Learning Ukulele Quotes

Now that I crossed off annoying you from today’s to-do list, I’m all done.” I readjust my suit for the umpteenth time. “Do you have any intention of doing something useful with your life?” “I’m not sure. I considered learning to juggle, but then I saw a video about ukuleles, so I started getting into that during my spare time.

few months into our relationship, Barack invited me to come home with him to Honolulu over Christmas, so I could see the place where he’d grown up. I immediately said yes. I’d never been to Hawaii. I’d never even imagined getting myself to Hawaii. My only conception of the place was a kind of pop-media fantasy involving ukuleles, tiki torches, grass skirts, and coconuts. My impressions were largely if not entirely derived from the Brady Bunch’s three-episode visit to Oahu in 1972, in which Greg took up surfing, Jan and Marcia wore bikinis, and Alice threw out her back learning to hula. I incorporated what I thought I knew about Hawaii into my daydreams about what spending Christmas there would be like. Barack and I were still in the fantasy stage of our new relationship, so it all felt fitting. We hadn’t yet had a fight.

I met Tyler roughly a year after his minimalist decision to leave social media. He was clearly excited by how his life had changed during this period. He started volunteering near his home, he exercises regularly, he’s reading three to four books a month, he began to learn to play the ukulele, and he told me that now that his phone is no longer glued to his hand, he’s closer than he has ever been with his wife and kids.

To understand what the Royal is now you must first understand what it was, from 1927 through the Thirties, the distant and mildly exotic “pink palace” of the Pacific, the resort built by the Matson Line to rival and surpass such hotels as the Coronado, the Broadmoor, Del Monte. Standing then almost alone on Waikiki, the Royal made Honolulu a place to go, made all things “Hawaiian”—leis, ukuleles, luaus, coconut-leaf hats and the singing of “I Wanna Learn to Speak Hawaiian”—a decade’s craze at country-club dances across the United States. During the fourteen years between the Royal’s opening and Pearl Harbor people came in on the Matson Line’s Malolo and Lurline and they brought with them not only steamer trunks but children and grandchildren and valets and nurses and silver Rolls-Royces and ultramarine-blue Packard roadsters. They “wintered” at the Royal, or “summered” there, or “spent several months.” They came to the Royal to rest “after hunting in South Africa.” They went home “by way of Banff and Lake Louise.