Wednesday, February 2, 2022

 Wednesday, February 2, 2022

            

     I had a bad, bad night, struggling with fear. Terry Gross interviewed a woman who did research on heartbreak. Among other things, she talked about the impact of loneliness on our bodies. She spoke about how our bodies respond to being alone the way I am from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. When we're alone, our inflammation is boosted in preparation for an injury. When our brains were evolving 700,000 years ago if being isolated was a dangerous business. An injury could mean death.    

     On the other hand, when we were enveloped in our groups, the inflammatory system quieted, and our immune system was boosted. When with others, the danger was in catching something from them. The problem with this system is we don't need to worry about aloneness in the same way in our modern world. I am alone. I live alone. However, if I injure myself, I can call someone. I can even get in the car and drive to Urgent Care. I don't need to be in a constant state of inflammation. I don't need to be in a state of hyper-vigilance; neither do others living alone in this world. Aloneness signals danger. Great! Just what a need to be in a state of constant fear. That's how I lived as a child. I had forty-five years of rest, only to pick up the challenge of aloneness again. I don't like it.

    On my walk this morning, I ran into Tammy. I hadn't seen her for a while, a long time. She asked me how my visit with my stepson went over Christmas. I had to tell her he never came, and I had been all alone. Being alone at that time was okay. Special days were never a big deal for me. Mike and I celebrated our union every day. In fact, I found Christmas, with its too-much-of-a-deal-present-giving, a drag. Mike loved it. Being alone for Thanksgiving and Christmas wasn't the worst. However, the burden of aloneness has been getting heavier. The forty-five years of being with Mike provided me with only so much insolation. It thinned out over time, as stored fat does in a famine. Eventually, you just run out. I've run out. I told Tammy how hard it was. She was sympathetic. As we separated, walking in opposite directions, I started to cry. I must have been sobbing out loud. Tammy came back and apologized for making me cry. I told her, no, no, it was a gift. I don't cry easily. Having a cry with wracking sobs felt good. It released some of the grief.

    Despite my poor mental state, I present as surprisingly steady. I may feel like I'm vibrating inside, but I look calm. I can hear my voice as more modulated than it usually is, combating my inner state. For the most part, I experienced the upset as just physical. My mental state was reasonably calm when I was engaged with others.  

     At ten, I signed up for a workshop on Connecting with Our Students sponsored by Step Up Tutoring. Participating in these workshops is wonderful. I get to be part of a group. While close to a thousand tutors are in the program, only thirty or so ever attend these online classes. Many of the names and faces were becoming familiar. I saw mostly older people. Of course, we were all retired. We had the time, and we were alone and needed company. The class wasn't relevant for me. It was how to build a relationship with your student. I'm an expert on that. I don't follow their suggestions. I usually start by having the student tell me something they do well. We are working on something they don't do well or need help with. In our relationship, they're children who are failing. I want them to know I know something they do well. That works like a charm as far as I'm concerned.  

      I had an appointment to have the car serviced at Kia at 11:30. I gave the clerk all the information he asked for. He seemed to be preoccupied with something on his computer. I asked him what I should do. He snapped at me as if I had said something rude. I was startled. This is the second time this has happened to me with the people who work there.   Last time, the guy told me off directly. I was shocked. I hadn't said anything meaning to be rude. I still have no idea what I did to offend him. My NYC style may have something to do with it. It's direct and no-nonsense. I have a New Yorker's sense of entitlement. I ask questions. As it wound up, he still needed to finish entering my information. I wonder if he was having problems or was just slow. I asked him again what I should do now. I also asked how long the service would take. An hour and a half. What!!! It was twelve, and I had to be home for a 1 pm appointment. I made another appointment for Thursday and left. My sense of time was way off. I had planned to stop at Costco after the Kia servicing to do some shopping. I barely made it home in time without the car servicing or a stop. I am suffering from temporal disorientation.

     New Yorkers indeed expect speed. I have moved west in progressive steps. Each time there has been an adjustment. Mike and I moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey. I remember laughing at how hesitant people were to make turns into traffic.  

     Then we moved to Columbus, Ohio. Oh, boy. I sat behind a line of cars on a two-lane road with a truck in front of us moving up slowly. I couldn't imagine what was going on. No one honked their horn. It would have been a symphony of noise signaling annoyance in New York. Finally, the third car in line swung into the opposite lane to pass the cars ahead of him and the truck. The rest of us followed. A worker on the street in front of the truck was doing road work, moving down the road a few feet at a time. We would have been there forever. 

   Then Mike and I moved to Hawaii. Josh told us we could expect to be held up as two people going in opposite directions on a two-lane road stopped to talk. No one would honk. I generally love the slowed-down pace. 

  I made it home to meet with the tutor I had missed on Monday for my reading office hours. He still needed to meet with his tutee. We quickly decided he should watch my videos on YouTube, The Phonics Discovery System Phase I and II, and then get back to me if he thinks he needs help.

    I finally got around to washing Elsa. She hates it, but it's the only thing controlling her skin lesions. Some of the old ones on her neck and upper back had cleared up, but new ones had erupted on her lower back just above her tail. I should have been bathing her every other day. That's not a fun idea for either one of us.

   I had a scheduled appointment with Mama K's crew for 2 pm. I called there was no answer. I texted her, telling her the problem I ran into. She texted back, saying the phone hadn't been plugged in. Could I do it some other time? I was not enjoying these telephone sessions. We were doing story writing to help them develop thinking and speaking skills. The kids never had anything in mind before the session. I can cope with that, but their distractibility is driving me nuts. It was bad when we were on Zoom. Now we are on the phone; it's even worse. It's an eight-person household. It's impossible to isolate someone from the rest of the family when the youngest is a set of seven-year-old twins. I gave Mama K one of Mike's old computers after their tablet broke. They still haven't set it up. We could get back to Zoom if they did, which would be better. For now, I'm dreading my work with them.

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Musings:

  On Race and Whoopie Goldberg's comment:

    Race is not a scientific term; it's a social term. It implies some dramatic genetic difference, distinguishing one group of people from another. Distinctions like this are created by repeated inbreeding within a group. If a group is very small, abnormalities set in. If the group is large enough, just distinguishing characteristics. The royal houses of Europe practiced inbreeding. All sorts of horrible abnormalities developed. Were they a separate race?   Inbreeding happens when people of the same religion make sure they only marry people of that religion. If the group is large enough, abnormalities don't develop.

    As I understand it, race is a social construct, not a scientific one. It is consistently adopted by those who want to denigrate a group of people, as the Nazis used it to denigrate the Jews. I am 51% Ashkenazi Jewish; I do not consider myself biracial, no matter what the Nazis want to say about it. Are Jews ethnically different? Yes. Are they racially different? There are genetic differences that can be identified. That's true for the Irish versus the Germans versus the Italians. Are they different races? If you say no, why not?   

     When Italians first arrived in the USA, they were considered racially different. Then they were absorbed into the social structure. Italians are no longer commonly considered racially different. At least I haven't heard comments to that effect. 

      Poor Whoopie.  Do Jews really want to be considered a different race? Who's protesting her comments? Are Jewish groups protesting her not viewing Jews as a separate race? Oh, dear. They're supporting the Nazis. Pretty confusing.

     I hear alienation whenever I hear a group identified as a different race. It announces some uncomfortable differences. Whoopie says the term race should be reserved for people with visible differences, like skin color. I'm sure the term race, or the sentiment, was applied to groups of people with differences in hair or eye color at one point. But as people of different groups interbred, those distinctions became less apparent.  

      As for skin color, the criterion for group membership is more stringent than the Nazis' for Jews. The Nuremberg Laws dictated that you were 1/8 Jewish; if one of your grandparents was Jewish, you were Jewish. To make things more confusing, Jewish was defined as someone who practiced Judaism. If the child of a Jewish couple converted to Christianity, and his children followed suit, they were still considered Jewish. If the next generation continued to be Christians, were they home-free?   It sounds like the Germans were into epigenetics before the rest of us. It's the one-drop rule when it comes to identifying people of color. Any colored blood makes you a person of color. If you don't declare yourself as such, you're passing. Really???  

    White people panic because people of color are starting to outnumber them. Assuming we continue considering people of color a different race, with all its implications, white people with their prejudices have screwed themselves.   If they considered anyone with one drop of white blood white and treated them accordingly, they wouldn't be part of a majority rapidly becoming a minority. Think of all the black women who were raped by their white masters. That alone would take care of the numbers. How people of color are treated in the white world is a different ball of wax. If you're going to treat people as less deserving than you are, why would you be surprised by their objections?

     No, I'm not considering we banish the word RACE to make the problem disappear. Think of book burning. Banishing words does not make concepts disappear. If anything, it makes them stronger. It becomes forbidden fruit.