Friday, October 18,2024

Friday, October 18,2024 

  I fell asleep easily at 9:30.  Then I was up at 12:30, unusually wide awake.  I got up and took my blood pressure. I was concerned about my pulse rate. That was okay, but my blood pressure- 172/101.  My blood pressure is never that high with or without medication.  I’ve only seen it that high once before.  I had no idea what triggered it. I stayed up and wrote for two hours. I went back to bed and tried to meditate. I don’t think I slept a minute for the rest of the night. I got up at 5 a.m.

   I ran into Dean at the end of my walk this morning. We only had a few minutes together before I went home. I noticed I was unusually energetic on my walk this morning.  I usually drag at the end of my walk and am happy to go home. 

   Today was Hula. I was almost at the community center when I remembered we were meeting at Old A.  I prefer it there.  We still get the great ocean breezes, but the water is far enough away that the waves don’t drown out the teacher’s voice.

   Of course, I can’t hear her voice under any circumstances.  She addressed her instructions to the woman right in front of her. She yells out instructions as she models the dance. Still, I can’t hear or understand her instructions because she uses Hawaiian words for the dance moves.  The only one I’m sure of is puli, which means turn. Ah, there is one more term I feel secure with, Holoholo, and Holoholo Holoholo.  Those are two slightly different dance moves.  I noticed I had more energy during the class today. Something has shifted. Hopefully, it’s not dependent on high blood pressure.

    On Audible, I was listening to The Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. All human beings are emotionally immature at some level, no matter how much work we do or how hard we try to be sane. I don’t think it is an option to be whole.  There are always holes in our psyches. I’d like to think belonging to a tribe versus a nuclear family would be a solution. If you belong to a group of people, there is always someone in their sane mode if your parents go off the rail for the hour, the day, or forever. I don’t know how much children identified with their birth parents versus extended family members in the tribe.  Of course, we don’t have good examples of tribal life creating better people.  How much of that is because the tribe is under siege by the dominant population? How much is that because of the efforts made by the dominant culture to destroy their culture?  We’ll never know.   What we do know is we were designed to live in cohesive groups. There is evidence from still-existing hunger-gatherer groups that all the people lived with equality. All material wealth was shared. When no one has a great deal more than anyone else, envy doesn’t have much sway.

    Our culture puts too much pressure on the individual these days.  Marriages fail because we expect our partners to be everything to us, best friends, therapists, lovers, problem solvers, partners in all tasks, helpmates, etc.  Likewise, we are making similar demands on parents and calling parents immature if they can’t fulfill all of the child’s needs.  That burden didn’t fall on parents alone. Their job was to get the child through to adulthood alive.  Ergo, when our modern-day parents focus on providing for our physical needs, and that’s it, we complain. Those other needs were originally satisfied by the extended family or the tribe.  The author talks about parents imposing roles on their children. Yes, that is the job of a parent. That’s why they send them to school or teach them to read, write, and do basic math.   

   I heard something on the radio today. The speaker said that they lived close to poverty, but no one minded because everyone was in the same boat. We’re programmed to search for more. That was necessary when we were living in the wild without refrigeration. You had to be in constant search for your next meal. But many of us know where our next meal is coming from. We still want more, always more.

   Our search for more material possessions is comparable to our appetite for sweets. When it was the occasional fruit, that was one thing. Now, we have companies that make it easy for us to eat sweets 24/7. It’s destroying us.

   I found how to access old videos I recorded in February 2022 on Zoom. I watched them because I wanted to decide which ones to delete, so I had room for new videos. It was humiliating watching those videos. I looked terrible and was boring.

     I planned to go to Ulu Wini at 2 p.m.  I noticed Joseph’s car was parked behind mine. Joseph usually leaves at 6 a.m. and returns home at 7 p.m. at the earliest.  I texted him to say I would have to leave around 2, but I could cancel if he was too sick to move his car. He came out of his room. He wasn’t ill. He had received bad news while at work and was sent home for the day.  Someone called him at work to tell him a student he had in his Sunday school class last year had committed suicide by shooting herself.  We’re talking about an 11-year-old girl.  Breath-taking.  Joseph was visibly shaken.  

   I only worked with two students today. When I first worked with first-grade PY, the only word she recognized was THE when we started. I showed her how to use the ‘screen behind her forehead.’ She had reverted to using the primary visual cortex at the back of the head for her initial embedding. I got her to switch back to forehead. By the end of the session, she recognized the first nine words on the Fry Sight Word List. She was an enthusiastic student. She kept saying she wanted to do another word.

    Then, I had third-grade PL. Using the visually embedded word approach, she could recognize the words she knew more rapidly, and her concentration improved slightly. This child is a candidate for ADD.  She can’t focus on much of anything and has poor impulse control.

   I approached 2nd grade NV, PY‘s older sister, asking her to work with me. I’m not sure I can help her.

    Second-grade JM asked if she could work with me but wanted to finish the art project for Halloween. I waited a while and realized I was too tired to work with the kids, so  I went home.

   While my blood pressure was 171/ 101 last night, it was 117/79 this evening. I have no idea why it was so high yesterday.

  I got an email announcing that the payment for the permit for my solar system had been posted. I called Provision Solar to make sure they knew. Not only did they know, they had submitted the payment. Someone would call me to set up the installation date.