Not There.

Hawaii is the quintessential American paradise. It's a slice of heaven beneath a familiar flag. There's no messy exchange rate, no adapting to operating a car from on the other side of the road. There's no thong-laden, oil stained beaches, and there's no pocket translator. It's a string of islands offering different personalities and flavors, and it's right there off the coast of California.

For me at least, Hawaii's always been cloaked in a mystical aura. It's a weird cultural mural of Polynesian-hippie-volcano lore mixed with pure American commercialism. The state (or multiple states, as I see it) is all happenstance. It's an oasis the earth spit out smack-dab in the middle of the big blue Pacific. In my mind, it was always a place where the cars are Woodys, the drinks are mai tais, and the surfboard racks are never empty. You replace waves with a shaka, or the "hang loose" if you're from da mainland. It was a postcard colored in tanned white skin and tropical flowers, in Tommy Bahama and Jimmy Buffet slack. It was never authentically Hawaiian, though.

And growing up a white kid in America, Hawaii stood as the answer to the Whuddle I do if I ever win the Lotto? question. It was the place everyone wanted to live on elementary school MASH charts (actually we adapted it to C(astle)M(ansion)A(apartment)S(hack)H(ouse)G(arage)), right next to New York and Florida (the other lands fabled in cinema). Hawaii was the light at the end of any number of self-imposed tunnels, a prize that, when attained, could alleviate all of the ailments of a life of servitude off the island. Living out my teenage years in what I considered a small, boring town, I couldn't help but imagine an alternative to the Bud Light cans I found thrown in our driveway. I couldn't help but daydream about an end to late nights spent in parking lots discussing our lack of options; the sweet breathing to follow countless sighs at how nothing ever happened in The Ville. I figured anything with palm trees and smooth shore break would be better than what I was living.

Even as undergrad drew to a close, I continued to find myself fantasizing about a retreat to the islands. Unattached at the time, I put the island on my plate of possible temporary destinations. I thought I saw things clearly and simply. Work, surf, fish, live aloha. I convinced myself I could handle the tourists. I could cater to them. I was fresh off a stint in the hospitalities industry, so I could endure. Vacationing in Maui in 2005 only furthered my fantasy.

Actual life, of course, happened much differently. And thankfully so. In my actual life I returned to the islands, this time to Kauai and Hawaii, and do you know what I found? I found the result of my silly fantasies. Without even looking, I found those same Bud Light cans, this time littered on beach front streets. I noticed numerous groups of locals standing around truck beds in parking lots, presumably talking about how there's nothing to do. I found paradise--it's a string of small, boring towns surrounded by a steady flow of visitors and the same big blue ocean.

And I again learned my Gertrude Stein, as I tend to do from time to time. In her book Everybody's Autobiography, she recounts how the desire to visit her childhood home in Oakland led her on a fruitless journey on which she was unable to locate the actual house. She said, quite profoundly, "There is no there there." That is, what we concoct and envision rarely manifests exactly the way we hoped. Like Stein, I went on vacation hoping to enjoy the paradise I'd constructed in my mind. Instead, I felt the familiar strain of perpetual human longing. I saw general dissatisfaction surrounding tiny glimmers of hope. It's all the same, just in a different setting.

Actual life in paradise is no vacation. It's still just actual life.