Friday, October 7, 2022

 Friday, October 7, 2022

 

   I slept very well. I did my morning exercises in bed. I felt pain in my left calf and ankle, triggered by putting the soles of my feet together and letting my knees fall out. Huh? What is this related to? I kept close to home on my morning walk in case my ankle gave out. It did better than yesterday. I treated my ankle to an infrared lamp treatment yesterday. I would have to do more of that.

   I was feeling anxious and jumpy.

  Judy called at a convenient time; yay! She often called when I was in a tutoring session. She and Paulette were going nuts with all the cars they had to drive. The job is stressful. The original idea was that they would leave the car in the parking lot, inform the customer where it was, and go home. Since tourism picked up again as the threat of Covid decreased, we have more tourists. Therefore, the parking lot is full. They have to drive around searching for a space.

   Many bodyworkers can make money during Ironman. The participants live in constant pain. I asked Yvette if she was busy. She said, "They're not my people." She complained about them as most locals do. They're rude, entitled, and cheap. I hear that a lot. They create situations where people lose money rather than bring money to the island. The roads are closed, so people can't even access shops in town. Whole shopping centers close down on the day of the race.

   I told Judy what Yvette said. She said her son said the same thing. He ran into them when he drove for Uber a few years ago before Covid. Judy speculates that people who achieve that level of excellence at anything are bound to be difficult. Along with ruining their bodies, they ruin their souls. While achieving this level requires an iron will, I'm not convinced it isn't a form of mental illness. We speculated if painting all the athletes with a single brush was possible.

   I meditated to calm my inner disturbance. I was jumpier than I'd been in a long time. I jumped when Scott said good morning when I wasn't expecting it. What is going on? I'm familiar with this state of mind. It is how I lived my childhood around my mother, in a constant state of alertness for the next attack. It was horrible. The old trauma was resurfacing. Is it because Mike, my protector, is gone, or is it coming to the surface for healing? Hope it's the latter.

   2nd grade L.'s mother told me to contact her father and force him to schedule a session with me on his time. Whether this was a substitute for our current Friday session or an addition was unclear. It may be unclear to him, too. I'm not looking forward to dealing with him. I'll be in the middle of these two and their difficulties. I pity the child. I find Mom a tough cookie. From her description of the dad, he's on a par with her, if not worse.

 I was going to continue with the Starfall reading program. L got on right into our Zoom session right after she had finished her school session with her mom. She looked grim. I wanted to do something easier. We wound up working on something quite tough. But she found it pleasurable.   

    L has terrible memory problems, as so many of my students have. In the past, I only encountered one student that I clearly identified with a specific memory problem. He couldn't remember a word from one line to the next. L isn't quite that bad, but it's close.

   I asked her to remember something her mom said earlier in the day. She could repeat something we both heard her say as she set L up to work with me. When I asked her where she heard it in her brain, she pointed to the right spot for auditory processing. Then she repeated something I said. Again, her repetition was word perfect. I only realized a few minutes ago that when she repeats sentences, she can use the rhythm of language to help her recall. She does that brilliantly. I have to see if she can remember a random list of words read as a list, devoid of sentence intonation.

  We worked on storing and retrieving a few words. I wrote see, look and you. L could do that with some consistency even with distractors until the end of the session. I wrote look, and she said you. Oh, well.

   I asked her what the back section of her mind felt like, where information is stored. She said it was blank. I asked her to give it a color. She chose green. A pretty green or ugly one? Green is one of her favorite colors, she said. She named other colors at other times. This green was not her favorite because it was too dark. I showed her the palette and asked her which green to use. I colored that section of the brain in on my rather crude sketch of the brain. She said the green area was impenetrable. I asked her to create a fictional character that could get in. She named her character Galoksa and paired her with a color. She could tell a story in which Galoksa got in but still couldn't retrieve information. I told her to "listen as if I'm whispering the answer in your ear." Nothing worked. How do children that young have problems with long-term memory retrieval?

 I watched the end of Family Secrets. Yuck! Not a satisfying ending. It left you wondering what the hell happened. That's all, folks!