Friday, May 5, 2023

 Friday, May 5, 2023 

I slept well and got up around seven-thirty, although I could have stayed in bed longer. I dropped two pounds as of today from my high of one hundred forty-nine lbs.   I eliminated all sugar. I didn’t have my lemonade with two teaspoons of honey, no Hershey’s milk chocolate nuggets with almonds, and no fruit salad. I’m sure there’s sugar in something I ate. I also didn’t eat dinner. I wasn’t hungry. Usually, I’m hungry most of the day. It was the Herys that finally slated it. Guess I should have known. I checked blood sugar monitors online. I can get one without a prescription, but they’re expensive. I want to check if I can get them through Kaiser first. 

I had an appointment with Shelly. I dealt with feelings of hatred. I felt a cold inner hatred from and for some people. It’s distressing.   I had an experience confronting this feeling before. It was terrifying. It was at the end of a ten-day silent meditation retreat. The final meditation was a metta, a meditation on loving-kindness. Once this meditation was over, the participants filed out and started talking to each other. I  envisioned myself filled with paranoia, slinking along the walls and giving everyone the stink eye. I looked crazy as a loon. I said, “God, you got me into this mess. You get me out.” The thought that came to me was, “You’re scared. Live with it.”  That worked. I got up, walked out, and behaved in delightfully social ways, thoroughly enjoying every encounter. The thrill of long sits is you get to see aspects of yourself that are less than wonderful. But that’s one of the good points. You face your demons and, with any luck, heal.

Adolescent D’s mom had told me he was way behind in his assignments. I asked if I could help. He said no; he had math to do, and I couldn’t help. He said he had to read an article and take notes. I could help with that. I helped him read it. He said he usually listens to the article being read on the computer. We reviewed the assignment; he had to take two notes on the introduction, ten on the final section, etc. I went over the article and said that you need a note for each paragraph in the introduction. In the section where he needed ten notes, there were five paragraphs. You need two notes for each paragraph there. Then we signed out. While he listened to the article on the computer, compensating for his poor reading, I finished reading the article. You’ve got to be kidding me. The article was from Scientific American. If I had that assignment when I was in ninth grade, I would have been begging my dad to help me. The vocabulary! The syntax! What was this teacher thinking?!

We signed into Zoom again after half an hour. He had taken notes on the two paragraphs in the introduction. I told him how hard I thought the article was. He said he would do more work on his own. I asked him to text me when I did some. He did more work and texted me.

I finished off the chicken breast I broiled two days ago. Remind me never to buy chicken breasts again. I’ve never been a big fan of white meat. I prefer the back and legs. By this time, the chicken was dried out. I spiced it up with the tapenade I bought at the health food store.