon, I woke up with JT snoring at my face, so I slowly got out of bed to log online. I talked with Dustin for awhile when I saw the time. I wanted to wake JT up at a reasonable hour, somewhere between a decent night’s rest and enough daylight time before our kayaking class. So, I took a brief shower and made some coffee to stall for some time while JT slept. I woke him up at 1:30 with much difficulty.

We walked around downtown for a few hours. We went into the Ohm Gallery, the lantern store for those not privy. JT took interest at all the spiritual stuff and the wall scrolls with quotes on them. We were in that store for awhile, JT looked for some oriental clothing, and I observed. So, pretty much a normal shopping day with anyone I shop with, which was odd because I didn’t expect it to be that similar when I was with JT.

We also walked into Serpent’s Kiss, the spiritual store with a bunch of stones, scents, and other miscellaneous Wiccan stuff. He had walked in with something in mind, something that was made of amethyst or the like. I just looked at pendants with other people in mind.

I led him to Gigi’s, where I introduced him to the Blondie. There, we decided to eat some lunch. Kaylah walked out and talked with us for a few minutes. The tallest person I know and the second shortest person I know in one sitting. I had brought up Piper’s excursion with alcohol on her birthday, where Piper described the Midori drink to Kaylah. Midori seemed the most appealing to her and asked me to relay the message to JT to bring her some. I told her that the drink was in the trunk of JT’s car and she got excited.

Kaylah was trying to give us directions, but she didn’t exactly know where to find the kayaking place. After a few texts and some Blonde confusion, I found out that the place we were to meet everyone was on the wharf by the boardwalk, which I thought it was all along.

~

During most of our extended conversation, JT explains that there are different levels of wants. There’s the “passionate” level of want, and the “semi-interested” level of want. Those who want things on a “passionate” kind of level will stop at nothing to get what they desire, despite any obstacles they may face. Those who want on a “semi-interested” level will allow any obstacle as an excuse of getting out of it. These people will find themselves putting up roadblocks for various reasons. In their choice of not going through with their desires, they choose what they think they should be saying as an excuse for not following through.

In the case of Piper, as JT puts it, is that she chose to victimize herself by putting up roadblocks that prevent her from making her desired choice. Although this probably wasn’t intentional, she had tried to put JT’s and my feelings at ease when she complained that she was being held back instead of going with JT on this trip. In the case of Kaylah, if she really wanted to try Midori in the first place, she wouldn’t have easily let us go like that and had us over to hang out instead of deciding to go to bed early. With JT’s logic, I could just as easily take to face that everyone I invited to visit me during the quarter didn’t have a strong enough desire to come over in the first place…

I agree to a point.

While it may be true that if Piper really wanted to go to Santa Cruz with JT, she could’ve just as easily did everything in her power to ignore the complaints. However, coming from a different perspective, Piper would see “being tied down by excuses” as meeting and prioritizing obligations by placing other people’s needs and wants before her own. Kaylah, although she expressed extreme interest to try the Midori, she decided to put herself above everything else that night to try and be healthier. To everyone else, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t intend on visiting me anytime soon, but they could just as easily be prioritizing their needs over their wants and leave me in the dark as a result.

To my conclusion, I’ve decided to stop bugging everyone about coming to visit. They know they have a spot on my bed if they want to sleep over, but I’m not going to push them anymore. If they really wanted to come over, they would’ve done so already…

We choose to do everything or nothing, whether or not we see it… Like my unconscious choice of not telling my mom that I planned to go kayaking with JT off the Santa Cruz Wharf.

It wouldn’t have been a huge deal if I didn’t know how to swim.

Admittedly, JT questioned my logic for going through with it. Basically, I felt that I was safe, so long as I had someone with me who knew his way around the water, (hence, with JT’s sailing experience and swimming capabilities, I was in the safest hands possible). Of course, I had asked my CA, Kim, to see if I needed any swimming or ocean experience, to which she replied, “No, I don’t think so. If it did, I wouldn’t be planning this event because I’m super afraid of the ocean!” So I wasn’t alone.

“So you trust me?” JT said, after explaining my logic. “Well, you know this shows that I am trustworthy.”

I chuckled. His statement came from a previous conversation of ours about trust. “I chose to trust you.” I said.

I don’t make this kind of decision lightly.

After walking and talking on the wharf, JT and I arrived at our checkpoint, where we stashed our stuff and put on our wet suits and life vests. After our quick tutorial about paddling and worse case scenarios, (which didn’t comfort me at all), JT and I walked down to the kayak. I sat down in front, while JT held control of the rudder in the back.

It felt so weird. I didn’t like feeling that I wasn’t on solid ground. I felt my legs and back tense up. However, after paddling for awhile and a few dozen assurances from JT, I started getting the hang of it. In fact, after a few donuts in the water, I felt the nervousness slip away. This was the most spontaneous and excited I felt in a long time! It didn’t even bother me that JT, predictably, steered us numerous times to collide with the other kayaks to test my bravery.

JT’s foot pedals, the ones that steered the kayak, were bothering him. Being the tall person that he is, his feet would fall asleep whenever he concentrated on the foot work. So I got a little nervous when he decided to bring up the rudder, leaving us to steer manually with the paddles for the rest of the time.

There was another two person kayak that kept following us. I recognized them from around Kresge East, but I didn’t know their names. These guys kept asking for a race to the point where they taunted us. Taunted JT.

Taunting JT? Not a good idea.

So we raced a few times. JT kept repeating behind me, “Remember: strong, smooth strokes! Gain that momentum!” They unleashed the tiger. We lost one race, but we won a few more.

In between bravery highs and freaking out moments, we kayaked around a huge bed of kelp and seaweed. One of the kayaking instructors threw a snail at us. The snail landed in the water, which splashed in my face. I grabbed the snail, which had smaller snails riding on the back of it, and handed it to JT. The snail rode with us the rest of the trip.

We also saw a baby otter lying on the mother otter’s stomach and a head of a sea lion poking out of the water. The sea lion was so close, we almost crashed into it. It was those kinds of moments I wished I had invested in a waterproof camera.

Then, we kayaked further out to see where the waves got rougher. The surfers were present in partaking to these waves closer to the rocky shore. We sailed along, one wave after another raising our kayak and splashing back down as it passed. JT kept asking how I was doing the entire time, and I kept assuring him that I was okay. A few more strokes and we rowed to the big rock, where we saw a bunch of lazy, migratory sea lions piling on top of each other. There were brown ones and blonde ones. They were so cute! I was glad that we went out of the way to see them.

On the ride back, we had the option of sailing back depending on how strong the wind was. The instructors had expected the winds to die down, but the winds did just the opposite. I bungeed my paddle to the kayak and pulled out the sail. I pretty much followed everyone else’s lead in reigning in the wind. JT kept instructing from behind, “Brace yourself with the sail! Try and steer the wind in our direction!” With no rudder, JT steered us using brute force against the increasing waves. The entire time we were sailing, I felt like the kayak would tip over at any minute. JT warned me of this from the get go. So, as uncomfortable I was clenching the sail in both my hands, I tried to level myself into a complacent balance as we raced across the waves back to the pier.

When we arrived back at the dock, JT felt that he could rock and tip the kayak back and forth, seeing as he did plenty of that once the wind died down. I felt impressed that I could balance myself that well, especially after JT remarked about how well I was doing. After we helped put all the equipment back, JT and I grabbed a couple of burritos and retired back at my place.

I offered a few DVD’s to watch. He picked out Star Trek just so that he can trash it to pieces while I was watching. I wanted to see how “bad” it was, so I agreed.

~

Movie Review: Star Trek

It was bad.

I’m by no means a Trekkie, but from what back story I know, even I agreed this movie was bad.

There was no room for character growth and it seemed that the story line was based off of a million different impossibilities at once, (to which JT pointed out every single one). Kirk, after a bar fight, ends up being called to the academy among all the other space cadets. This Kirk is a jerk; a stereotypical, boob-grabbing, hiding-in-my-tightie-whities-under-the-bed type of jerk. Then there was a twist in the story: Spock and Aurora being romantically entangled. I didn’t expect that one. I thought Spock had tried to become an emotionless being like the rest of his people. What about Aurora? I thought she was supposed to be romantically entangled with Kirk later down the line. I got so confused, so I just thought that, whatever the writer’s were doing, they weren’t going to stay with any original story arc. It’s something I can allow if they can do it well.

However, it got to a point in the movie where I said it was enough. After Kirk gets exiled onto a frozen ice planet, running away from big, bigger, biggest monsters, in comes the real Spock. The old Spock from the TV series. After hearing the detail as to why he was there, (something about red matter, black holes, Rimulon being destroyed, and time travel), I saw that the writers had to have created a story feasible enough to include as much of Leonard Nimoy in the movie as possible.

It reminded me of the Transformer movies in so many ways. To my surprise, JT showed me an internet review which revealed that both the Transformer and Star Trek movies were written by the same writers.

The only thing I could see redeeming this movie was the stellar visual effects. They show so much potential! But with no redeemable characters, a nonsense storyline filled with fate and destiny, and nothing memorable to show for the plot and villain, the effects just lessens the blow of an overall horrible movie.

My Final Review: 1 Out of 5 Thumbs Up –> This was NOT my mom’s Star Trek.

~

In the end of it all, I semi-confronted JT because I felt uncomfortable with making decisions on the trip that he was supposed to have. I wanted to say, “You’re the guest, you make the decisions.”

But, as if he read my mind, he preemptively said, “I made my choices. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t choose to come here, right?” Aww… “I came here for your punk ass, didn’t I?”

I guess only fire can bend metal. But then again, I don’t think I would have it any other way.