Arigato Sushi after Surfing and Apartment Lease Arrangements

10 Emotions -- 10 Action Signals!
Uncomfortable-- Mildly Embarassed, Distressed, Uneasy, Boredom, Impatience,
Fear-- Concern, Worry, Apprehension, Anxiety, Terrified
Hurt-- Sense of Loss
Anger -- Mildly Irritated, Livid, Resentful, Angry, Enraged
Frustration -- Held Back or Hindered in Pursuit of Something
Disappointment -- Sad, Defeated as result of something that didn’t work out well
Guilt -- Regret
Inadequacy -- Feel “Less than” or “Unworthy”
Overloaded -- Overwhelmed, Hopeless, Depressed, More than you can possibly deal with
Lonely -- Alone, Apart from, or Separate From something



Quick Recap: I went surfing for 2 hours. MASSIVE fun. Was an hour late to dinner with my parents at Arigato Sushi. When I arrived they were incensed. I agreed it was humiliating for anyone to wait that long. But it was the two of them, not ONE person, so it wasn’t too problematic. (besides the next day I was 40 minutes late (but called) and they had no problem with it). My mom ended up getting extremely enraged, upset, and hurt. I meanwhile tried to figure out what had caused this? One VERY hypothetical and bizarre theory is that my surfing put me in a GREAT fun and aligned state, which brought out the residual emotions that have been dormant between my parents for so long. This goes back to difficulty in sharing some things with some parents. I’m convinced they’re having serious communication problems between each other and use me as the glue for their relationship. Here are the details.

I feel disturbed about the Arigato thing. Because I think I wanted to handle it differently. I wanted mom to recognize her emotions, clarify where HER anger was coming from. She had a LOT of it. I’m 87% sure that most of it was ALL directed towards Tom, but she projected her feelings of ill-communication toward me. That was very strange how she felt what I often feel. My mom said to dad and I “You guys are ganging up on me!”. Have the dinner conversation, my mom looked like a bulldog -- so utterly enraged, but quiet. When she spoke, I dont’ really know what she was trying to do...sound cutting or derisive? No Idea, I think she was interested in blaming me for the emotions she was feelling. Then she burst into tears, but pushed it back down. And then left to find the car. Things that irked me were I said to mom during dinner, “you look hurt”. Which was true, she kind of nodded to me that that was true, and the same when I observed that “you look aggravated”. Then I asked something like “how did you feel during the conversation”? and my dad turned to mom and said the exact same thing “how did you feel during the conversation?” Is there an echo in here? He did that a bout 2-3 times. That irked me because: 1)It conveyed a lack of authenticity on tom’s part. If he’s just repeating questions he thinks were good, said by me, how genuine can his intentions be in truly finding out how mom feels. 2)I kind of wanted to address how mom was feeling because she looked SERIOUSLY upset and she looked open to that, but my father, Tom (I’ve experienced this) has a way of asking questions that cause you to rationalize emotions instead of feel them. That’s okay for productivity and my dad is a MASTER of go-go-go and always getting thigns done, but sometimes for your healthy and emotional safety, you just MUST actually FEEL the emotion, so you can hear the signal it’s telling you (and then take appropriate actions). Emotions are like indicators of what needs to change for yoru soul, your life, your sense of peace, happiness, and joy. When you deny yourself from experiencing and heeding an emotion’s signal, you deprive yourself of such an invaluable beacon and bearing of ‘what to do”! Then after mom, in a heat of upset and rage and hurt, left the table, dad kind of laughed and joked that she wouldn’t be able to find the car. I love my dad for being able to joke and make a laugh out of almost any situation, but I was also a bit shocked. Dad said something about how “he just says things and gets them off his chest, while mom allows them to build up”. I affirmed that James (my bro) does teh “just saying thigns” method, while I occasionally do the “build up” method, but am trying to be more authentic and congruent. I asked, shouldn’t we go after her to see if she’s okay? He sai,d “she’ll be fine” and I said “It’s hard to know what to do when someone is hurt and upset. Do they need to walk and cool off, do they need a hug? Do they need someone to talk with?” So I end up running out of the restaurant, and immediately run into a runner who’s like “Wanna race?” I go “Sure!” and he says “You look fast. Anyone who comes out of Arigato running has a leg up on the comepitition!” I ran around the block, but couldn’t find mom and went back to dinner. Dad and I talked about how it was more complex than it looked. I remarked, “Oh good, I think I was making it even MORE complex. I was like What is going on? What made mom so upset? Was it just me being late? Do mom and dad have marital problems?” and my dad laughed at that one. What does that mean?!! That they do? children, of all people, pick up on these things, especially adult-children like me. There are just SOOOOO many eggshells (like fields and fields of eggshells) when talking to both parents about something highly emotional or volatile (when one is upset) because I think they have so many things to communicate about that they’ve suppressed, that they frequently get angry about something and then misdirect that onto me. Again, my solution to all this is to just convey and FEEL massive gratitude toward them both because they deserve that and much much more!

the reason why I am making such a big deal of this Arigato scene is that I feel like it was
A rupture of the can of worms between my mom and my dad themselves and I could have been more encouraging and therapeutically catalyzing catharsis.
Afterwards, I felt it was “bad” to surf. The next day, I woke up, felt AWFUL, hungover, hadn’t showered, hadn’t run, felt terribly disgusting, and then spent 5 hours with my parents doing hte lease final thigns on the apartment before going for a run and during the run this woman flagged me over to her car (Lucette) and said these 4 heinous accusations of an old geezer, I think of as a “step grandfather” (Jim Bogges), so immediately after teh run, I jumped in the car (after telling my parents that I’d be late) and visited jim to see if he was addicted to methadone, sleeping with the house cleaning women, attacking Lucette’s clients, and that he and I were lovers. Of course, all those 4 things lucette said were absolutely spurious and not true, but it was a “quite a drama”!!! The point is that Friday was day of service, doing things for other people nonstop and that night my parents were extremely giving and relenting about being late. Thursday was me surfing for 2.5 hours HAVING A BLAST, doing things for myself. I feel incredibly frustrated that when I seem to do things for myself and feel absolutely INCREDIBLY, people around me tend to get upset and act infuriated (atleast my parents do). I think a good rule of thumb is parents are great, I have TREMENDOUS gratitude for their financial and intellectual and leadership generositiy and they’re brilliant, adorable, great people, bu they aren’t friends. I have to pick a peer group that actually is enjoyable when I treat myself with nourishment (like surfing! this #2 Concept is BIG. Other people being upset scares me because I’m so focused on making sure other people are having fun and feeling happy, so when I feel REALLY happy (like after surfing that one time), I felt obliated to try to sort out my parents problems in this gordian knot impossible quagmire where they’re opposed to admitting they want anything sorted out in the first place! What do you think about that? Why do you think when I feel FANTASTIC (I had done the hollywood scene yesterday, I had surfed all of thursday, I was on top of the WORLD of FUN!) people sometimes (atleast parents do) get enraged. Do you think me being so full of life and happy causes them to identify with their true emotions? More importantly, how can I continue feeling HAPPY and FREE and GREAT about myself when other people seem to lash out at me? How can I NEVER feel guilty about feeling happy? Do you think my parents could intentionally try to subdue and smash down my happiness by creating confusing drama when they recognize me being happy? Something is VERY Fishy with that whole genuine happiness thing. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I trust that I’ll evolve to a state where i experience consistent truly galvanizing and guilt-free happiness on a regular basis!

Wave Dynamics -- Surfer's Almanac: Swell and Wave Formation

Swell – Swells is long, oceanic surface waves, consistently formed by tropical storms and wind systems. A few fractions of a second difference in a wave, on the other side of the ocean, creates a totally different set of waves. Swell waves are often mixed with local chop “noise” waves.

Swell Size -- Swell waves are measured in “swell size” which is 33% of the largest wave in a set (trough to crest).

Fetch – The fetch is just the “un-wave” part of water. The larger the flat water (fetch) and the stronger the wind, the larger the wave will be. Shores that have inslands in front of them have a very short fetch (blocked), so smaller waves. The swell is generated by wind blowing consistently over a fetch.

Local Wind – too intense of a local wind will make the swell waves too choppy and unsurfable. Ideal is a slight offshore wind, that blows into the face of the wave, scooping them out even more!

Wave Formation – Imagine a pond and throw in a rock; ripples form with measurable size, distance, and speed. Now substitude ocean for pond and huge tropical storm for rock; that’s how waves are made.

Wind to Wave: Waves on a pond create little ripple indentations. Additionally, on the open ocean, small (or large) hurricanes create small wave indentations that form with other waves to form chop, then the chop forms with more chop to form, again, more wind waves, produce a full wave!

We want Swell Waves – Wind waves dissipate the farther away from their souce. Yes, they do! They will eventually peter out to water surface tension….unless they generated enough energy from the center of the storm or wind zone to create a swell. The swell’s energy can then carry that wind wave the entire circumference of the globe without energy or wave-size loss! Good deal!

Three Swell Factors:Okay, so Swell waves form with the combination of

1. large fetch (pointing towards your beach

2. Wind velocity (strong)

3. Duration (long time of wind blowing on the fetch

Ground Swell -- Considering those factors, basically storms create a lot of chop and swell. Eventually the swell “clears the chop” and becomes smoothed chop-free waves. NZ storms great swell that can travel 6000 miles, such magnificent swell is dubbed, “Ground Swell”.

Waves have longest periods first, then waves from the same swell days later will have shorter periods. For example, ground swell starts off Sydney’s coast and builds to hit SoCal. The swell has 24sec periods the first day with huge waves. Next day the waves are smaller, but closer together with a 20sec period; third day has 16sec periods, etc. The waves break closer and closer together! Remember a tropical storm is simply an awesome boulder chucked in a pond (the ocean) that creates gnarly sets!

Wave Sets – A wave set is simply a wave group (that deep water traveling wave train of 3-15 waves) that has hit shallow water.

Number of Waves in a set = 3-15 (for long distance fetches)

Number of waves in set from a local (1000- miiles) source = 1-3 (less organized because less time for the wave groups to form)

If there’s a large distant storm and a local one, you could get intermittent 1-3 wave sets every 5-10 minutes and then a huge 3-15 wave set every 40-minutes, for example. There’s LOTs of stuff always going on in the ocean.

A “shallow-water wave group” IS a wave set! They appear as often as every few minutes to every half hour depending how long the waves traveled to reach the shore. The longer the waves travel, the better the organization, and greater consistency. So, if a storm caused a deep water wave group to travel 5000 miles to hit your california shore, the wave sets would be incredibly organized and reliable because of the distance they covered (that “refining time”). Obviously in shallow water, individual waves of wave groups don’t phase out/phase in, so you can actually surf them and they won’t dissappear (sometimes they do) but a true wave set are waves that all break, if they don’t it’s just chop, likely.

Wave Groups – As waves span out from the fetch that created them, the large waves move in the direction of the wind (the wind helps them, instead of goes against those “with the wind” waves). Then after awhile, the waves that are moving in the same pace in the same direction, form groups of about (3-15+ waves). The further away from the original fetch and deep water source (like thousands of miles away), the more defined the wave group gets.

Set Frequency.

Okay, so a huge storm breaks out in New Zealand. It takes a wave group to travel 6000 miles from that souther hemisphere to California and approx imately 200-300 hours depending on the wave period. But the interesting part is exponential growth of time. For example, say an 18sec and 17.95sec period wave group starts at that souther hem. Site (6000 miles away). Therefore, the further away the deep water source (storm for example) the more temporally spread out the sets will be. If the source is from a fetch only 1000 miles away, the .05 second difference only pans out to being a few minutes, instead of 40 with the 6000 mile distance covered.

Individual wave size in the wave group.

What’s VERY cool is in the physics of deep water wave propogation, in a wave group (say of 10 waves), all the waves change places, move forward, etc, but the middle waves are always the largest and the end and front waves always the smallest! Any wave that moves to the middle of the wave group gets big!. Another theory behind this is multiple wave trains overlap and it appears like some waves grow but it’s just mingling with the other wave train, a less eloquent theory than the physics, assembly-line middle waves always biggest ideology.

Individual wave movement and Speed in a group. Individual waves (within the group) move twice as fast as the group! However, when those 2x-faster moving individual waves reach the front of the wave group, they get pulled back, so it’s 2 steps forward, 1 step back with the wave group and individual wave dynamic. Determing the speed of an individual wave is simple (3 x (period))

3 x Period = Indiiviual wave speed

So if a period is 20 seconds, the individual wave is moving 60 knots/hr!

However when the wave group becomes a wave set (and hits shallow water) the wave set moves at the speed of the group (half that of the 2x as fast individual waves) so that wave set would be 30 knots per hour.

Traveling Fetch – Sometimes the storm can be moving in the direction of the chop so the waves for, say, 2000 miles beome well-formed sets, but they’re constantly being overtaken and regenerated by waves from the storm immediately behind it, making big waves that accumulate onto each other. There are only a few places open to thousands of open ocean positioned near the tracks of winter storms: NW USA, Chile/Peru, W Australia, and S.Europe. A “traveling fetch” phenomenon to some degree occurs with every fetch, but the waves in front are always bigger than the waves after the storm because of the traveling fetch “wave booster” phenomenon. The “virtual fetch” is just sets with 12 hour intervals, a “pseudo fetch”, but the traveling fetch produces massive waves. Now when you look at the totally gnarly conditions for any Maverick's surf contest, a director of the contest (Spansler, apparently, uses government satellites -- a good use of those orbitting bits of technology -- to predict these wave condtions) says, “We search for a big storm way off in the North Pacific, out past the international date line" (NYT). “That’s the best cradle for a Mavericks swell. Waves start their lives as wind. The longer and stronger gales blow in the same direction, the larger and more powerful the seas that result” (NYT). The technology used to wire into surf conditions to make Mavericks great is so high-tech. Mavericks competition coordinators use those government satellites as well as a Quickstat and Jason-1 satellite matrix to get water undalations, and surface data up to 3.3 cm over the ocean! It's like a lot of high-tech advancements in science and technology are plugged-in and utlized for this surf contest! So pre-condition for any Maverick's surf contest is that the wave's origin must be a storm PAST the international date line. Can you imagine that fetch! To put this in perspective, Hawaii is BEFORE the international date line. So the CLOSEST source of a storm to meet the Maverick's surf contest preconditions would be New Zealand. Even if it's that "close", you're still looking at a killer 5000-6000 mile fetch (NZ is 6000 miles from the US, but it's slightly south of due west of the International date line along the same latitudes as the U.S.). Can you imagine that! This surf contest is ENGINEERED to produce EPIC surf! Sweet!

Measuring Waves: Height and Period – A typical report is 6 ft @ 17 seconds, which means the wave heigh (trough to crest) is 6 ft for 33% of the largest waves and they occur every 17 seconds.

Height – trough (front wave barrel bottom) to crest (top of unbroken wave. This is for the largest 1/3 (33%) of all waves.

Period – he amount of time it takes for two wave crests to past a specific point. There are two forms of measuring data presented as “Significant Seas” and “Swell data. For surfing, Swell data is the most reliable because, “significant seas” don’t even exist from a surfing (shore only perspective), it’s for boats, we want surf, so “Swell data” it is.

Significant Seas – The Square root of the sum of the squares of all wave energy. A 5 ft swell from S and a 3 ft swell is 6 ft sees, but this isn’t practical for surfing. And will always be an overstatement of wavesize. Surfers ride one wave and if two swells of 3 ft each approach that’s the wave height. Sig. Seas would overstate wave height as 4 or 5 ft. But at sea in a boat, Sig. Seas are, obviously, very important. The largest wave in any given day will likely be the Sig. Sea height. In other words, if Sig. Seas says height is 8 ft. and swell data says 5 ft. you won’t see a 9 ft. wave and if you see an 8 ft wave, catch it! That’s the wave of the day!

Swell Window -- This is just the range a beach has for receiving waves. If a land mass is immediately north and directly south, it would have a swell window of 90 degres to 180 degrees or only 90 degrees. CA has a swell window (where islands don’t block the surf) of about 180 degrees sometimes.

Great Circles – bSwells travel away from their source on Great Cicle pathes or routes. If wind is blowing parrallel to your Great Circle path (connecting to your beach), then you could have a swell because that means no chop would break up swells traveling along the fetch of your Great Circle path. In short, Wind bloing parallel to a Great Circle path parrallel to your beach is a GOOD thing for good swell size. Additionally, remember that great circle paths curv and are not always perpendicular to the beach. For example, believe it or not. Southern Australian is on the great circle path for south california even though their in opposite Northern and Southern Hemispheres! Theoretically a storm near India could follow the great circle path to southern california if wind kept blowing parallel to the path, but this is very unlikely (because it’s probably 8000 miles), but totally possible.

Directional Spectrum – In ocean reality, swell waves may come from a variety of different directions. There may be 5ft @20 secs from the south and 2 ft @10 seconds from the north ,for exampl.e A directional spectrum depicts the period, direction, and density of all waves present at a fixed space and set period of time. IT’s produced by buoys with height, period, and direction sensors installed. In short, if you want to know the heigh, direction, and period of all waves at a point from all direction (from all swells), the directional spectrum does that. Sweet!

Spectral density just shows the relative wave energy present at all frequency periods for a fixed space and fixed time interval.

Storm and Fetch – Most storms (other than hurricanes) follow the jet stream west to east at about 20-30 knots.

Period Length effects Wave Depth and Strength

A wave train that has significant period (like 15 seconds or more) has enough momentum that it will lose little or zero energy, size, or speed, while traveling thousands of miles until reaching land and breaking! The reason for this is a wave with a period (wavelength) of 15+ seconds means that all fo the energy is travelling DEEP under the ocean surface (the wave crest is literally the tip of the iceberg of the entire wave. The actual wave you see on the surface is about 5% of the massive deep water wave! Example: A 14 second period reaches down into the ocean 516 ft. and a 20-second period reaches down 1053ft! Opposing wind or other things (other than shallow water) would have a VERY little impact on a 1053ft underwater wave! Even an opposing wind wave wit ha 7-second period (reaching down 129 ft) wouldn’t even effect a 20-second period 1053ft wave! Actually even different period (or same period) lenghted wave trains don’t effect each other and neither can wind. The only thing that impacts wave trains other than shallow water, where they break, is surface tension (the stuff bugs use to float on water). But still it’s tonly the short-period wave trains that are susceptible to surface tension decaying the wave.