Kathrin invited me to go to the beach yesterday after Bikram. She took me to the beach at the Old Airport. It's a large beach with a series of coves. The parking lot is the old runway. We walked and sat at a picnic bench under a tree and talked. I am looking forward to showing the beach to Damon, Cylin, and August. While the beach is beautiful, it seems like it's too rough for swimming for Cylin and took rocky for boogie boarding. There were surfers out there. A good sign that it is not a good place for us garden variety swimmers. I very much enjoyed Kathrin's company. We have a lot in common.
I spent the afternoon packing up some books for shipping, my first three boxes. Notre Dame ordered about 100 books. I have found about 30 of them. Only 3770 more books to go before I have emptied the library. As I worked, I wondered what Mike must be thinking about having left me with this chore. I can't imagine that he ever thought of it. His plan was for us to die together in our nineties and leave it Yvette and Damon's job.
I had dinner with the Glicksteins last night. No special occasion, just Judy making sure I'm getting a decent meal. It was lovely. I miss having people around.
I am going to have to work on having someone else to live with. I'm not comfortable just navigating around furniture. That leaves me feeling 'I'm not the chair I'm sitting in. I'm not the table I'm walking around." I also need, "I'm not this other human being I'm taking into consideration.," so that I can remember that I am human.
Elsa doesn't cut it. Besides being a dog and not a human, she doesn't cling to me. When I picked her up from the groomer yesterday, she was sitting on his lap. He said she was needy. Boy, not with me. She has her own life. I suspect that she is waiting for Kathrin to come home. She was here long enough to become part of her pack.
Kathrin hasn't been home now for over two weeks. She has moved in with her friend, Michael. Well, that is until her visitor's visa runs out.
_____________ _________ _________
Musings:
Whenever Brooks refers to the ego's needs, he refers to the needs of fame, fortune, and power. (Again, the poor ego gets a bad rap being judge by its worst moments only.) Now, for starters, I disagree with him on the ego needs. They can manifest as constructively as easily as they can destructively: the need to see oneself as good can be either good or bad. That's as much an ego need as any fame, fortune, and power, and it can go just as wonky.
As I have mentioned previously, I view the human psyche from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Therefore, our drives to secure fame, fortune, and power must have a survival purpose. When our brain circuits developed, the opportunities for excessive fame, fortune, and power were limited by our circumstances. How much fame, fortune, and power can be accrued when you are one person in a group of 10 to 100 wandering the wilderness in search of food. Everyone is in search of fortune: food, water, and safe shelter.
I remember an anthropology teacher saying that stealing is not a problem is a small primitive tribe. If you stole something from someone else, you couldn't use it anyway. Everyone would know, and, boy, would you ever be in trouble. Doing something like that could easily cost your life when you were exiled from the group for your behavior.
Fame: does everyone in the group know me? Am I well-liked? Are they happy to have me as part of the group? I am possibly known by the members of a neighboring tribe, so when I go to visit, they don't kill me? How much would more fame be possible?
Power: Am I respected? Do people acknowledge my needs and my point of view? I believe that once basic physical needs are satisfied, power is what we fight over between family members and between countries. It has to do with our precarious grasp on reality. Each one of us sees the world slightly differently. We need to know that some share our point of view to be validated. Even in the most structured cultured, there are small differences in point of view. I think these differences are scary for people. It brings into question our grasp on reality.
