4 October 2008
Saturday, 9:15 PM
High-Level Journal Summary: Getting a strong education in what it is like to go to a family party once again. This is a family party for the engagement of their son, Christopher, to a beautiful young woman named Wister. Boy, was she ever welcomed.
My lesson came in who paid attention to 38 Lemon once they heard about it. So many people ask what I do, so I tell them that I am a brain cancer patient for nearly 4 years now. Sometimes, people react with joy. At other times, people react with such curiosity, which is what I found I prefer.
The reasons for this last reaction are explained in this online journal entry. I would much rather talk about why we are alive, how we learn, the best ways for doing so, etc. This man was keen on such topics, to the point that the next 45 minutes were consumed here. It is a topic which will continue in the future. What a fascinating gentleman.
Countdowns:
1.) Day 23 of 28 in Cycle 1 of the Avastin + Enzastaurin Clinical Trial at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
2008 Seizure Activity:
1.) Last Simple Partial Seizure, or SPS, was 22 days ago.
2.) In 2008, I have had 80 SPS's in 278 days. This is an average of 1 SPS every 3.5 days.
Actual Journal: It was interesting last night. As mentioned in my 10/2/08 online journal entry, I was invited to a family party. It is never easy to get to such events, and once there, it is a lot of work to find the people who make such trips truly worthwhile. They are buried in that mass, usually, and it is work to find them.
The strange thing for me is that they are almost always older than me. The kids are fun, but older adults are working on issues that seem so conducive with where I am right now in life. I can joke around for a few minutes with kids from 20-40 years in age, but I get tired quickly. Compare this with how I react to people who are up to 40 years older than me. That is where the real conversations seem to be for me.
Where does love emerge best?
I met a young woman, the Mother of two kids, aged 31. I've known her all her life. When she introduced me to a young friend of hers, they were like fans in a fan club. It was impressive, I must say. I will have to say that my basic instinct is not to care about getting such reactions, though. I was much more interested in other reactions I got throughout the evening.
I met the Father of the Fiance, Wister, and we ended up speaking over 30 to 45 minutes. He kept asking penetrating questions about 38 Lemon and why it is constructed the way it is right now.
In the end, he had reasons to do so. He has retired from his "regular" life, looking for his next career. So, I talked with the Dad of Wister (our fun nickname) about journaling. He traced my writing back to 1st grade in 1972, just by asking strong questions. His conclusion is that I have chosen to express myself verbally since then. That is about 36 years of journaling, in some way, shape, or form.
I had not thought about journaling in this format before. I have, but it has not been an external discovery since then. Why did he do this? Why did he have all these questions within him? Because he will be teaching again soon, and he has been looking for lifetime writers as people who contribute the characteristics he needs for how he would like to be teaching.
Learning
In short, I found a single person on this trip who really learning about brain cancer and my method for doing so. Some people just glance over it. Some people make sure it is written about. Other folks use the opportunity to do something new and unscarred. Some dancers do entire shows on this material. There is hardly anything that can be left alone, given a wildly creative mind.
To find a new mind that has such an active curiosity is so refreshing. To find this active mind within minutes of finding other minds is even more revealing. I like to find and learn and discover. Maybe the first conversation would have gone in this direction, but it was not going to be this evening. Instead, I was filled with the relative drama that can come with how knowledge is obtained, learned, and shared with others.
That is the kind of stuff which woke me up in the middle of the night in a rare, good way. Talk about good stuff which is wild to think about. How do we learn? How do we do it best? What works best for each of us individually? Do we have decades of information to prove this? My answers to each of these questions are positive in a fun sense.
We'll see what Carlton Brooks ("Mr. Wister") offers out in the future. Going to speak to one of his classes would be classic, which we have already discussed several times.
