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!