Despite napping forever, I fell asleep quickly and slept well for most of the night. Here's another blessing: Mike and I always slept like babies. I hear from peers in my Golden Age Club that sleep does not come easily. I woke up around 5:30 a.m. and decided to get up and do my morning walk with Elsa. We walked a reasonable distance today. I had completed over 5,000 steps when I got home.
I went out to check the laundry. It was mostly dry, just a little damp around the edges. I took some underpants to dry inside the house but left the rest. Then it started to sprinkle. I went out to grab a pair of shorts and my T-shirts. The rest are long-sleeved shirts, most of which I plan to give away and none I anticipate ever wearing while I live in Hawaii. I throw on a sweatshirt when it gets cold enough for a long-sleeved shirt.
I discovered a gift from Elsa on the lanai. The wee-wee pad was lying open and waiting in the bathroom. She used it once for a bowel movement, but the lanai won out today. I decided to smear a little poop on the wee-wee pad along with the touch of urine, hers, of course.
I am still feeling blah. It feels like I have nothing to do. Judy reports that she does a lot of shopping, taking care of her grandson, participating in Zoom meetings for the church, and doing household chores. I have a lot less stimulation. Dorothy is complaining about the same state. Lethargy is taking over. She calls it boredom. Household projects have lost their meaning; I think I need something challenging.
If this is bad for me, I can't imagine what it must be like for elderly people who have nothing in their lives except going to the grocery store once a day and watching television. I have so much more. I don't know how much of my malaise is due to what is happening in the world.
I appreciate that my life may suffer if things become violent in this country, but I can't blame people who have lived under the gun as people of color have. I know that many whites fear that people of color will become the political majority. What goes around comes around, even if you're not directly responsible for it. Ignore climate change, and the world becomes uninhabitable. Ignore the suppression of others, and then, oh, dear, surprise, they don't like the people who benefited from that suppression. What a surprise! I may not like how I will have to live at the end of my life, but, man, I get it.
Right now, I couldn't be better situated in relationship to anything. I live not only in Hawaii but on one of the outer islands. Not only that, but the Big Island has no new cases of Covid. I want to say that people of color live peacefully with whites, but that's not exactly the case. Native Hawaiians are not given the advantages that whites get.
Some say that the lack of economic success among people of color is their fault. For starters, does anyone know what constant threat does to brain development? I knew a Guatemalan man who was tortured as an adult and experienced a drop in his cognitive abilities. Your mind is forever devoted to protecting you from something terrible happening. You can't focus on abstract concepts like 2+2= 4 if your brain is whirling with fear. Not to mention all the ways whites have systematically limited educational and economic opportunities to people of color. If they were too successful, they were considered uppity, reaching beyond their status, and everything was taken away from them.
Why we need an underclass is beyond me. I do not fear losing what is considered' white privilege' if everyone becomes equal. I assume everyone will have the same privileges that I currently have.
If the alarm goes off as I leave Macy's, announcing that some item is unpaid, the security guard will approach me and say, "Excuse me, miss. Could I please look in your bag? It looks like one of the gadgets may not have been removed by the clerk who checked you out." I wouldn't expect to be tackled without another word.
But that's what happened to a woman I know in Princeton, NJ. She left Macy's with her four young daughters in tow when she was tackled in front of her children. If you're thinking this woman looked like some street junkie, think again. She was a middle-class woman with straightened hair. She had a Ph.D. in psychology and taught at Rider University. Oh, yes. Her skin was sufficiently dark to categorize her as a person of color. Why would there be a difference in how I would have been treated versus how she was?
I decided to go with the mood of the day, to go toward it instead of away from it. I meditated for an hour and spent time catching up with the NY Times.
At 8:30, Damon and Cylin hosted a Zoom meeting with his mom, Jean, his stepdad, John, and me for a Father's Day get-together. We wished Mike a happy Father's Day. Cylin dropped out quickly, and Damon took his tablet up to his 16-year-old son's room. Guess what he was doing at 11:30 a.m.? What do you expect an adolescent to be doing at that hour of the morning when he doesn't have to go to school? He was sleeping. Damon sat on his bed, keeping the camera on the poor boy. When asked what time he went to bed, he said it wasn't that late. Damon said he got up to go to the bathroom around 1, and he was still up, and Cylin had gotten up around 3 and reported that same thing. August pleaded innocence.
Damon walked down to the pool area with his mom because she hadn't seen the pergola he had installed. She loves to swim; she would be doing so now if the public pool in Princeton wasn't close to the virus.
Cylin asked how my car was doing. I told her it was in the shop for the second time since I brought it home on June 8. I've only driven it twice. The first time I tried to drive it, it was dead as a doornail. It wound up that the starter battery was dead and needed to be replaced. The service was excellent.
The car drove well this time, but after charging it the required time, I only had 5 miles available on pure electric versus the 26 advertised. Damon told me that the electric batteries charge inconsistently. Inconsistent is one thing, but less than one-fifth of the total amount. I couldn't even make it to town, no less back, on this much. I bought the car thinking I could drive on pure electric most of the time. Since Damon told me that inconsistent charging is a feature of these cars, I'm freaking out. They may say, "That's what you got." But this isn't a child I gave birth to that has some severe limitations. It's a car.
August has been working on attaching a PowerPoint image to my audio file for publication on YouTube. He keeps saying he's working on it, but I suspect it isn't getting a lot of his attention. Beggars can't be choosers. He is my go-to tech guy, and he's the go-to tech guy for the whole family. I reminded him of my project in the middle of the Zoom meeting, and then Jean chimed in with a problem of her own.
Most of the Zoom meeting was devoted to discussing the political situation. We're all on the same page. I don't think anyone in this group favors disbanding the police department altogether, but maybe.
I am a supporter of the police and the unions; both these organizations have abused their power. Unions have even less of an excuse than the police. One can say that the police have to make split-second decisions to protect their own lives. It's just that they're more frightened of black men than white men, regardless of size. The police have been overly militarized. Even the military said that the armed forces should not be called to police demonstrations; they're not trained. I'm all for more training and reorienting the police force to serve the community.
I heard a program the other day saying that you can predict the police force's action by the degree of prejudice in the community. You don't have to poll the police themselves. Some communities have more discrimination, and their police force reflects that.
I spent time catching up on back issues of the NY Times before I downloaded today's paper. I didn't make it to church today. I'm programmed for the 9 a.m. mass at Saint Michael's, but I had to skip it today to join the family Zoom meeting. I thought I would be anxious to get out afterward, but no. Staying home was just fine with me.
