Saturday, May 25, 2024

 Saturday, May 25, 2024

   For the past several days, I have been dragging. Walking up the hills took more effort. I needed more short naps. I wasn't sure what the problem was. It may be the shift in my breathing pattern. I learned the rib anchor through the Gokhale method. It made sense posturally, but I had to give up a lifelong habit of breathing with my abdominal muscles and learning to breathe with my chest muscles.  I couldn't figure out how to breathe deeply using just my chest muscles. I've been trying to make that change despite the medical advice posted on the Internet. It says good breathing is abdominal. Chest breathing is a sign of anxiety. Perhaps it induces anxiety, the anxiety I've been feeling of late. Laughter triggers the lower abdominal muscles.  I will figure out how to combine abdominal breathing with the rib anchor.  I have confirmation of the rib anchor when I watch athletes and dancers.  It makes a huge difference to someone's posture. Today, I tried abdominal breathing to help calm anxiety.  The difference is whether you push out your belly to inhale or suck it in. I find if I suck it in, I maintain the rib anchor, while I can't if I extend my abdomen to inhale.

   I can now tell Twin A and Twin E apart. They are identical twins, so much alike that their mother has trouble distinguishing them. The good news was that I could; the bad news was the why. Twin E is cheerful; Twin A is gloomy. Twin A is the one who shared her feelings of sadness because of her academic inadequacies.  Her reading was steadily improving. The rich get richer; the more we know, the easier it is for us to improve.  Twin A has been ahead of Twin E. That may be part of the problem- survivor's syndrome. That may make her feel bad. However, Twin E is gaining.  Their mother says both girls are reading books at home now. 

    My friend Sandor called last night. Did I know an Uber driver I could contact for him? He needed a ride to the airport. He tried to arrange for an Uber to come to his house and learned they don't travel out that far.  He had no one to help him. I assumed it was a polite way of asking me to give him a ride. No worries.  I was happy to do it. 

  He said he wanted to leave at noon.  While he made the trip from my house to his in fifteen or twenty minutes, I figured I would need half an hour.  I arrived shortly before noon.  He lives in a gated community. I called him for the passcode and directions. I got a little lost because I remembered his house being at a dead-end. It's not. It just looks that way from his yard.

    He was rushing around taking care of business. I wandered the property, taking in the view of Mauna Kea and figuring out the lay of the land.  Eventually, I went to my car to listen to the Saturday shows on HPR.  It started to pour. I called Sandor to tell him I couldn't remotely open the car's trunk.  He didn't answer. I called again. Still no answer. It was close to one p.m. I feared he had fallen and couldn't get up.  I planned to check on him if he didn't come out soon or answer my call. He came. I can't remember what he said he was doing that he couldn't answer my calls.  I don't know what would have happened if he had gotten an Uber. No one would have waited an hour for him to get ready.  But that's Sandor. I love him to death, but he's always in a mad rush. What a way to live. 

  I drove back toward Kona and the airport at the speed limit. It would be what it would be. I wasn't risking life and limb. Sandor regaled me with stories on the ride. His nephew, his wife's blood relative, just graduated from Hawaii Preparatory Academy. Sandor hosted a celebratory lunch at his house for close family, a mere twenty-five people.  Nothing like my family. My mother was an only child. My father had one brother who never married so much for the extended family. 

   Sandor's wife had been in Miami for several days, having had some dental work done. He called her while we were driving. She had gone on a boat ride with some of Sandor's friends or family from Miami, where he is from. 

   The last story was about his neighbor across the street. Holy cow! Boy, that's a scene and a half. The couple that live there both suffer questionable mental health issues. The man is constantly bringing charges against his neighbors. He exhibits generally strange behavior. Sandor said his problems with him started when the man approached him asking for support for his complaint about another neighbor having a tractor on his property. The development is zoned for agriculture. He has every right to have a tractor, several in fact. When Sandor refused to cooperate, the man started calling the cops on him. He finally took Sandor to court. 

  They were refer to meditation to start. When the mediator got the details of the situation from Sandor's neighbor, she ended the sessions, saying, "This is a stalking situation."  The case against Sandor was dropped.

  Today, he told me about a new wrinkle. He mentioned the man's name to a family member. As it winds up, the man and his female partner rented a home from his wife's family on property primarily as a family compound.  I think there are nine homes with a public street carrying the family name.  The man's name was recognized, "Don't you remember. He's the Peeping Tom."  He went around the compound spying on women showering or changing. He was finally asked to leave.  

   Sandor got to the airport at 1:30 for his 2 o'clock flight. While the Kona airport is international, it is still small. He got through check-in and security and had no trouble checking his luggage and making the plane. 

  I had two responses to an ad for tutoring I posted on Next Door. One was a mother looking for reading support for her two children, one going into Kindergarten and the other into First grade. She wanted to be ahead of the game. I don't like working with children younger than six. I'm with Waldorf; children shouldn't be made to read before the age of seven. I  disagree with the push to have them read by the time they enter Kindergarten.  

   The second was from a mother whose son was in third grade and had problems with letter reversals.  This is my cup of tea. Unfortunately, I was so anxious I made two serious mistakes in my response. First, I gave her my telephone number forgetting it was posted in the ad. The second was a doozy. I confused her name with her son's. Would you want to hire a reading teacher who mixed up people's names? Oh, well.  I feel I have to post another ad.  If I leave this one up, it clearly condemns me as incompetent at one and all.

   I have a funny story about mixing up names.  In my sophomore year of college, I had to compare two early American authors on an English exam.  The teacher called me into his office.  He said I had written the best exam but mixed up the names. He should fail me, but he couldn't because I had demonstrated such an excellent understanding of the material. He apologized and gave me a C.  The whole situation baffled me. looking back on it now, I thought," What a pedantic!" The critical point was that I understood the literature. Getting the names right was trivial. I still made Dean's List.

   One of the fronds finally fell off the Bismarck palm tree in my front yard. It is a gorgeous silver-blue palm with huge fronds.  Dean says the palm comes from Madagascar. It must have been a German who named it, thinking the magnificent tree deserved the name of a powerful human being. I asked Darby if she wanted the frond or if it was too much for her to handle. She suggested I give it to Dean. When I arrived home this morning at the end of my walk, I invited Dean to look at the frond. He suggested I offer it to Darby.  These fronds are huge, and no one wants to deal with them. While I know people respond that way because they're uncomfortable saying no to a request- in this case, it was an offer. Many respond to an offer as if it is a request. I was the proud owner of a pruning chainsaw and knew I would cut those fronds down to a manageable size.

 

    Oblique language drives me nuts. Once, many years ago, while Mike and I were visiting Princeton for Thanksgiving, I stayed with Jean, my Hanai sister, while Mike stayed with this obnoxious friend. One afternoon, I was curled up on the sofa by the fireplace. Jean said, "Wouldn't you be more comfortable upstairs?"  I took the question literally, thanked her for her concern, and assured her I was comfortable.  She then asked me directly to go upstairs because she had a Skype visit with her husband and wanted privacy. I asked why she didn't say that. "I was being polite."  I found her request confusing. Oblique expressions are part of a language. I doubt many people in their twenties would understand expressions like, "I have to powder my nose." (It means I have to go to the bathroom. in those days, ladies did go to the bathroom  to refresh the power on their noses.)  You have to learn what those words mean as much as you do any other language convention.  When Jean started with, "Wouldn't you be more comfortable…," someone raised with that language would have understood the speaker wasn't concerned for their comfort but their own.   

    The empty gel capsules I ordered from Amazon arrived. I ground the green tea leaves into a powder using my coffee grinder. I found a YouTube video showing me how to fill those capsules effectively. 

   I have heard about the health benefits of green tea from several sources. I used to include it in my smoothie after grinding the leaves with the flax seeds I also put in the drink.  The green tea affects the taste of the smoothie unpleasantly. I switched to drinking the tea. I noticed the few remaining natural teeth I had left became considerably more stained. Really quite unsightly. Sure enough, green tea stains teeth.  I started a teeth whitening regime.  It didn't make sense to do that at night and drink green tea in the morning, which darkened my teeth again.  Ergo, the green tea capsules. They solve two problems.