I got up a 2am this morning. I had gone to be at 8:30 pm last night. By 2, I had had six hours of sleep. It's not too surprising that I was wide awake. I worked on my updates, read, and meditated. I went back to bed around 4 am. I wound up waking up at 6:30. I got up and went for my walk.
I called Dorothy first thing. She hadn't been up for conversation yesterday because she wasn't feeling well, upset stomach. She thought she caused it by overdoing the veggies.
I learned something upsetting yesterday. My life has recently been filled with frustrations. I would say way more than I'm used to. I learned that my Internet connection is unstable because the Big Island infrastructure is inadequate for the number of people it services. I want to do tutoring via Zoom and Google Meet. This means I can't give consistent service. Since everyone is on their computers these days operating remotely, the system must be strained big time.
I have been walking a different route and meeting other people as a result. I announced that I was looking for tutoring clients to a small group. Joe offered me his business card and told me to email him. His card said he had something to do with the media. I told him that I was concerned about my unstable internet connection. He recommended hard wiring my connection to the Internet with an ethernet cord—another problem on its way to being solved. When I got home, I thought maybe he could help me with some of my other issues.
The day was jam-packed. I called the vet to cancel Elsa's appointment to have medication put in her ears. Her ears smelled just fine, indicating that they were not infected. I called The First Hawaiian Bank, where I have my local checking account, to find out if they charged me for electronically transferred checks. My new tutoring client wants to pay electronically rather than just send me a check, my preference. I was told the First Hawaiian charged for each deposit, confirmed by a six-dollar charge for each Square deposit made to my account. I wanted to check that this was not the case before I gave my routing number. Hawaiian told me I was good; I had changed my banking plan after I discovered those charges.
I called the Police Department to get more information on the fingerprint procedure. Wow, what a mess. It was so confusing I don't think I can explain it. The ORI code identifies where the print was taken. If it only represents where the prints were taken and not the requesting agency, why couldn't the card I sent in be used? Something about every agency processing background information has different rules. OMG! If I brought in a card from the requesting agency, could the ORI number be handwritten, or did it have to be printed as it was on their cards? Printed. How could that be done? Are you ready for the answer? Typewriter. Given that most of the people working at Step-Up Tutoring are under thirty, I doubt many of them even know what one is.
Then I called the state car insurance oversight agency. I got a confused, contradictory message. "No, you don't need to call Progressive to check on each item." "Yes, call Progressive and check on each item." I spend about an hour on the phone for each item, and there are twelve items.
I spoke to this agent once before. I didn't recognize his voice, but I did recognize his 'spiel.' He used to work in California. He said Progressive monitored their agents very carefully there. There were no shenanigans. Here was a different story, not just with Progressive but with all the insurance companies. I'm confused. The renewal form must be issued from a central location, something that covers the whole nation. It doesn't make sense that there is a different issuing agency for each state.
Sears called to ask if the ordered equipment had arrived. The first Sears repairman who was here discovered that the problem hadn't been correctly diagnosed, and the equipment ordered wouldn't fix the problem. I had to cancel the appointment for the next day. Then, the packages arrived around 4 pm. Too late.
I found another seventy books in Mike's library and organized some others. I think I found an even more efficient method for locating the books. I do two shelves simultaneously, going through every request sheet. It went more smoothly.
I had an appointment with J., the six-year-old boy who is having trouble adjusting to online schooling. His mother wants me to work on how he responds when he doesn't get what he wants. I talked to him about my anger at the police department, "How can they be so stupid?" I told him how uncomfortable my anger made me. I talked about two ways of dealing with anger, spewing it out, which hurts others, and swallowing it, and hurting ourselves. I asked him if he was interested in finding a third way. He said yes. I could feel the relaxation surging through him. He said yes.
I took my requisite nap. When I woke up, I saw Jean had called. She had left a distressing voice mail asking if I had heard from Damon. California was in the middle of a bad fire season; Damon lives right next to Griffith Park. The fire could be a serious threat. I felt my heart sink. I called her back. She said Damon had finally called her.
Jean has a deal with Damon that he always answers the phone if she calls twice. He didn't. She got worried. Of course, she hadn't called Cylin and August to check if everyone was all right before contacting me. Her excuse was that she didn't have their numbers at hand. She doesn't use the address book on her cell phone. She rarely uses her cell phone. She doesn't text. She is somewhat of a Luddite. Even Mike made some advances.
I pulled out 20 more books and reorganized those shelves. The goal is to have all the books on the eye-level shelves alphabetized. All the books in the whole library with authors starting with A will be together, etc.
Had an alarming awareness tonight. When I stepped up on the ladder to work on the high shelves, I noticed it was a challenge for my right leg, my good one. I am getting weak. My home has only one small step in it. There is no place I go that I am required to climb stairs. Yes, I walk up and down hills, fairly steep ones at that, but it's not the same. I had to raise my foot higher than I need to when climbing these hills to get on the step ladder. Then, from that position, I have to push myself up. It's a whole different ballpark. I am resolved to doing several exercises that address this problem. 1) I will do plies. 2) I will raise my legs higher as I walk up the hill. I will do something closer to a dress march. 3) I will drive over the Kealakehe elementary school, where I volunteered when it was open, and climb up and down their good-sized bank of stairs several times a week, probably on the days when I don't do yoga.
I called Darby; she was up for joining me for my before-dinner walk. She has told me that she feels like she's twelve when she's with me. She means that as a compliment. Despite my age, I was classified as one of her younger friends.
That young man who slows down to greet me came by. Again, he slowed down. I had a chance to ask him if I reminded him of his grandmother. He said no, he was just a friendly person. Oh! I now understand why people often responded in strange ways when I said hello. People walking on a street in Manhattan have given me distressed looks as I made eye contact. It looked as if they were trying to figure out where they knew me from. I see the difference now. Ivan, the young man's name, always made eye contact with me. Everyone waves when they pass me, but most people just wave and casually look in my direction. He is only the second person I have ever seen who does what I do. I can see what it's disorienting. I guess for those who are downright paranoid, it must be pretty upsetting. My mother would have been such a person. She would have wondered what he wanted from her. Nothing mom! Just eye contact with no chaser.
My leg hurt a lot. Again, I was afraid that this was it. I tried the trigger point massaging gun. It made some difference, but not much. Besides the problem in the muscles around the hip joint, my back was bothering me. Had I managed to straighten a back that could no longer be straightened? Has my pursuit of a properly aligned back left me up with a need for back surgery? We'll see. Then I braced the ball of my left against the one step there is in my house. I stretched out the muscles in the back of my left leg. Bibbity- bobbity- boo. All the pain was gone.
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Musings:
I'm working with a six-year-old who quickly dissolves into anger when he doesn't get what he wants. His mother said, "Don't we all feel that way?" Thinking about it, I concluded the answer to that question is "No!"
I say that because I have noticed differences in my reaction to not getting what I want. The good old-fashioned one of having my whole body tightened up in defense persists. I'm not suggesting that it's totally gone. I feel it a lot these days in response to the political situation. While my response does me more harm than good, I also think it is an understandable response. My vision for the direction we are going, not only for this country but also for the world, is not good. I think we are heading for self-destruction. I don't believe that we can vote our way out of this situation. My vision is one where my life is in danger. But I have two other responses to not getting what I want. I can only hope and pray that I can develop my inner wisdom enough to apply it to what I believe I will have to face in my lifetime.
The second response to not getting what I want is a momentary tightening reaction and then allowing curiosity to dominate, allowing me to wonder how I will benefit from this alternative plan. Maybe I will learn something new. Perhaps I will meet somebody new. I'm open to the possibility, which means I am willing to explore the alternative rather than go to ground over the change as this boy is doing.
The third response is excitement. I wonder where this is going to take me. I'm on an adventure into the unknown. How will this turn out? Curiosity is the dominant emotion.
That last one was my response to Mike's death: I was on a new adventure. How was it going to turn out? Clearly, I didn't want Mike to die. We were doing very well as a couple.
This makes me remember a period in our marriage that wasn't that good. Easy affection and laughter were gone. Here was something I wasn't prepared to live without. I considered leaving Mike but concluded that he was a really good person, and I had no place else I wanted to be. I let go of what I wanted and resolved to find a way to make myself comfortable.
Spoiler alert: the dead air between us cleared up shortly after I came to that conclusion. Maybe not such a spoiler alert. When we want something too much, when we hang on too tightly, we block the possibility of the very changes we want. Shortly after the dead air period broke, I shared my thoughts about leaving the marriage with Mike. He said he had had the same thoughts and came to the following conclusion: "She's a really good person, and I have no place else I want to be."
What's weird as I look back at that period is that we never sought marriage counseling. On previous occasions when we were annoyed with each other or in outright conflict, we sought out help, but this dead air episode never triggered thoughts of marriage counseling. Why didn't we respond that way to this most serious threat to our relationship?
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