Thursday, August 4, 2002

 Thursday, August 4, 2002

   

I got up early this morning because Yvette started driveway yoga after a long hiatus. I got home in time from my early morning walk with Elsa to get some breakfast, particularly some water. I love doing yoga on the hard cement ground, looking up into the sky. The class starts at 7 am. In the summer, sunrise is around 6 am; in the winter, it's about 7 am. The sun is never glaring down on us. I can lie on my mat and look up into the sky without endangering my eyes. During the summer, we deal with house flies. I've learned to ignore them as one or two will crawl on my legs. They don't bite. It's a good meditation discipline, staying calm and accepting while they tickle.

    

At 1:30 pm., I had an appointment for a mammogram. Oh joy, oh rapture. A woman came out to claim me. She introduced herself as Sylvia. "Ah, you're the woman who's going to squeeze the life out of me." She laughed. Most of the people who work for Kaiser are of good spirit. It's amazing. The mammogram was uneventful except for a tiny change. In the past, when asked if anyone in my family had cancer, the answer was no. Not one person on either side of my family had ever had cancer. Now, there was one person who had age-related breast cancer. It was caught early, but nonetheless . . . .

  Lutz told me they had a new CEO of the Kaiser Clinic. Before he came, the clinic's criteria for success was the number of people who were happy with the service. He changed the objective to the least number of complaints. Some of the staff left because of him.

   I stopped off at Costco on my way home. I had no trouble handling the walk through the parking lot and the store. I had a list of items on sale and some of the standard items: a case of almond milk, vinegar, lemons, and sweet kale salad. I would have picked up some more whole grain taco chips, which I enjoy for breakfast, but they had none.

  Of late, I'd felt I had to write about everything I had done in a day. My update entries were longer this year than they had been last year at the same time. For my sake, as well as those who read these, I decided to be more selective. I also noticed I write less about philosophical issues. I think less about these issues, too. I suppose there is something good about that, but I love the stimulation. Also, it's exciting to discover something I have never noticed or thought of before.  

  I regularly did the Brain HQ exercises and some German training on Lingopie. A neuroscientist designed the brain exercises. They say they have scientific proof they're effective. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. The program only costs $14 a month or $98 for the year if you pay annually. I applied my usual criterion: can it do harm? No. Okay, I'll try it. What do I have to lose? Not more than I would playing FreeCell for endless hours. The same applies to the German training.

      The process offered by Lingopie is the most engaging language program for me. They show movies in the target language and then subtitles in both the speaker's native and target language. I can press on any word and hear it pronounced. I like this method. I found the others tedious. German is my first language, literally. It's the first one I heard. My parents stopped speaking it to me after the Americans entered the war against Germany. People attacked Germans on the street. Given that they were white, people could only identify them by their language. I started school in February 1946 with very little German, but speaking English with a German accent you could have cut with a knife. No one would have suspected. Ha! Ha! I was never attacked, and my parents started speaking German at home after the war. My German is limited to domestic use, and I never learned to read it. While I speak German fluently.' I don't even know what half the words mean in isolation. It gives me insight into the language problems of children who come from immigrant homes.

 I found the exercises on Brain HQ confusing and frustrating at first. I learned to be patient with myself and 'start again,' a phrase I learned from S.N. Goenka when I studied Vipassana meditation. "Just start again." Observing which exercises I find challenging and which I can do with relative ease is interesting. I was amazed to see how well I did on some tracking exercises. I was shown three objects to track. Then ten more were added, and all were moved around. I had to identify the original three. If I left my eyes unfocused, I could keep track of them.  

 There's a funny aside to Goenka's phrase "Start again." He came from Burma, now Myanmar, and spoke with an accent. He would say, "Start again. Just watch your respiration," at the beginning of each meditation session. Because of his accent, respiration sounded like desperation. "Start again. Just watch your desperation." Oh, so true.