Sunday, October 17, 2021

 Sunday, October 17, 2021

 

   I slept in. I had some sadness over troubled family relations. On the upside, I got a postcard from my nephew. He got married and moved to England.  He reported that he enjoys married life and is looking forward to getting his MA in screenwriting and finding work.  The postcard was a great picture from the wedding.  It’s a small moment. He and his wife are smiling at each other. Those smiles are worth building a life on.  He says he is also going to look for work.  He may have to work internationally on some Internet connection.  While he has EU citizenship and can work in the rest of Europe, he can’t in England.  He will need a work visa.  

  I had a long talk with Julie today.  I had known that his firstborn son was a crossdresser who made his living performing in NYC and died of AIDS twenty-five years ago.  When she first told me about him/her, her tone sounded dismissive.  I got a very different impression today.  She told me that he performed as a drag queen under his family surname.  He asked his mom if she wanted him to use a different one.  She said, “No, you’re our son, and we love you.” As she talked about him, she alternated pronouns.  Her son fully identified as female, although he never had any sex-change surgery. At first, I thought he didn’t because it wasn’t available back then. No, Julie assured me, it was.    She also told me that the local high school had her son use the staff bathroom.  Apparently, he was out and went to school dressed as a female.  Wow!  I can’t imagine that happening in NY, where I was from. Of course, I am the same age as Julie and Vince. Their son went to high school a good twenty-five years later. I still can’t imagine the schools, the communities I lived in, responding in such an open way.  

    I finally found the balls Elsa loves online.  I put in multi-colored balls with knubs or spikes in a Google search, and up it came, the exact balls she loves. Got it! I am so happy. Her preference for this ball is so apparent. 

     I got to work evaluating the videos I had recorded to find the parts that I thought I could use in the final video. The video is made up of slides with me speaking about them.   There are seventeen slides in the Phase II video. I made a check-off grid.  As I watched, I evaluated each section to see if it was good enough. Most were not. Ow!  I was going to have to start over again.

    My dinner reading is Dahaene’s Math Sense.  He says both sides of our brain respond to numbers. My guess is the left responds to the numeral and the right to the physical sense of the number.  He says the brain doesn’t respond the same to nonnumerical words. Maybe I didn’t read that right. The brain still has to pull up the concrete image for an apple. Doesn’t the right brain get involved in doing that?