...if you have them, which is really what George Orwell warned us about. The point of the book "1984" was that language was being impoverished so that people didn't have the words to describe things; to even think about things. That's what held the whole system up.
Even in a house full of books with an Ivy League graduate father, I was not taught to be verbal and people were, in general, no more verbal than they absolutely had to to. So that I ran off and joined the Army when my father said he could not guarantee we'd have the condo we were living in, in another month. I interpreted it to mean I had to be out in a month, and talking it out would have clarified things.
Likewise, when I got back from Army training, my grand-aunt gave me $500 but it was never cleared up whether it was a gift or a loan and as little as I made, I never touched it and eventually gave it back. Talking it out would have helped a ton. Also talking about her spiteful decision to not help me with college because my older brother had taken money she'd given him for classes and spent it on a bike. Hell, I'm a whole different person? And I'm the one who had to be responsible when my older brother was allowed to slide on everything.
Grand-Aunt Mary also didn't want me to go to college (it took me years to realize how smart she was in this) but could not verbalize why. Instead she tried to scare me with hints that college campuses were incredibly dangerous, infested with violent crime. This did not work as I'd been around tons of violent crime and nothing on campus ever scared me; I went to college and years later realized what a scam it is. If Aunt Mary had been better at verbalizing her actual thoughts, I might have been more sensible and gone into a trade instead.
(The longer I live, the more I believe that the only sure thing is a skill that was viable 100s or more like 1000s of years ago like art, music, maybe being a particularly adept tatooist or pickpocket or having a gift for begging or conning.)
The rift between my older sister and myself could have been solved with more words. Simply pointing out when she said, haughtily, "Well, if you're going to be homeless....." just saying "Look. No one wants to be homeless...".
I think writing this thing is helping me in this respect, this and various things I write online and even communicating with Ebay customers probably helps.
I will certainly need some verbal skills to convey how I could leave Hawaii for what's termed by many, "Gold Mountain", and not become rich. I'll need to get across that life is actually a lot harder here, that it's more expensive, the distances make everything difficult, and there's not really a society. California's but really the US's motto should be, "You're not here to make friends, you're here to work".
OK so I got some good practice in last night, lots of long tones and played a couple of songs. I'm starting to sound a bit better - this is like training to run a decent time in the mile, it takes years.
I was up in time to pack a whole 4 things, two of them big and kinda-big, so that's OK. I took 'em up to the post office and FedEx. In front of FedEx was a guy with the worst diabeetus feet I've ever seen. They were wrapped in bandages and frankly, kind of looked like they were rotting. The guy was just kind of loitering around, not sure if waiting for family to finish shopping in H Mart or a beggar who just didn't beg from me. The guy wasn't hugely overweight be just standard American overweight, in that zone between overweight and obese but in America if you can still walk you're good.
The poor guy's probably taking tons of insulin, eating tons of high-sugar foods, pretty much one foot on the brake and one on the gas, as is standard procedure for diabetics here.
I've been paying more attention to this stuff because I must assume I'm pre-diabetic myself. The food environment here pretty much guarantees it. I've gone low-carb to try to cure my headaches, and so far it's worked. I'm also losing weight, which I can tell without having weighed myself. I don't talk with anyone about this because "the first rule of keto club is you don't talk about keto club".
It'd be nice to just go to a doctor and get an A1C test but that seems to be very expensive and difficult to do. I think I might be able to buy a glucose monitor, the prick-your-finger kind, without a prescription so at least I can get an idea of where my blood sugar is and I may do that. Blood glucose is actually the last link in the chain of things, and your body can be putting out heroic amounts of insulin and keeping your blood sugar even, and you only get high glucose readings when your poor pancreas is failing.
But it's an idea, and in the interest of cheapness I think I'll just ask Ken to test me. It won't be a fasting test but it will be a number. I'll at least know if I'm cruising around with a blood glucose of 400 or something.
I found some good packing stuff and got back here, cleaned up the parking lot, and that's my day.
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