Reflections2017

* Dedicated to my new friend LH who is a cancer servivor and coined the phrases "new normal" and "new reality".    After over 8 1/2 months of living with the cancer melanoma, including the recovery of the disease, I have finally come to accept that there has been and will continue to be a significant change in me. I am living through a paradigm shifted from the “old normal” to the “new normal” because of the cancer. This is a new reality. (First verbalized by LH while we were discussing such things along with her husband over lunch, I think, or simply coffee. She is a breast cancer survivor and is learning her “new normal".)    Thinking back, the "new normal" has been taking place since my operation. I have just never completely rationalized it. That took a teaching moment for me to put this label on it. It happened a week prior to a Christmas concert I attended.   A good friend of mine invited me to the concert in her apartment complex. They have...

 One of the curious things about people is they spend most of their time looking and very little time seeing. I mean really seeing. I tell this to my students in every new computer class that I teach. As a case in point, I ask the attendees if they were aware of the white butterfly on the desktop screen of Microsoft Windows. I don’t need to ask for a show of hands because I can tell by the expressions on their collective faces that most if not all have not. Try it yourself. Perhaps surprise yourself. Many of us have been using Microsoft for years. No butterfly, until now. Interesting. People simply look.  When one loses the sense of sound or most of it (I am now raising my right arm), others such as sight does double-duty.   I recall from more than a couple of years ago in an undergraduate psychology course I took at York University, we studied a module on the senses and how they interact. I then wrote a paper on how the other senses of a person could strengthen ...

 ​A seemingly innocent act sent my confidence into a tailspin. It all has to do with eyeglasses. Or more properly stated, their absence.   ​I have worn eyeglasses for virtually my entire life. I think my mom stuck a pair on me when I was still aching to attend kindergarten! It has been that long ago. How did she know to do that? I couldn’t even recognize pictures, never mind the 26 letters of the English alphabet on an eye chart! Putting eyeglasses on very small children has remained a mystery to me for my entire life. It is right up there alongside the mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Nasca Lines in the Nasca Desert (southern Peru) that can only be appreciated as an aerial panorama, or Stone-hedge.  At any rate, there I was, learning to walk and chew gum at the same time…and adjust to this thing sitting on my nose! I learned never to be without them.  ​Then the 2 June arrived.  ​Immediately following my head and neck cancer operation I did...