Monday, July 8, 2024
Dean and Nina plan to come by on Saturday afternoon to play Rummikub. He wanted to play Scrabble, although neither Nina nor I did. I find Scrabble anxiety-producing, and Nina's first language is Chinese. Nina still struggles to communicate in English. She does fine at work, where what she has to say is limited. Dean is concerned because he doesn't know how to play Rummikub. He proposed playing with me because I talked about how lonely I was. I am that lonely. I appreciate the company. As long as they're not patronizing, I'll be fine.
I left late for Chi Qigong today but arrived on time. Clyde was standing on the bluff, enjoying the view of the tide pools and the bay. He commented on my Bronx accent for the second time. He's full of assumptions. We talked about religion. I told him that both Mike and I were converts. He asked if we converted because we had epiphanies. He told me the story of how he had an epiphany that got him to give up alcohol. It came in a dream. He saw himself as a knight in metal armor kneeling before a sword. He swore never to drink again; that did it for him. He never touched a drop again after that day thirty-six years ago.
Diane came today and brought another lady with her from her morning water aerobics session in the bay. Diane reminded me of the benefit of standing barefoot on the soil or sand, having nothing between the skin of your bare feet and nature. It made a big difference today. It was immediately calming.
I sat quietly by myself on the picnic bench before I headed off to Target. I needed some more Clorox 2 for my laundry. I gather it's no longer called that. There was a product made by Clorox that was for colors. I bought another small package of pastries, two more cans of lentil soup, my go-to choice for dinner when nothing else appeals to me, and Dave's organic multi-grained bread on sale.
When I got home, I called Mama K immediately. She was volunteering at the Food Bank and had Twin A with her, but Twin E was home. I worked with her. It was a frustrating session. She read the passage we've been using to work on her memory. She got all the words correctly. She got most of them from her memory, but there were some we had gone over she had to decode again. She never remembers the decoding procedure I teach. I have to lead her through it every time. Find the vowel and blend it with the following consonant. Today, we worked on the word against. OMG! I gave her the vowel letters ai. What sound might they make?
I teach students to pick a likely sound. The student can infer the word using context clues if the pronunciation is close enough. She said, /er/. The likelihood of ai making an /er/ sound is very low; however, anything is possible in English. Then she guessed /ar/. She had just seen ar and figured out it made an /ar/ sound. She finally gave me the short /a/, as in /an/. Then I asked her what the following letter was. She looked up at the ceiling. I kept telling her to look at the word to find the next letter. That took a good minute. When I got her to focus on the page, she had no trouble identifying the letter as s and blending /an/+/s/= /ans/. She identified the next letter as t without difficulty. Did I not communicate the idea of looking at the page correctly? I can't remember my exact words. I may have said, "Look at the word." But I tell them to look at it in their heads as well as on the page. Did I not make a clear distinction with my words? I'll have to explore that further. The problem is that poor students often look up at the ceiling instead of the printed text to find the answer. I have no idea why they do that. Well, I have some. They have no confidence that looking at the text will help them. They can't extract information from text, so why bother looking at it in the first place. I have to figure out a gentler way of getting them to do it than repeating the same words over and over.
At any rate, Twin E got to the point where she blended the sound /ganst/. When she put the /a/ from the first syllable with the word, she quickly recognized it as /agenst/; yeah, that's how we pronounce it.
I did some yard work, trimming the shrubs I'd already cut, ignoring the ones I hadn't touched yet. I filled the two-gallon sprayer with 30% vinegar, a dash of Dawn detergent, and salt, rinsing the opening with the remains of a container of 5% vinegar before screwing on the lid. I sprayed the area by the street-side fence. I covered most of it with the three-quarters full tank. This process is much easier than killing the weeds with boiling water, one carafe at a time. Of course, the advantage of the latter method is it gets me on my feet and walking every five minutes.
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
Yesterday evening, I told Lutz a story about something that happened between my cousin and me. However, I couldn't remember her name for love nor money. As I struggled to remember this morning while lying in bed, I remembered the names of her parents, her sister, her sister's husband, and her niece and nephew. I could even remember the names of her niece and nephew's spouses and children, but not her I went through the alphabet, hoping that would jog my memory. I felt attracted to the letter H. That didn't sound right. I knew her name didn't have the letter H in it. I tried to continue with the alphabet but got pulled back to the H. I contemplated it. Ah, her husband's name started with the letter H. While I couldn't remember his name, I only had a brief contact with him; her name came up. It must have been stored in my brain next to his: Barbara.
My brain was racing while lying in bed. I was frantically solving one problem after another, looking futilely for solutions. This had been going on for several days. Fortunately, it stopped when I had something else to do, writing or a conversation. When alone and not verbally occupied, my mind saw a golden opportunity and grabbed it. Damn! I was determined to get it under control. I meditated.
As I meditated, I asked what was lying underneath the mental spinning. It was fear. Terror really. I sat with it. My conscious mind knows there is no reason for this fear. My life is not in danger. I do not have to fear abandonment in a primitive world.
Thank God I'm not the only one talking about evolutionary psychology. Wilson and Dawkins's books were published in the mid-1970s. This brought the concept, which had been introduced by Darwin in the late 1800s, to the public's attention. I was into it big time in the 1980s, developing activities for the children I worked with based on the theory that many of our responses were rooted in circumstances we had never experienced. Nonetheless, our nervous systems operate as if we were living in hunter-gatherer groups, where abandonment and isolation meant certain death.
But now I had my knowledge of the current reality to share with my biologically driven unconscious mind. I am not living in a group of 10 to 30 people, moving across an unoccupied landscape searching for food and water. I am living in a world jam-packed with people and almost devoid of meat-eating animals. Yay! I am safe. My conscious mind knows what this world I live in is about. I can tell my unconscious, "You are safe. We are safe.
Loneliness is an epidemic. Behind loneliness is the fear we inherited from some primitive forebearer we know nothing about. I'd say, "Thanks a ton for nothing!" but it's hard to hold someone who lived under different circumstances responsible for my nervous system. Well, at least, it's unfair.
Having relieved myself of the fear of death, I could sit with the fear my mother's constant attacks generated in me from a different perspective. A. I did survive it. Despite emotional handicaps, I went on to have a decent life. I had a good marriage and a career I loved. B. I can survive any current attacks as long as they don't reach the fever pitch of the Nazis or the Hutus of the Rwandan genocide. Of course, anything is possible in the future. We're living in interesting times. But weirdly, the thought of that is less distressing than my mother's attacks when I was a child and vulnerable at a different level.
I worked with the Twins and Adolescent D. The work with D is routine, the same every day. He makes small improvements in each session, which is gratifying. If he did this exercise independently daily, he would someday be a fluent reader. The interesting work is with Twin E, as she forces herself to use the part of her brain for recall that works instead of the one that doesn't.
It's worth sharing background information on this work with Twin E. Both Twins had terrible memory problems. At the end of first grade, neither one could name all the letters in the alphabet, and neither one could read anything. They are heading into fifth grade next school year. They are both reading at a second-grade level. Their comprehension is good, and they summarize a short passage on their own after receiving instruction on how to summarize. I think they will do well once they conquer their word recognition problem.
Twin E revealed that she knew when she had a word wrong a few days ago. How did she know? Another part of her brain gave her the right word, So why didn't she use that part of the brain? It was on the periphery of her attention instead of in the center. Could she force herself to use the part of her brain that she knew was giving the correct reading of the word? That's what we have been working on, not so much identifying the word as using the information from a particular part of the brain, she says, gives her the correct answer. It's breaking a reflex action, breaking a habit like any other. Changing her brain so that the part of the brain that gives the correct answer pops up in the center of her attention instead of the part that doesn't. I see her making progress.
Yvette proposed we have dinner together. She picked up a pizza, it was lovely spending time with her. I hadn't had pizza in a while, and I was stunned to learn that a small pizza costs $25. Really!!
Rita Wilson appeared on the TED mainstage with a message. Ask yourself what you really want to do. It's a good question. It was appalling hearing her up there telling her story. "I asked myself what I wanted to do, and guess what? I got it." She learned she wanted to sing. When her agent asked her what she wanted to do, she said, "Be in a musical"- and just like that, she was in one. I heard her sing. She's mediocre at best. I don't have the best ear, but she was off on a few notes. For her to feel comfortable publicly singing suggests she has dementia, and her husband is using all his clout to protect her from that knowledge. Very sweet. But she didn't belong on the TED main stage. She didn't belong on any stage. The only message she had to deliver was one on entitlement.
Wilson's talk reminded me of Linda Lay's appearance on the Morning Show after the Enron debacle. Employees had lost their retirement accounts and had nothing. Mrs. Lay, looking for sympathy, complained that she and her husband, who had defrauded the employees, had to give up one of the homes. Really! That sounds just as bad as being homeless to me, don't you agree? Grrr!
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
My mind was still calm this morning when I woke up. I don’t think my mind has ever been this silent without effort. I’ve achieved degrees of peacefulness in mediation retreats, but this is different. It’s not so much peaceful - just less noisy. The trick was to confront the underlying fear. Learning that that fear is motivated by a primitive understanding of my life circumstances dictated by the experience of my forebearers as they roamed the savanna in search of food was very helpful. It explained the intensity of that feeling.
Confronting underlying fear has been the key to significant changes over and over. The first time I faced fear, I was twenty. I was so wired that a sophomore teacher recommended I seek counseling. Good move. I took her up on it. The therapist was somewhat of a jerk, but she asked a poignant question. Why did I act that way? I hiccupped out, “I’m scared.” I hadn’t even known before then that I was driven by fear. It was a good start.
I went to Ulu Wini today. The kids have stopped coming to me for academic help. Some of it is they’ve put their brain on vacation mode. No one wants to work. On Monday, when I asked going-into-sixth-grade ML if she wanted to work, she said, “No, I’m good.” I turned into a monster, not because she said no but because of how she said it. I hate when people use euphemisms to avoid saying something directly, saying what they really want. I wanted her to say, “No, thanks.” I bullied her into saying, “No.” I saw an aspect of myself I’d never seen before. I was appalled. I apologized to her today. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Still, I think it’s important for adults to apologize to kids when they act out and to take responsibility for their behavior. It lets kids know they have the right to their feelings.
I don’t know the impact of my apology on ML. I made a more routine error with Twin E the other day. I instructed her to look at the word without clarifying where she should look, on the page or in her mind. I didn’t do the same thing I had done with ML but expressed frustration. The frustration was really hers if I was unclear. When I asked her if it made her feel better or made no difference, she said it made her feel better. I know when I hear someone say, “I’m sorry,” in a tone that suggests concern for me instead of a plea not to be beaten, it soothes my nerves. Customer service agents always use it, apologizing for things that are in no way their fault. Ahhhh! Every nerve in my body cools down.
On Monday, I tried to introduce a phonemic exercise to Shauntel. I sounded out the letters /th/ and the /e/ as in the. She looked confused. I tried it on one of the kindergartners. Boy! I think that strategy didn’t work. I never introduced phonemic awareness that way before; I won’t ever use it again.
I have always introduced it by saying the word first and then making the sounds. I’ve never had that fail. As I think of it, I ignored a basic pedological principle: always work from the known to the unknown. I started with the unknown. I spoke to Shauntel about her reaction. I understood it. When I first learned about phonemes in a graduate linguistics class when I was twenty-three, it blew my mind. It still blows my mind. It’s like discovering the world you thought was solid isn’t; it’s made of little bits of other things temporarily stuck together by some force that could easily fail.
Lutz has successfully killed unwanted trees by drilling holes in them and pouring in small amounts of Round-Up. I tried it with one tree. I had trouble drilling the hole. The other day, I asked for more detailed instructions. What size bit did he use? Half-inch bits on the Schefflera. Oh, boy. I used a small one. Even with that one, I had trouble getting it into the tree. Rather than drill a hole, it just pushed the material aside. What was I doing wrong?
I went to Home Depot to pick up more 30% vinegar and the large bits Lutz recommended. I found two sold independently- not in a package of bits. They were advertised as containing titanium. I hope that makes them better bits. They were indeed more expensive. The individual ½ inch bit cost as much as a whole kit of a smaller one.
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