Thanks to the holiday, I had a short week this week, without much to report. So instead, I figured I’d answer a couple questions I’ve gotten from readers.
One reader wanted to know whether, as a corollary to reduced vision, my other senses were enhanced. This is a pretty common idea – that blind people’s senses other than vision are extremely good as some kind of biological compensation mechanism.
The truth is…not really, but kind of. I think the idea of compensatory senses is probably a bit overblown. We aren’t all Daredevil, the comic book character who went a long way towards enshrining this idea but who certainly didn’t invent it. It’s not so much that our other senses are empirically better; rather, it is that we rely and focus on them more. In other words, it’s not that I hear things others don’t because my hearing is better; it’s more that I’m listening more.
So generally speaking, I would answer this question by saying that blind people can pull more information from their other senses than can sighted people, which is not to say that those senses are sharper or “better,” but simply that they are more developed.
But! Daredevil fans rejoice, for there is also the possibility that other senses in blind people actually are “better.” Now forgive me as I wander off into the domain of science, where I am but an infrequent and inexperienced traveler. There is a concept in brain science called ‘neuroplasticity.’ It means, as near as I understand, that brain cells are pretty ingenious and adaptive little buggers who can, especially early in development, actually reassign themselves based on need.
For example, if the brain has assigned certain cells for visual applications, but then realizes that there is a shortage of optical data, the brain can then reallocate those cells to another task – language, for instance. As I understand, massive-scale restructuring tends to be more prevalent in early development; but the brain can pull this trick throughout life. Neuroplasticity is in play anytime someone suffers a major injury and has to adapt, for instance.
I won’t go any further down this road, because I don’t frankly know what the hell I’m talking about; but based on my understanding, I do wonder if this means the brain can actually shift some processing power to other senses. Again, I’m not talking about the senses themselves – your brain can’t make your nose or ears more sensitive. But I do wonder if it can make you a little bit better at reading the instruments.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the context of my own hearing, particularly in relation to music. I’ve always had the ability to process music aurally at a fairly high level, whether that means learning music quickly by ear, or separating out the individual components of a recording, or hearing frequencies within a mix. I have no idea whether this is related to my low vision. I doubt it would be possible to say for sure. But it is certainly something I’m curious about.
…
Another reader asked a few weeks back about the mechanics of going into a business as a blind person. This was prompted by my description of walking into a coffee shop under sleep shades. I’ve done this a number of times, in a number of locations, since that initial visit to the coffee shop. How?
Honestly, by some combination of intuition and the forbearance of others. It is often possible upon entering a business to listen and hear where the action clusters. Sometimes there are dead giveaways like cash registers, but other times, you just have to listen for where you hear things going on – conversations between cashier and customer, chiefly. And then you basically have to pluck up your courage and sally forth, hoping that you’ll either hit your guess or learn something from missing it.
This assumes, of course, that you’ve found the entrance to the business at all, the accomplishment of which frequently requires a barely-structured grope along walls and the sides of buildings. If you’re lucky, a patron will enter or exit while you are listening; but if you’re not, there’s not much to do but feel around and look for clues (a doormat is a good sign; so, too, is a change in echo that might indicate the difference between a concrete wall and a glass door).
And, to draw it all out one step further, there’s the even larger issue of knowing which door you’re looking for. As I described in an earlier blog post, the Denver address system is rich in information and can tell you a lot about where to find whatever address you’re looking for. So you may know that a given location is on the west side of the street, about halfway down the block; but you still have no way of knowing whether you’re in the laundromat or the gun shop (this being Colorado) until you ask.
That’s part of where the forbearance of strangers comes in. Because there are times when you have to ask for help. And there are times when you accidentally cut someone in line, because you’re good enough to figure out roughly where the cash register is, but not able to tell just by listening where a line starts and ends. And there are numerous other times when having limited vision can be a social challenge around others, just in the course of going about your day. Which is not at all meant as a ‘woe is me’ story, but rather as a nod to the overall kindness of others, who are often overzealous in their desire to be solicitous, but who are nevertheless compassionate and accommodating in their own ways.
There are two themes touched on here – the imprecision of getting around without sight, and the role others play in this getting around – that I’d like to underline now, as I plan on returning to them in future weeks. I’ll certainly keep you all posted about the daily goings-on of my time at the Center, but after about the seventh casserole (good name for a horror story), I suspect your eyes will start to glaze over. So I hope to mix in a little more of the philosophical stuff going forward. We’ll see how it goes.
For now, it’s time to pack up and get ready to leave my sister and nephews and head back to Colorado. Talk to you soon…
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Week Five: Week Five?!?
The independence training program at the Colorado Center does funny things to time. This past Friday, November 18th, marked one month since I begin classes here, but the program has been such a profound and all-encompassing change to my typical day-to-day that it feels like I’ve been here for far longer. As much as I try to maintain a foothold in my regular life, there are times when it all feels very far away indeed.
Which is not to say I’m bored or unhappy here. In fact, this past week included a couple pretty memorable experiences. On Thursday, a sudden plunge in temperature and the year’s first snowfall brought an abrupt end to an uncommonly long Indian summer. You haven’t seen anything til you see a blind snowball fight.
In all seriousness, though, the snow can be a real nuisance to a blind person. Most obviously, accumulated snow makes it difficult to tell where sidewalk ends and grass begins. If it isn’t fairly well packed down, fresh snow also makes sweeping a cane back and forth really difficult. And if there’s enough of it, snow can absorb a lot of sound and especially echoes, taking away a lot of valuable information from the blind traveler.
Thankfully, here in the Denver area, the sun shines 300 days a year and the thinner atmosphere gives the sun a bit of a boost, and a couple inches of snow can disappear over the course of an afternoon. So snow is mostly a lifter of spirits around these parts.
Thursday afternoon also witnessed the much-anticipated Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB) Thanksgiving Feast. The good news: the food was really quite good. The turkeys were well-cooked and flavorful, the gravy was excellent, and the desserts were delicious. My sweet potato and apple crumble got high marks. The stuffing was very good as well.
The bad news? All 50-60 of us (students and staff) were seated around four long tables, and I happened to be seated at the table which got to go through the buffet line last. Going through a buffet line blind is challenging enough, what with the scooping of food onto plates and the not-exactly-sure-what-this-is; but going through a buffet line blind after 40+ other blind people have already taken their turn is a disaster of epic proportions. The buffet route was somewhere between the food fight in Animal House and the Last Supper parody in Buñuel’s Viridiana, with a generous helping of Sherman’s march to the sea. There was food on the tables next to the trays, food on the floor…it was an absolute mess. The woman in front of me, attempting to move her plate of food out of the way of another oncoming student, accidentally raised her plate into her own face. (It’s ok, you can laugh: I did. She did, too.)
I’m not precisely sure what lessons I was supposed to take away from this culinary bacchanal. I think I was supposed to learn something about the capacity of the blind to do anything a sighted person can do, but mostly I came away thinking “under no circumstances will I ever do this again.” Anyway, happy blindsgiving.
Other than Thursday’s deviation from the norm – insofar as there is a norm in an environment like this – I had a great week. In travel, I explored Union Station and the surrounding 16th Street Mall area in downtown Denver. My friend and I went on a co-independent (read: unsupervised) to find a tamales place I had read about, which proved to be well worth the hype. I can tell just from my posture as I walk that I’m becoming much more confident traveling under sleep shades. I’m no longer tensed and expecting to walk into something at any moment. Which doesn’t mean I don’t walk into things – but what a lot of people don’t understand is that walking into things, or at least, whacking them with a cane just before walking into them, is the normal and optimal way for getting around as a blind person. If you see a blind person strike a trash can with a cane, you might be inclined to think they’ve veered off course; but the truth is that their cane is doing its job and they are getting around just fine.
I didn’t do much in home management this week due to various scheduling conflicts, although I have now learned a great deal about home cleaning and am even, for the time being, in the honeymoon phase where I actually kind of enjoy cleaning a bathroom or kitchen. It’s just nice to finally have these skills, so I’m putting them to good use and enjoying the novelty of it for now.
In Braille, I’ve moved on to grade two, and have begun learning a number of contractions. Braille takes up a lot of room on the page. The Braille menu at a restaurant with lots of options isn’t far removed from your standard issue phonebook in terms of size. To compensate for this, Braille includes a wide variety of contractions. Most letters written by themselves (i.e. not part of a word) stand for a common word, e.g. T for That, C for Can, B for But, etc. A further series of symbols stands for common words like “the,” “and,” and “for” – but in those cases, the symbols can refer both to the words and the composite letter combinations that make up those words. So you can use a given symbol to mean “and,” but you can also place it between the characters for ‘c’ and ‘y’ to spell ‘candy.’ It’s just a bit of memorization, which I’m usually pretty quick at, so mostly I’m just enjoying how much more efficient it is to read contracted Braille.
Finally, in tech class, I have begun using my phone without sight pretty regularly. I’ve been amazed to learn that I can type pretty well even without seeing, just from my knowledge of the keyboard layout. Obviously, it’s not foolproof; but Apple allows for this with a pretty neat feature called touch typing. Basically, you put your finger where you think the key you’re looking for is, and then the VoiceOver app speaks aloud what key you’re actually on. If you’re correct, you just lift up your finger to input the letter. If you’re not – say, if you’re looking for ‘a’ and you’re actually on ‘s,’ you just slide your finger a little bit to the left without losing contact with the screen, and then your phone reads ‘a’ and you can lift your finger up. It’s not quite as fast as regular typing, but it’s not terribly far off, either.
Of course, if I’m texting or inputting a lot of text, there is also a dictation option. As long as you make an effort to speak a little more slowly and with more precision, the transcription is pretty accurate. You do have to get used to speaking your punctuation – saying ‘comma’ and ‘dash’ and the like – but it’s pretty easy and incredibly helpful to someone who can’t otherwise see the screen.
All in all, it’s been a good first month here in Littleton. I’m really happy with the progress that I’ve made, and with the skills I’m learning. I tend to be a little impatient, so I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t counting the days til my graduation; but at the moment, I’m feeling thankful for the skills I’m learning, and I can’t wait to put them to use back in the real world.
I’m headed to Oregon Wednesday morning so this will be a short week, but feel free to leave any questions you may have below in the comments. I’ll probably do a little holiday week mail bag next weekend. Take care, and have a happy Thanksgiving!
Which is not to say I’m bored or unhappy here. In fact, this past week included a couple pretty memorable experiences. On Thursday, a sudden plunge in temperature and the year’s first snowfall brought an abrupt end to an uncommonly long Indian summer. You haven’t seen anything til you see a blind snowball fight.
In all seriousness, though, the snow can be a real nuisance to a blind person. Most obviously, accumulated snow makes it difficult to tell where sidewalk ends and grass begins. If it isn’t fairly well packed down, fresh snow also makes sweeping a cane back and forth really difficult. And if there’s enough of it, snow can absorb a lot of sound and especially echoes, taking away a lot of valuable information from the blind traveler.
Thankfully, here in the Denver area, the sun shines 300 days a year and the thinner atmosphere gives the sun a bit of a boost, and a couple inches of snow can disappear over the course of an afternoon. So snow is mostly a lifter of spirits around these parts.
Thursday afternoon also witnessed the much-anticipated Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB) Thanksgiving Feast. The good news: the food was really quite good. The turkeys were well-cooked and flavorful, the gravy was excellent, and the desserts were delicious. My sweet potato and apple crumble got high marks. The stuffing was very good as well.
The bad news? All 50-60 of us (students and staff) were seated around four long tables, and I happened to be seated at the table which got to go through the buffet line last. Going through a buffet line blind is challenging enough, what with the scooping of food onto plates and the not-exactly-sure-what-this-is; but going through a buffet line blind after 40+ other blind people have already taken their turn is a disaster of epic proportions. The buffet route was somewhere between the food fight in Animal House and the Last Supper parody in Buñuel’s Viridiana, with a generous helping of Sherman’s march to the sea. There was food on the tables next to the trays, food on the floor…it was an absolute mess. The woman in front of me, attempting to move her plate of food out of the way of another oncoming student, accidentally raised her plate into her own face. (It’s ok, you can laugh: I did. She did, too.)
I’m not precisely sure what lessons I was supposed to take away from this culinary bacchanal. I think I was supposed to learn something about the capacity of the blind to do anything a sighted person can do, but mostly I came away thinking “under no circumstances will I ever do this again.” Anyway, happy blindsgiving.
Other than Thursday’s deviation from the norm – insofar as there is a norm in an environment like this – I had a great week. In travel, I explored Union Station and the surrounding 16th Street Mall area in downtown Denver. My friend and I went on a co-independent (read: unsupervised) to find a tamales place I had read about, which proved to be well worth the hype. I can tell just from my posture as I walk that I’m becoming much more confident traveling under sleep shades. I’m no longer tensed and expecting to walk into something at any moment. Which doesn’t mean I don’t walk into things – but what a lot of people don’t understand is that walking into things, or at least, whacking them with a cane just before walking into them, is the normal and optimal way for getting around as a blind person. If you see a blind person strike a trash can with a cane, you might be inclined to think they’ve veered off course; but the truth is that their cane is doing its job and they are getting around just fine.
I didn’t do much in home management this week due to various scheduling conflicts, although I have now learned a great deal about home cleaning and am even, for the time being, in the honeymoon phase where I actually kind of enjoy cleaning a bathroom or kitchen. It’s just nice to finally have these skills, so I’m putting them to good use and enjoying the novelty of it for now.
In Braille, I’ve moved on to grade two, and have begun learning a number of contractions. Braille takes up a lot of room on the page. The Braille menu at a restaurant with lots of options isn’t far removed from your standard issue phonebook in terms of size. To compensate for this, Braille includes a wide variety of contractions. Most letters written by themselves (i.e. not part of a word) stand for a common word, e.g. T for That, C for Can, B for But, etc. A further series of symbols stands for common words like “the,” “and,” and “for” – but in those cases, the symbols can refer both to the words and the composite letter combinations that make up those words. So you can use a given symbol to mean “and,” but you can also place it between the characters for ‘c’ and ‘y’ to spell ‘candy.’ It’s just a bit of memorization, which I’m usually pretty quick at, so mostly I’m just enjoying how much more efficient it is to read contracted Braille.
Finally, in tech class, I have begun using my phone without sight pretty regularly. I’ve been amazed to learn that I can type pretty well even without seeing, just from my knowledge of the keyboard layout. Obviously, it’s not foolproof; but Apple allows for this with a pretty neat feature called touch typing. Basically, you put your finger where you think the key you’re looking for is, and then the VoiceOver app speaks aloud what key you’re actually on. If you’re correct, you just lift up your finger to input the letter. If you’re not – say, if you’re looking for ‘a’ and you’re actually on ‘s,’ you just slide your finger a little bit to the left without losing contact with the screen, and then your phone reads ‘a’ and you can lift your finger up. It’s not quite as fast as regular typing, but it’s not terribly far off, either.
Of course, if I’m texting or inputting a lot of text, there is also a dictation option. As long as you make an effort to speak a little more slowly and with more precision, the transcription is pretty accurate. You do have to get used to speaking your punctuation – saying ‘comma’ and ‘dash’ and the like – but it’s pretty easy and incredibly helpful to someone who can’t otherwise see the screen.
All in all, it’s been a good first month here in Littleton. I’m really happy with the progress that I’ve made, and with the skills I’m learning. I tend to be a little impatient, so I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t counting the days til my graduation; but at the moment, I’m feeling thankful for the skills I’m learning, and I can’t wait to put them to use back in the real world.
I’m headed to Oregon Wednesday morning so this will be a short week, but feel free to leave any questions you may have below in the comments. I’ll probably do a little holiday week mail bag next weekend. Take care, and have a happy Thanksgiving!
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Week Four Recap
I missed two days of classes this week. On Monday, as feared, my ankle was still too sore from last week’s Goal Ball injury to walk, so I mostly stayed home and kept off of it (though I did manage a trip to the doctor and grocery store). I returned on Tuesday, and had a pretty eventful day – but a little too eventful, it turned out, as I walked far too much and reinjured my ankle in the process.
I probably wouldn’t have made it to class Wednesday anyway, what with a necessary day of post-election mourning; but the re-incapacitation of my leg made it a fait accompli.
In spite of the missed classes, however, I had another solid week with a couple minor breakthroughs. I can definitely tell my confidence in traveling under sleep shades is growing. Intersections that might’ve seemed intimidating in the first week or two are becoming more second-nature, as I refine my ability to orient for street crossings based on the sounds of cars passing parallel and perpendicular to me. On Tuesday I walked nearly a mile to the local DMV to vote, and on Friday, a fellow student and I hopped on the light rail to complete an independent assignment by locating a coffee shop. As a matter of fact, I will be starting with a new travel instructor on Monday. I was told that I should be escalating my travel progress and working on some more advanced skills.
Home management continues to be my greatest challenge, but, as noted in today’s other blog post, I am definitely making strides and have solved one of the big mysteries of blind cooking by learning how to tell when a piece of chicken is done cooking without seeing it.
I spent a lot of time in tech class this week familiarizing myself with VoiceOver for iPhone, which allows me to do most things a sighted user can do on a phone without the benefit of sight. VoiceOver reads aloud every option or button, cycling through the screen via a series of swipes and other gestures. You can also skip the cycling and just select items using your own spatial memory of the screen layout, which I am mostly able to do (thanks in no small part to my years using my phone visually.) I’m even getting pretty good at typing without seeing, although it’s a bit slower.
When combined with Siri, Apple’s voice-activated operating system, the iPhone is a remarkably accessible device. On Friday, I was creating playlists in Spotify, downloading and listening to the latest New York Times in Audible (spoiler alert: we’re in trouble), and even jumping around in a voice memo recording of the open mic I played on Wednesday evening. Next week, I’ll begin learning VoiceOver on my MacBook laptop as well.
Finally, my progress in Braille has slowed a bit this week as I begin to read single-spaced paragraphs instead of the double-spaced lines I began with. It’s oddly difficult to keep your place with lines stacked on top of each other, and to get from the end of one line down to the beginning of the next without getting lost. I’m also working to solidify my grasp of punctuation, which is somehow more difficult to retain than letters. To assist in this enterprise, I wrote out my own punctuation cheat sheet that I can refer to for reminders.
A word on Braille writing: it requires you to reverse everything you know. To write Braille, you place a sheet of paper in a device called a slate, which holds the paper in place and offers small, grooved spaces with Braille’s six possible cells to allow you to write your characters. Then you use a small pointy object called a stylus (like the needle and point on a turntable) to poke the cells which correspond to the characters you’re trying to write.
The trick is, you’re poking the paper from underneath so that it will be raised into Braille dots, which means you have to write backwards – right to left, with all characters in mirror image. As if that weren’t enough, it’s a painfully slow process (at least for a beginner like me), which means that it’s very easy to skip letters when you’re writing because your brain has already moved on to whatever you’re going to invert and poke next. All of which is compounded by the fact that it’s not practical to erase mistakes, and that it’s very easy to lose your place – at which point, you’re really in trouble because your only hope then is to count back from the far right to try to reconstruct what letter you’re on (assuming you can remember how you began the line you’re writing).
Next week, as mentioned, I’ll be working with a new travel instructor. I’ll also be spending my home management classes working to prepare for a massive Thanksgiving meal on Thursday the 17th. It should be a challenging but rewarding week.
I probably wouldn’t have made it to class Wednesday anyway, what with a necessary day of post-election mourning; but the re-incapacitation of my leg made it a fait accompli.
In spite of the missed classes, however, I had another solid week with a couple minor breakthroughs. I can definitely tell my confidence in traveling under sleep shades is growing. Intersections that might’ve seemed intimidating in the first week or two are becoming more second-nature, as I refine my ability to orient for street crossings based on the sounds of cars passing parallel and perpendicular to me. On Tuesday I walked nearly a mile to the local DMV to vote, and on Friday, a fellow student and I hopped on the light rail to complete an independent assignment by locating a coffee shop. As a matter of fact, I will be starting with a new travel instructor on Monday. I was told that I should be escalating my travel progress and working on some more advanced skills.
Home management continues to be my greatest challenge, but, as noted in today’s other blog post, I am definitely making strides and have solved one of the big mysteries of blind cooking by learning how to tell when a piece of chicken is done cooking without seeing it.
I spent a lot of time in tech class this week familiarizing myself with VoiceOver for iPhone, which allows me to do most things a sighted user can do on a phone without the benefit of sight. VoiceOver reads aloud every option or button, cycling through the screen via a series of swipes and other gestures. You can also skip the cycling and just select items using your own spatial memory of the screen layout, which I am mostly able to do (thanks in no small part to my years using my phone visually.) I’m even getting pretty good at typing without seeing, although it’s a bit slower.
When combined with Siri, Apple’s voice-activated operating system, the iPhone is a remarkably accessible device. On Friday, I was creating playlists in Spotify, downloading and listening to the latest New York Times in Audible (spoiler alert: we’re in trouble), and even jumping around in a voice memo recording of the open mic I played on Wednesday evening. Next week, I’ll begin learning VoiceOver on my MacBook laptop as well.
Finally, my progress in Braille has slowed a bit this week as I begin to read single-spaced paragraphs instead of the double-spaced lines I began with. It’s oddly difficult to keep your place with lines stacked on top of each other, and to get from the end of one line down to the beginning of the next without getting lost. I’m also working to solidify my grasp of punctuation, which is somehow more difficult to retain than letters. To assist in this enterprise, I wrote out my own punctuation cheat sheet that I can refer to for reminders.
A word on Braille writing: it requires you to reverse everything you know. To write Braille, you place a sheet of paper in a device called a slate, which holds the paper in place and offers small, grooved spaces with Braille’s six possible cells to allow you to write your characters. Then you use a small pointy object called a stylus (like the needle and point on a turntable) to poke the cells which correspond to the characters you’re trying to write.
The trick is, you’re poking the paper from underneath so that it will be raised into Braille dots, which means you have to write backwards – right to left, with all characters in mirror image. As if that weren’t enough, it’s a painfully slow process (at least for a beginner like me), which means that it’s very easy to skip letters when you’re writing because your brain has already moved on to whatever you’re going to invert and poke next. All of which is compounded by the fact that it’s not practical to erase mistakes, and that it’s very easy to lose your place – at which point, you’re really in trouble because your only hope then is to count back from the far right to try to reconstruct what letter you’re on (assuming you can remember how you began the line you’re writing).
Next week, as mentioned, I’ll be working with a new travel instructor. I’ll also be spending my home management classes working to prepare for a massive Thanksgiving meal on Thursday the 17th. It should be a challenging but rewarding week.
Cooking in the Dark
I’ve mentioned several times already on this blog that cooking is not my strong suit. As a matter of fact, I’ve had virtually no exposure to it. Learning to cook was the main draw for me in signing up for a program like that of the Colorado Center for the Blind.
Happily, a lot of cooking is fairly tactile. Cutting and chopping are functionally just as easy under sleep shades as not. Measuring out cups or spoons of spices or other additives is the same.
Other things, however, require practice and blind-specific adjustments. One thing I’ve always been nervous about as a potential cook is how to deal with cooking meat – specifically, how to tell when it’s done. This past Tuesday, I crossed that bridge while making a chicken and vegetables stir-fry. I learned that you can take a piece of chicken and rip it partly to expose the inside of the meat: if the inside shreds, then you know the chicken is cooked and safe and ready to eat.
Another challenge in cooking is measuring liquids. The stir-fry recipe I was using called for several small measurements of chili oil, poured into two separate bowls. I tried to keep my fingers on the bottle and the measuring cup, to try to tell how much liquid was coming out of the bottle and how full the cup was; but somehow or another, I accidentally poured almost the full bottle of chili oil into one of my bowls. (Thankfully, the added heat was just about right and I managed to improve on the original recipe by accident.)
There is no particularly foolproof way to pour and measure without sight, particularly when you’re pouring small measurements. The best technique is to pour over a separate bowl to catch any overflow. It’s not especially efficient, but it does ensure that you get the amount you need in your measuring cup or spoon.
While learning individual cooking skills and executing specific recipes is essential for me in my development, I think there’s also a general confidence component. Having basically never cooked before, any sort of hands-on experience is beneficial to me in terms of building experience and convincing me that this is indeed something I can master. So far, my results have been mostly sub-par – I’ve managed to screw up one thing or another in just about everything I’ve attempted. But the experience of it all is definitely encouraging, and I am starting to feel as though I’ll be capable of navigating simple recipes on my own without supervision. I’m really excited to be able to cook for myself, both here in Colorado and in life wherever I end up next. I’ll keep you posted.
Happily, a lot of cooking is fairly tactile. Cutting and chopping are functionally just as easy under sleep shades as not. Measuring out cups or spoons of spices or other additives is the same.
Other things, however, require practice and blind-specific adjustments. One thing I’ve always been nervous about as a potential cook is how to deal with cooking meat – specifically, how to tell when it’s done. This past Tuesday, I crossed that bridge while making a chicken and vegetables stir-fry. I learned that you can take a piece of chicken and rip it partly to expose the inside of the meat: if the inside shreds, then you know the chicken is cooked and safe and ready to eat.
Another challenge in cooking is measuring liquids. The stir-fry recipe I was using called for several small measurements of chili oil, poured into two separate bowls. I tried to keep my fingers on the bottle and the measuring cup, to try to tell how much liquid was coming out of the bottle and how full the cup was; but somehow or another, I accidentally poured almost the full bottle of chili oil into one of my bowls. (Thankfully, the added heat was just about right and I managed to improve on the original recipe by accident.)
There is no particularly foolproof way to pour and measure without sight, particularly when you’re pouring small measurements. The best technique is to pour over a separate bowl to catch any overflow. It’s not especially efficient, but it does ensure that you get the amount you need in your measuring cup or spoon.
While learning individual cooking skills and executing specific recipes is essential for me in my development, I think there’s also a general confidence component. Having basically never cooked before, any sort of hands-on experience is beneficial to me in terms of building experience and convincing me that this is indeed something I can master. So far, my results have been mostly sub-par – I’ve managed to screw up one thing or another in just about everything I’ve attempted. But the experience of it all is definitely encouraging, and I am starting to feel as though I’ll be capable of navigating simple recipes on my own without supervision. I’m really excited to be able to cook for myself, both here in Colorado and in life wherever I end up next. I’ll keep you posted.
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Week Three: In Which Graham Suffers the Slings and Arrows
Blindness is a contact sport. By which I mean not just that blind people rely quite a lot on their sense of touch to provide the information sighted people can see, although that is certainly true; but also that it can get a little rough out there sometimes.
On Wednesday, I was asked to make an apple and sweet potato crumble for our upcoming Thanksgiving feast. And while peeling sweet potatoes with one of those razorblade peelers, my hand slipped and I cut my finger. Which is kind of a thing when no one can see, since there was equal concern for my digit and the sweet potato crumble. So off I went to one of our resident sighties (this is a term I heard in New York and think is hilarious – go ahead and laugh at yourself, sighty), who confirmed that, yes, my finger was bleeding and needed a bandage, but no, I hadn’t bled on the food or cooking area. Phew.
(Thankfully, I was able to finish the crumble and even play an open mic later that evening.)
Then, on Saturday, I injured myself a bit more seriously while playing goal ball for the first time. Goal ball is a sport invented in 1948 for visually-impaired World War II veterans, now played at the highest levels of competition by blind athletes throughout the world. It was described to me as a cross between soccer and dodgeball, although in fact you are trying to do the opposite of dodge the ball. Basically, two teams of blind (or sleep-shaded) athletes square off on a court about the size of a volleyball court. They take turns trying to speed-roll a 3-pound medicine ball with bells inside into each other’s goals, with the defending team seeking to block the shots by flinging their bodies into the path of the oncoming ball.
And I was having a lot of fun learning how to play yesterday until my foot got stuck as I attempted to take a shot, resulting in a severely sprained ankle.
I’ve been bedridden since then, unable to walk beyond a Frankenstein-esque lurch to and from the bathroom and kitchen. Ice is keeping the swelling under control, and I would be ecstatic if, come Monday morning, I can limp to my classes. But I’m not particularly optimistic right at the moment. So we’ll just have to see how things go – I may need a support cane in addition to my regular cane for a couple days. In which case, naturally, I’ll be launching a hip-hop career as 2 Canez. (I rolled my eyes, too.)
Still: other than these calamities, it’s been a pretty good week. Travel is ramping up and I had my first uncomfortable challenge – crossing a six- or seven-lane intersection of two busy streets, complete with a turn island to make things that much more challenging. It takes a lot of focus to parse traffic patterns by sound alone, and to use the sound of traffic to orient yourself for a street crossing. Denver isn’t New York, and you don’t get a lot of obvious right angle street corners here. But I’m getting a lot better at it, and I’ve been supplementing my sleep-shaded travel classes with a good bit of (partially) sighted exploration of the Denver area. Even managed to catch a great Sturgill Simpson show Friday night.
As for home management, I’m finally cooking a bit. In addition to the aforementioned crumble, I also made a casserole on Friday with chicken, rice, chiles, beans, corn, and some Mexican seasoning. Unfortunately, like the unsighted novice I am, I accidentally doubled up on pepper and left out the onion seasoning. But I’ll consign it to the dustbin of history, literally and metaphorically, and take a small measure of pride in the fact that I at least completed every step of the process and can now see how a little practice will enable me to get this cooking stuff eventually.
Braille, as I mentioned in another post, is coming along really well. I’m excited to begin Grade 2 next week.
And finally, I’m starting to learn some truly applicable things in tech. Friday, I got started on VoiceOver, which allows iPhone users to get the most out of their devices without sight. I can now read and send emails and texts without seeing the screen, and I understand the mechanics of navigating other apps as well. From here, it’ll just be a bit of trial and error as I learn to command the apps – Audible, Spotify, Transit – I use most frequently.
Anyway, I reckon it’s time for another shuffle to the freezer for a new bag of ice. Stay safe out there, kids. Talk to you soon.
On Wednesday, I was asked to make an apple and sweet potato crumble for our upcoming Thanksgiving feast. And while peeling sweet potatoes with one of those razorblade peelers, my hand slipped and I cut my finger. Which is kind of a thing when no one can see, since there was equal concern for my digit and the sweet potato crumble. So off I went to one of our resident sighties (this is a term I heard in New York and think is hilarious – go ahead and laugh at yourself, sighty), who confirmed that, yes, my finger was bleeding and needed a bandage, but no, I hadn’t bled on the food or cooking area. Phew.
(Thankfully, I was able to finish the crumble and even play an open mic later that evening.)
Then, on Saturday, I injured myself a bit more seriously while playing goal ball for the first time. Goal ball is a sport invented in 1948 for visually-impaired World War II veterans, now played at the highest levels of competition by blind athletes throughout the world. It was described to me as a cross between soccer and dodgeball, although in fact you are trying to do the opposite of dodge the ball. Basically, two teams of blind (or sleep-shaded) athletes square off on a court about the size of a volleyball court. They take turns trying to speed-roll a 3-pound medicine ball with bells inside into each other’s goals, with the defending team seeking to block the shots by flinging their bodies into the path of the oncoming ball.
And I was having a lot of fun learning how to play yesterday until my foot got stuck as I attempted to take a shot, resulting in a severely sprained ankle.
I’ve been bedridden since then, unable to walk beyond a Frankenstein-esque lurch to and from the bathroom and kitchen. Ice is keeping the swelling under control, and I would be ecstatic if, come Monday morning, I can limp to my classes. But I’m not particularly optimistic right at the moment. So we’ll just have to see how things go – I may need a support cane in addition to my regular cane for a couple days. In which case, naturally, I’ll be launching a hip-hop career as 2 Canez. (I rolled my eyes, too.)
Still: other than these calamities, it’s been a pretty good week. Travel is ramping up and I had my first uncomfortable challenge – crossing a six- or seven-lane intersection of two busy streets, complete with a turn island to make things that much more challenging. It takes a lot of focus to parse traffic patterns by sound alone, and to use the sound of traffic to orient yourself for a street crossing. Denver isn’t New York, and you don’t get a lot of obvious right angle street corners here. But I’m getting a lot better at it, and I’ve been supplementing my sleep-shaded travel classes with a good bit of (partially) sighted exploration of the Denver area. Even managed to catch a great Sturgill Simpson show Friday night.
As for home management, I’m finally cooking a bit. In addition to the aforementioned crumble, I also made a casserole on Friday with chicken, rice, chiles, beans, corn, and some Mexican seasoning. Unfortunately, like the unsighted novice I am, I accidentally doubled up on pepper and left out the onion seasoning. But I’ll consign it to the dustbin of history, literally and metaphorically, and take a small measure of pride in the fact that I at least completed every step of the process and can now see how a little practice will enable me to get this cooking stuff eventually.
Braille, as I mentioned in another post, is coming along really well. I’m excited to begin Grade 2 next week.
And finally, I’m starting to learn some truly applicable things in tech. Friday, I got started on VoiceOver, which allows iPhone users to get the most out of their devices without sight. I can now read and send emails and texts without seeing the screen, and I understand the mechanics of navigating other apps as well. From here, it’ll just be a bit of trial and error as I learn to command the apps – Audible, Spotify, Transit – I use most frequently.
Anyway, I reckon it’s time for another shuffle to the freezer for a new bag of ice. Stay safe out there, kids. Talk to you soon.
Grasping for Words
A couple of people have asked me what it’s like to learn Braille. And while I’m not exactly reading like a seasoned pro, I did want to share some observations.
Learning Braille is not like learning another language, as a few people have hypothesized to me. At least, I don’t see much similarity. The intake mechanism is completely different from how one would learn any other language, in that it is purely tactile and doesn’t rely at all on sight or sound, the two usual vectors for learning a new language.
Reading purely through touch can, for a novice like me, result in some hilarious moments. About a week ago, I spent a good two minutes puzzling over the word “c-o-u-l-d.” “Is this a typo? Is it some British spelling of ‘cold?,’” I thought, at least half-seriously. I had to sit there and beat my head against it for an eternity before realizing what the word could be. These are the growing pains of developing a new way to metabolize language, to borrow my pal Yale’s wonderful phrase.
In spite of the occasional struggles, though, I’m pleased to report that I can already sense major progress in my brain’s capacity to recognize Braille letters. When I first began, I had to basically cross-reference each letter against what I had learned. For every letter I would encounter (with the exception of ‘A,’ which is just one dot), I would need to pause momentarily and think, “OK, I feel dots 1, 4, and 5 – that’s a…D.” Now, my brain mostly bypasses the cross-reference phase and recognizes D on its own terms.
So, in the past three weeks – or more accurately, in about twelve days, since we’ve had some other activities eat into Braille class time here and there – I’ve basically finished Grade 1 Braille. I now know the alphabet and the ten or so most common punctuation marks. I’m reading sentences and getting used to reading two lines not separated by a line break (at first, I was reading only single lines).
Two major challenges await in the next couple months. To begin with, I will soon begin reading pages with no breaks between lines except for paragraphs. Reading four or five lines of Braille all stacked on top of each other is very challenging, because it’s easy to lose your place and to mistake the top or bottom of an adjacent line for part of the line you’re trying to read.
More than that, though, Braille is all about efficiency, and so the main thing I must tackle next is contractions. Since letters are, by necessity, a little bigger in Braille than they are in print, it is necessary to eliminate space wherever possible so that not every book in Braille ends up the size of a phone book. Braille relies on contractions for common word pairs, so things like ‘gh’ or ‘en’ have their own distinct characters. So that’s what I’ll be working on starting next week.
I have to say – I’ve enjoyed learning Braille a lot more than I thought I would. The realist in me had the notion that it would be mostly pointless to learn a language that has largely been obviated by the rise of screen readers and other new technologies. But there’s something kind of thrilling about learning a new way to read, and taking in information through a different medium. It has been slow going, at least in the sense that I am acutely aware I’m learning a new way to perform a skill I already have, and starting from scratch to do so. But it’s been very enjoyable nonetheless. I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where I read Braille as masterfully as someone who has practiced their entire life – there’s a guy in my program who reads at about 250 words per minute, which is faster than the average sighted reader’s 200 words a minute – but I do hope to keep up with it after completing this program.
Learning Braille is not like learning another language, as a few people have hypothesized to me. At least, I don’t see much similarity. The intake mechanism is completely different from how one would learn any other language, in that it is purely tactile and doesn’t rely at all on sight or sound, the two usual vectors for learning a new language.
Reading purely through touch can, for a novice like me, result in some hilarious moments. About a week ago, I spent a good two minutes puzzling over the word “c-o-u-l-d.” “Is this a typo? Is it some British spelling of ‘cold?,’” I thought, at least half-seriously. I had to sit there and beat my head against it for an eternity before realizing what the word could be. These are the growing pains of developing a new way to metabolize language, to borrow my pal Yale’s wonderful phrase.
In spite of the occasional struggles, though, I’m pleased to report that I can already sense major progress in my brain’s capacity to recognize Braille letters. When I first began, I had to basically cross-reference each letter against what I had learned. For every letter I would encounter (with the exception of ‘A,’ which is just one dot), I would need to pause momentarily and think, “OK, I feel dots 1, 4, and 5 – that’s a…D.” Now, my brain mostly bypasses the cross-reference phase and recognizes D on its own terms.
So, in the past three weeks – or more accurately, in about twelve days, since we’ve had some other activities eat into Braille class time here and there – I’ve basically finished Grade 1 Braille. I now know the alphabet and the ten or so most common punctuation marks. I’m reading sentences and getting used to reading two lines not separated by a line break (at first, I was reading only single lines).
Two major challenges await in the next couple months. To begin with, I will soon begin reading pages with no breaks between lines except for paragraphs. Reading four or five lines of Braille all stacked on top of each other is very challenging, because it’s easy to lose your place and to mistake the top or bottom of an adjacent line for part of the line you’re trying to read.
More than that, though, Braille is all about efficiency, and so the main thing I must tackle next is contractions. Since letters are, by necessity, a little bigger in Braille than they are in print, it is necessary to eliminate space wherever possible so that not every book in Braille ends up the size of a phone book. Braille relies on contractions for common word pairs, so things like ‘gh’ or ‘en’ have their own distinct characters. So that’s what I’ll be working on starting next week.
I have to say – I’ve enjoyed learning Braille a lot more than I thought I would. The realist in me had the notion that it would be mostly pointless to learn a language that has largely been obviated by the rise of screen readers and other new technologies. But there’s something kind of thrilling about learning a new way to read, and taking in information through a different medium. It has been slow going, at least in the sense that I am acutely aware I’m learning a new way to perform a skill I already have, and starting from scratch to do so. But it’s been very enjoyable nonetheless. I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where I read Braille as masterfully as someone who has practiced their entire life – there’s a guy in my program who reads at about 250 words per minute, which is faster than the average sighted reader’s 200 words a minute – but I do hope to keep up with it after completing this program.
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