Monday, March 20, 2023

 Monday, March 20, 2023

 Okay, I have my answer. Does Elsa use the doggie door on her own? No, she does not. How do I know? Because I found a pile of poop on the lanai rug this morning. Pretty conclusive. I've started throwing a treat out the doggie door. I don't have to stamp my foot to tell her she has to go. I doubt that will make a difference. The lanai rug has her embedded scent. Not that she hasn't pooped on the outdoor lanai too. I've seen the evidence. It's that Mother Nature erases it. I can't do as good a job on the lanai.

  My friend Melissa came for a visit. She came with two purposes: to visit me and search Mike's library for a book she knew he had at one point. She didn't find it. I must have sent it to one of the seminaries.

  After she had searched the library, we sat and talked. I offered her tea. I warned her that some must be at least twenty years old. She found an herbal tea bag. When the water hit it, the bag disintegrated. The loose tea leaves floated in the hot water and sank to the bottom. She fished out what was left of the tea bag, assuring me that the leaves would settle on the bottom. They did. She made no comments on the taste of the tea.

  Melissa is a doctor. We talked about neuroscience, particularly memory. I was reading Remember by Lisa Genova. She thought I was reading it concerned about memory loss with age. Oh, no. I was reading it because I was encountering students with memory problems. Adolescent D can't retain words in his short-term memory long enough to get something from another room his mother requested. He repeats the words out loud as he goes to do the chore. Mama K's twins had yet to memorize all the letters in the alphabet by the end of first grade. Judy has a student who doesn't recognize a word he saw two lines before, as I have with several of my students. What is going on? Is there some shift? Is it the hormonally modified food we're eating?

  As Lutz and I walked, he commented on how great it was to have all the volcanos silent. Kilauea was spewing for years, from 1983 to 2018, for thirty-five years straight. Then it stopped, and we had clear skies, no more vog. We've had short eruptions since then. At this moment, it was quiet. Lutz said the real threat is Hualalai, the mountain we live on. It is still active. The other active volcanos give warnings when they are about to erupt; they have frequent earthquakes. Hualalai's magma well is too deep. There will be no warning. When Mauna Loa erupted around Thanksgiving, the lava dribbled down the mountainside. The threat to the main highway across the island was measured in days. Lutz said when Hualalai blows, its lava will reach the seashore in twenty minutes. Something to look forward to.

  Wright wrote about another definition of achieving non-self. It's the end of all reactivity. It sounds like the 'self' is defined as the emotional self. Here's the problem: fMRIs show the emotional system is involved in all decisions, every blessed one of them, no matter how trivial or momentous. We are not Spock. Someone evaluated Spock, and not even he functioned without his emotions. This suggests that 'the self' is only the unpleasant antagonist parts of us; our true selves are all love and light. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.