Today’s will be a brief post, since it’s Christmas and I’m sure you have better things to do than read my ramblings. I’d like to begin by wishing everyone a happy holiday season, full of family and friends and good cheer. I would also like to say a heartfelt thank-you to everyone who has dropped by to read this blog over the past two months. When I hatched the idea to document my experiences at the Colorado Center for the Blind, I did not dream that so many people would follow my journey. Thank you for taking the time to read and share your feedback.
At the time I began my training at the Center on October 17th, I was pretty lousy at being a blind person. I had received some instruction on how to use a cane when I was much younger – between the ages of 8 and 12 or so, on and off – but other than that, I had had very limited exposure to the skills that blind people rely on to assert and maintain their independence.
Over the past two months, I have begun to remedy these deficiencies and to lay the groundwork for a more independent life going forward. I still have a long way to go, both in my program and in the work I will continue to do after graduation, but I am very pleased with the progress I’ve made so far in all of my classes.
While I had some cane skills going in, I have greatly improved my traveling abilities. Thanks to the use of sleep shades, I have become much better at navigating using only my hearing, sense of direction, and critical reasoning skills. I have lots left to learn – I’m not yet at the point where I feel super-confident about being dropped at a random and unknown location in the Denver area and navigating back to the Center, which will be one of my graduation requirements – but I can certainly sense the growth in my skills, and corresponding increase in my confidence.
I’ve also made great strides in using new technologies to offset my vision loss. While I do still generally have the ability to read text on my phone or computer, using the “invert colors” feature to reverse the contrast and display white text on a black background, this ability is diminishing quickly, and I am already unable to use my phone at all visually in bright light. It has been a real joy, then, to learn how to use a combination of Siri voice commands and the built-in VoiceOver software on my iPhone to reclaim the use of my phone even in bright sunlight. I am also getting more familiar with Windows-based screen reader software, and I can begin to imagine how I will be able to keep working as a freelance writer and researcher even without any sight at all.
But the area that has been most transformative for me so far in terms of my coursework has been my home management class. I came to the Center with extremely limited exposure to cooking or cleaning. In two months, I have learned how to use various kitchen appliances and devices; I have had the experience of muddling my way through recipes with ten steps or more; I have learned how to clean every part of a bathroom or kitchen, safely and thoroughly – in short, I’ve begun to gain the skills I either neglected or relied on other people to help me with for years. And I’ve gained an awful lot of confidence in my abilities along the way, meaning that I now look forward to challenging myself and learning more, where I used to dread any such endeavor in the home management sphere.
Oh, and lest I forget – I’ve learned the Braille alphabet and a number of contractions, and I’m making steady progress towards being able to read and write the language, albeit at a slow pace.
All in all, I’m quite pleased with what I’ve learned so far. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t long to get back to my regular life – I miss my friends and musical collaborators, I miss the familiarity of New York City and the independence it affords, etc. – but I am convinced that the skills I am learning now will let me return to that life as a much more capable person in a lot of ways. I’m looking forward to having friends over for dinner, to feeling empowered to travel the world on my own, to continuing a productive work life even when I can no longer read a computer screen.
In short, I’m feeling grateful and excited. What better way to approach a new year?
OK, back to drinking and eating too much. Happy holidays, y’all!
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Week Nine: Listen Up
It was a brisk seventeen degrees when I woke up Friday morning, but Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” was nevertheless blasting in my brain, even if it wasn’t season-appropriate. As grateful as I am for the training I’m receiving and the life-changing skills I’m acquiring, I must confess that life at the Center gets a bit exhausting at times. I’m definitely ready for a break. I’m off for the next two weeks, which I’m really looking forward to.
I’m starting to reach the point in my training where the days blur together and I can’t easily recall everything I did. Usually, I keep a record to help sort things out, but for whatever reason, I didn’t do so this week. So I’m a bit at a loss as I sit down to write this morning.
One thing I know happened and that I am proud to report is that, after last week’s incident of dropping the chicken I was making before I could get it into the oven, I successfully remade the same somewhat involved chicken tikka masala recipe. I also whipped up some basmati rice to go along with it, not on the stove or in a rice cooker, but in the oven. Kudos to my instructor for coming up with a novel but delicious way to prepare rice.
I also learned about a pretty cool website called directionsforme.org. It’s basically a compendium of packaging information for all manner of consumer products – everything from cooking instructions and nutritional information for food products, to instruction manuals for home electronics. The site is very accessible and surprisingly comprehensive. My parents have asked for technical assistance with their new FitBits for Christmas, so this website will hopefully enable me to help them.
Let’s see…what else? On Thursday morning, I explored a bike path that covers most of the mile and a half between the Center and my apartment. I walked it under sleep shades, so I can’t say precisely what the environment was like, but it was very peaceful and quiet, with running water in places and what I took to be a fairly wooded terrain.
I had the thought as I was walking along ahead of my travel instructor and two other students that peace and quiet are sort of the enemies of a blind traveler. Order and data are the most important things to successfully navigating without vision. A secluded bike path has neither: it wends and winds at its own leisure, with no predictable right angles or discernible patterns; and it’s also empty and devoid of the sounds that I normally rely on to paint a picture of where I am and where I’m headed.
Many students at the Center are intimidated by busy streets with lots of traffic. That’s understandable, and I certainly recall being slightly terrified of the noise and motion of the first few busy intersections I encountered under sleep shades. But as my travel skills have progressed, I’ve come to realize that busier is almost always better.
When you go to cross a busy intersection, there are a couple of things that you need to do and listen for. The first thing I like to do is to find the wheelchair ramp (“curb cut”) that typically points in the direction I’m trying to cross. Once I have an idea where that is, I then sweep around with my cane to find whether there is a crossing button. Here in the Denver area, busy intersections often have buttons to push which will extend the pedestrian crossing time.
Button pushed (assuming there is one), I return to the low spot on the curb where I plan to walk from, and then I listen. It seems obvious to say, but under sleep shades, you don’t really know what the geometry of an intersection is. Denver isn’t Manhattan, where streets reliably run at 90 degree angles and curbs meet at mostly sharp corners. Intersections are often slightly off kilter here. And the only way to know that is to listen attentively to the direction cars are traveling around you and to try and visualize how to cross based on what you hear of their trajectories.
This is why a busy intersection is actually much more navigable than a deserted one. Ideally, you’ll have steady parallel traffic to walk with, and idling perpendicular traffic to orient by as well. I prefer walking in the same direction as the parallel traffic – it’s still a little nerve-racking to cross a street with cars zooming past you in the opposite direction – but in either case, having a steady stream of parallel traffic helps you to walk a relatively straight line without the benefit of a curb to follow. And idling traffic helps you maintain your trajectory as well, ensuring that you’ll come out on the other side of the crossing where you intend to, rather than twenty feet up the curb.
Crossing with minimal traffic, on the other hand, is a bit more of an educated guess, since you have less information to reckon by. And wandering in a secluded setting, like the bike path I was traveling this past Thursday morning, is even more of a leap of faith. There’s only so much you can learn from listening and sweeping about with a cane; and when there’s nothing to listen to, there’s even less to go by.
I’ve started to try and rely more on my sightless travel skills even when I am not under sleep shades. I am now much more methodical about finding the curb cut as the origin point for my crossings. I will frequently close my eyes for a moment at a crossing, just to listen and try to parse what I’m hearing. I still cross relying on the vision that I have, rather than crossing with my eyes closed; but the process of listening and following the methodology of sightless travel is still useful in terms of the growth of my travel skills.
In fact, I am finding that one of the most useful things I can do is to pair my emerging sightless skills with the remaining vision I have. For example, if I close my eyes at a crosswalk and listen to build a mental picture of what’s in front of me, and then I open my eyes and confirm or adjust this picture based on what I can actually see, I can slowly improve the accuracy of my listening skills. I’ve been discovering that the most useful travel skill for me is the ability to build an accurate mental picture of where I am, so I’ve been doing this ‘listen and then cross-check visually’ thing a lot.
When I travel, I find it very useful to try to imagine what I would be seeing if my vision were not impaired or blocked altogether by sleep shades. It’s somehow a little less scary and a little more tangible than not imagining a mental picture of where I am. In a certain way, it grounds me in a world I am more familiar with. I expect I will continue to do this if / when I lose all my sight.
This sort of leads to a discussion I’ve been meaning to get to about the primacy of sight amongst humans, but that will have to wait til next week. For now, I’m going to sign off by wishing you all happy holidays and best of luck with your last-minute shopping. Talk to you soon!
I’m starting to reach the point in my training where the days blur together and I can’t easily recall everything I did. Usually, I keep a record to help sort things out, but for whatever reason, I didn’t do so this week. So I’m a bit at a loss as I sit down to write this morning.
One thing I know happened and that I am proud to report is that, after last week’s incident of dropping the chicken I was making before I could get it into the oven, I successfully remade the same somewhat involved chicken tikka masala recipe. I also whipped up some basmati rice to go along with it, not on the stove or in a rice cooker, but in the oven. Kudos to my instructor for coming up with a novel but delicious way to prepare rice.
I also learned about a pretty cool website called directionsforme.org. It’s basically a compendium of packaging information for all manner of consumer products – everything from cooking instructions and nutritional information for food products, to instruction manuals for home electronics. The site is very accessible and surprisingly comprehensive. My parents have asked for technical assistance with their new FitBits for Christmas, so this website will hopefully enable me to help them.
Let’s see…what else? On Thursday morning, I explored a bike path that covers most of the mile and a half between the Center and my apartment. I walked it under sleep shades, so I can’t say precisely what the environment was like, but it was very peaceful and quiet, with running water in places and what I took to be a fairly wooded terrain.
I had the thought as I was walking along ahead of my travel instructor and two other students that peace and quiet are sort of the enemies of a blind traveler. Order and data are the most important things to successfully navigating without vision. A secluded bike path has neither: it wends and winds at its own leisure, with no predictable right angles or discernible patterns; and it’s also empty and devoid of the sounds that I normally rely on to paint a picture of where I am and where I’m headed.
Many students at the Center are intimidated by busy streets with lots of traffic. That’s understandable, and I certainly recall being slightly terrified of the noise and motion of the first few busy intersections I encountered under sleep shades. But as my travel skills have progressed, I’ve come to realize that busier is almost always better.
When you go to cross a busy intersection, there are a couple of things that you need to do and listen for. The first thing I like to do is to find the wheelchair ramp (“curb cut”) that typically points in the direction I’m trying to cross. Once I have an idea where that is, I then sweep around with my cane to find whether there is a crossing button. Here in the Denver area, busy intersections often have buttons to push which will extend the pedestrian crossing time.
Button pushed (assuming there is one), I return to the low spot on the curb where I plan to walk from, and then I listen. It seems obvious to say, but under sleep shades, you don’t really know what the geometry of an intersection is. Denver isn’t Manhattan, where streets reliably run at 90 degree angles and curbs meet at mostly sharp corners. Intersections are often slightly off kilter here. And the only way to know that is to listen attentively to the direction cars are traveling around you and to try and visualize how to cross based on what you hear of their trajectories.
This is why a busy intersection is actually much more navigable than a deserted one. Ideally, you’ll have steady parallel traffic to walk with, and idling perpendicular traffic to orient by as well. I prefer walking in the same direction as the parallel traffic – it’s still a little nerve-racking to cross a street with cars zooming past you in the opposite direction – but in either case, having a steady stream of parallel traffic helps you to walk a relatively straight line without the benefit of a curb to follow. And idling traffic helps you maintain your trajectory as well, ensuring that you’ll come out on the other side of the crossing where you intend to, rather than twenty feet up the curb.
Crossing with minimal traffic, on the other hand, is a bit more of an educated guess, since you have less information to reckon by. And wandering in a secluded setting, like the bike path I was traveling this past Thursday morning, is even more of a leap of faith. There’s only so much you can learn from listening and sweeping about with a cane; and when there’s nothing to listen to, there’s even less to go by.
I’ve started to try and rely more on my sightless travel skills even when I am not under sleep shades. I am now much more methodical about finding the curb cut as the origin point for my crossings. I will frequently close my eyes for a moment at a crossing, just to listen and try to parse what I’m hearing. I still cross relying on the vision that I have, rather than crossing with my eyes closed; but the process of listening and following the methodology of sightless travel is still useful in terms of the growth of my travel skills.
In fact, I am finding that one of the most useful things I can do is to pair my emerging sightless skills with the remaining vision I have. For example, if I close my eyes at a crosswalk and listen to build a mental picture of what’s in front of me, and then I open my eyes and confirm or adjust this picture based on what I can actually see, I can slowly improve the accuracy of my listening skills. I’ve been discovering that the most useful travel skill for me is the ability to build an accurate mental picture of where I am, so I’ve been doing this ‘listen and then cross-check visually’ thing a lot.
When I travel, I find it very useful to try to imagine what I would be seeing if my vision were not impaired or blocked altogether by sleep shades. It’s somehow a little less scary and a little more tangible than not imagining a mental picture of where I am. In a certain way, it grounds me in a world I am more familiar with. I expect I will continue to do this if / when I lose all my sight.
This sort of leads to a discussion I’ve been meaning to get to about the primacy of sight amongst humans, but that will have to wait til next week. For now, I’m going to sign off by wishing you all happy holidays and best of luck with your last-minute shopping. Talk to you soon!
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Week Eight: Now You're Cooking; Or, How to Decorate a Floor
Now that the bulk of our holiday preparations are behind us at the Center, I was able to spend a good portion of my home management time this week cooking meals of my own choosing. Predictably, results were mixed.
On Monday, I made my Nana’s trusty old vegetable soup recipe. Not much to it – chopped and peeled some potatoes and onions, added some frozen vegetables and okra (always the secret weapon), seasoned with pepper for some kick. The potatoes didn’t soften quite as much as I would have liked, but other than that, things turned out well and I now have a freezer full of soup. Which is pretty handy for days like Thursday, when the temperature was quite literally zero degrees when I awoke.
On Tuesday, I reached my greatest height yet on the culinary mountain. I made my mother’s chili recipe, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t come out tasting more or less as I remembered. I had the pleasure of cooking in my own kitchen at my apartment, since I was assigned to work there with minimal supervision instead of the large kitchen at school. Needless to say, it’s quite a bit more pleasant cooking in a familiar space, without four or five other people also bustling about blindly.
I was feeling pretty good about myself after my chili success, so I decided to take on a fairly ambitious recipe for chicken tikka masala on Wednesday. I was back in the home kitchen, this time because of a flood at the center; and my instructor was on hand to oversee my progress. I struggled through making a sauce and marinade for the chicken – measuring, whether spices or liquids, is still a real challenge for me – but after awhile, I had a cookie sheet loaded up with bite-sized chunks of chicken that had marinated in a blend of yogurt and spices.
Then I dropped the tray of chicken face down on the floor while trying to move it from the countertop into the oven.
There were no survivors.
I can’t really attribute this to my vision – it was just pure clumsiness. The lack of sight did make the clean-up a bit more grotesque, though – there’s nothing much to do but to feel around until you’re confident you’ve picked up every last bit of dropped food. I had to abandon the recipe, but I’m planning on trying again at school tomorrow during my home management class.
Later that same day, incidentally, I decided to heat up some of the soup I had made Monday. I had a pot going on the stove and, while that cooked, I began transferring the rest of my soup from a giant Tupperware container I had borrowed to get the soup home from school into several smaller containers of my own. I put one such container in the freezer and closed the door, evidently knocking something that had been sitting on top of the freezer down onto the stove in the process. I didn’t lose the entire pot of soup, but a good bit of it exploded off the stove and all over the floor. Seven hours after I had been on my hands and knees picking up marinated chicken, I was back sweeping around with paper towels and looking for potatoes and okra. Again – not a sight thing, just an indication of my general Schleprock status in the kitchen.
And I’d be remiss in not mentioning that, as I was pouring water into our coffee maker Thursday night to use it for the first time since we moved in back in October, I suddenly heard water cascading all over the counter and floor. Sure enough, there were two large holes in the side of the coffee maker, and once the water inside had reached their level, it began pouring out as I was trying to fill the reservoir.
Ah, the joys of the kitchen – with or without sight.
Other than that, the week was fairly uneventful. A couple successful travel journeys, memorizing more Braille contractions, continuing to work on using the JAWS screen reader software to help me navigate the internet. It turns out that, while the software is pretty powerful and helpful, its effectiveness is determined primarily by how well a given website is coded. If accessibility isn’t a priority for web designers, sites can be inaccessible to blind users with screen readers. I knew this to be the case, but it’s nevertheless surprising and disheartening to discover that, for example, a bare-bones, text-based baseball site that I enjoy reading is nearly impossible to manage with a screen reader.
I should also note, if only for a laugh, that I received what I believe to be the worst directions I’ve ever gotten this week. I was on a group independent trip with two other students to a strip mall about seven tenths of a mile from school. We were looking for the bagel shop, since it was 9 AM and we had time for a quick breakfast before returning to the center.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, finding the business you’re looking for is pretty much trial and error when you can’t see. This is particularly true in a strip mall, where you don’t even have clues from the address about where to expect a given business to be.
The first store we went into was a pizza place that had not opened yet. Then, while my fellow students walked in one direction, I pursued a hunch that there were other stores in a location they hadn’t checked. Sure enough, I found my way into a Subway sandwich shop. It turns out that my sandwich artist’s artistry did not extend to the art of giving directions.
I explained that I was looking for the bagel store. After a couple “it’s right over there”s – common, but nevertheless always surprising given that I am wearing a blindfold and obviously (I would think) can’t see what direction “over there” is – I received the following riddle: “OK, so you know where we are now?” (Not really, but go on.) “OK, well…the bagel shop is the opposite of where we are.”
No thanks to this cryptic clue, we found our target a couple minutes later. But it never does cease to amaze me how bad we as humans are at giving directions. I guess the conclusion might be that we don’t necessarily “know” where we’re going so much as we continuously rediscover it, chiefly through seeing clues and responding to them. It’s the particular challenge of a blind person to really internalize these things – to know, for instance, how many blocks it is until you make a left turn to go to the bank, rather than just looking for the familiar intersection. It’s a big part of the reason why I find the sleep shade experience to be sort of exhausting: you’re constantly making maps in your mind, and remembering every little detail of where you are and how you got there. It isn’t so much challenging as it is fatiguing.
Anyway, I’ll have one more week of heavy brain lifting and then it’s off to the four winds for the winter holiday. I’m hoping to write every week while I’m away, so stay tuned. And, as always, please feel free to ask any questions you might have – I’ll need topics to write about while not in school.
On Monday, I made my Nana’s trusty old vegetable soup recipe. Not much to it – chopped and peeled some potatoes and onions, added some frozen vegetables and okra (always the secret weapon), seasoned with pepper for some kick. The potatoes didn’t soften quite as much as I would have liked, but other than that, things turned out well and I now have a freezer full of soup. Which is pretty handy for days like Thursday, when the temperature was quite literally zero degrees when I awoke.
On Tuesday, I reached my greatest height yet on the culinary mountain. I made my mother’s chili recipe, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t come out tasting more or less as I remembered. I had the pleasure of cooking in my own kitchen at my apartment, since I was assigned to work there with minimal supervision instead of the large kitchen at school. Needless to say, it’s quite a bit more pleasant cooking in a familiar space, without four or five other people also bustling about blindly.
I was feeling pretty good about myself after my chili success, so I decided to take on a fairly ambitious recipe for chicken tikka masala on Wednesday. I was back in the home kitchen, this time because of a flood at the center; and my instructor was on hand to oversee my progress. I struggled through making a sauce and marinade for the chicken – measuring, whether spices or liquids, is still a real challenge for me – but after awhile, I had a cookie sheet loaded up with bite-sized chunks of chicken that had marinated in a blend of yogurt and spices.
Then I dropped the tray of chicken face down on the floor while trying to move it from the countertop into the oven.
There were no survivors.
I can’t really attribute this to my vision – it was just pure clumsiness. The lack of sight did make the clean-up a bit more grotesque, though – there’s nothing much to do but to feel around until you’re confident you’ve picked up every last bit of dropped food. I had to abandon the recipe, but I’m planning on trying again at school tomorrow during my home management class.
Later that same day, incidentally, I decided to heat up some of the soup I had made Monday. I had a pot going on the stove and, while that cooked, I began transferring the rest of my soup from a giant Tupperware container I had borrowed to get the soup home from school into several smaller containers of my own. I put one such container in the freezer and closed the door, evidently knocking something that had been sitting on top of the freezer down onto the stove in the process. I didn’t lose the entire pot of soup, but a good bit of it exploded off the stove and all over the floor. Seven hours after I had been on my hands and knees picking up marinated chicken, I was back sweeping around with paper towels and looking for potatoes and okra. Again – not a sight thing, just an indication of my general Schleprock status in the kitchen.
And I’d be remiss in not mentioning that, as I was pouring water into our coffee maker Thursday night to use it for the first time since we moved in back in October, I suddenly heard water cascading all over the counter and floor. Sure enough, there were two large holes in the side of the coffee maker, and once the water inside had reached their level, it began pouring out as I was trying to fill the reservoir.
Ah, the joys of the kitchen – with or without sight.
Other than that, the week was fairly uneventful. A couple successful travel journeys, memorizing more Braille contractions, continuing to work on using the JAWS screen reader software to help me navigate the internet. It turns out that, while the software is pretty powerful and helpful, its effectiveness is determined primarily by how well a given website is coded. If accessibility isn’t a priority for web designers, sites can be inaccessible to blind users with screen readers. I knew this to be the case, but it’s nevertheless surprising and disheartening to discover that, for example, a bare-bones, text-based baseball site that I enjoy reading is nearly impossible to manage with a screen reader.
I should also note, if only for a laugh, that I received what I believe to be the worst directions I’ve ever gotten this week. I was on a group independent trip with two other students to a strip mall about seven tenths of a mile from school. We were looking for the bagel shop, since it was 9 AM and we had time for a quick breakfast before returning to the center.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, finding the business you’re looking for is pretty much trial and error when you can’t see. This is particularly true in a strip mall, where you don’t even have clues from the address about where to expect a given business to be.
The first store we went into was a pizza place that had not opened yet. Then, while my fellow students walked in one direction, I pursued a hunch that there were other stores in a location they hadn’t checked. Sure enough, I found my way into a Subway sandwich shop. It turns out that my sandwich artist’s artistry did not extend to the art of giving directions.
I explained that I was looking for the bagel store. After a couple “it’s right over there”s – common, but nevertheless always surprising given that I am wearing a blindfold and obviously (I would think) can’t see what direction “over there” is – I received the following riddle: “OK, so you know where we are now?” (Not really, but go on.) “OK, well…the bagel shop is the opposite of where we are.”
No thanks to this cryptic clue, we found our target a couple minutes later. But it never does cease to amaze me how bad we as humans are at giving directions. I guess the conclusion might be that we don’t necessarily “know” where we’re going so much as we continuously rediscover it, chiefly through seeing clues and responding to them. It’s the particular challenge of a blind person to really internalize these things – to know, for instance, how many blocks it is until you make a left turn to go to the bank, rather than just looking for the familiar intersection. It’s a big part of the reason why I find the sleep shade experience to be sort of exhausting: you’re constantly making maps in your mind, and remembering every little detail of where you are and how you got there. It isn’t so much challenging as it is fatiguing.
Anyway, I’ll have one more week of heavy brain lifting and then it’s off to the four winds for the winter holiday. I’m hoping to write every week while I’m away, so stay tuned. And, as always, please feel free to ask any questions you might have – I’ll need topics to write about while not in school.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Week Seven: The Wanderer
When John Steinbeck wrote in his memoir, Travels with Charley, “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found,” I’m quite sure he wasn’t referring to wandering around Colorado under sleep shades. It can be a trying ordeal, it turns out.
I spent a good bit of time lost this week. On Tuesday, having pulled a somewhat unnecessary all-nighter to work on some music projects and generally faff around, I downed a massive cup of coffee and reported to my travel instructor. He sent me off on what sounded like a relatively easy independent trip to a breakfast spot in downtown Littleton. I knew where the intersection was. Piece of cake, metaphorically and, time permitting, literally.
It was not to be.
Even before I got up the stairs and out of the building, I started feeling kind of off. I felt dizzy and confused – doubtless a combination of sleep deprivation and over-caffeination. I hadn’t gone ten feet from the door of the Center before I was disoriented. I got back on track after a minute or two, but then was lost again before I made it down the hill and to the busy street that runs north/south about six minutes from my building. This was on my home turf, mind you. I thought about turning back – I was at this point feeling so dizzy that I had trouble walking a straight line –- but decided to forge ahead.
I did eventually, arduously, make it to my target location and back again, but I got lost every couple minutes and was in a bad way by the time I finally returned. I tried to participate in home management but couldn’t think clearly. I took a half hour nap, ate some food and….then was completely fine the rest of the day. It was strange.
Mostly, it got me to thinking how safe and successful traveling without vision can be a walk on the razor’s edge. I’m pretty good at travel. My program recently bumped me to another instructor / class because I was making such rapid progress. And yet, there I was this past Tuesday, utterly lost on familiar ground, temporarily unable to process the information my senses were taking in and to translate it into the kind of reasonably assured travel I’ve been working on.
I thought of this again on Thursday when a fellow student and I went on a long independent to a climbing gym about an hour away. This time, I had all my wits about me; and yet we still managed to get completely lost, despite the fact that we’re both fairly skilled travelers.
It didn’t help that we didn’t do nearly enough research ahead of time to let us know what to expect when we arrived at the light rail station nearest to our destination. Preparation is probably the most important key to traveling blind. It is helpful to know as much as possible in advance, because there is a limit to how much you can find out when you can’t see. We should have had a better idea of what streets to take, what direction they would flow in, etc. Instead, all we really knew was that we were to get off the light rail and head roughly west, and that the street the climbing gym was on would appear shortly after crossing a bridge away from the light rail station.
As it happened, the route we took wasn’t exactly a surface street at all, but rather a path that wound its way between two apartment complexes. When traveling blind, you are constantly looking for clues that sighted travelers don’t even think about – sidewalks that provide structure to the vast expanse, the difference in texture between a smooth parking lot and a rough street, the existence of traffic and the direction it flows most commonly in, etc. When you’re on a path with little to no traffic and limited curbs or sidewalks, you don’t have these clues. Without them, getting around becomes, as I alluded to in an earlier blog post, more like swimming. There are times when, without direct clues, you feel as though you could forge ahead in any direction and it’d be just as sensible as any other. That’s a bad place to be as a traveler.
We turned a 15-20 minute walk into an hour’s trip getting to the gym, and only managed to make it there in the end because of the kindness of a groundskeeper at a nearby apartment complex who walked us the last several hundred yards. On the return trip, we decided to try a different route that sounded like it would be more surface streets and less meandering paths – longer, but easier, in other words – but were given faulty directions. When we stopped another person for directions after 45 minutes or so, we got different but equally flawed directions.
It turns out that, while people generally want to be helpful, they’re not always very good at doing so. Without exaggeration, I would estimate that people confuse right and left about half the time when they give me directions. Actually, I’ve been tracking this mentally for the past couple weeks, and it’s more than half so far. A reader asked me after my last post to address the issue of how to be helpful to blind people out in the world: this is a great question, but one I’ll need to return to, probably over Christmas break when I have no new updates on my activities to bore you with.
Anyway, suffice to say that traveling is difficult under the best of circumstances. On Friday, I went to Office Depot to run an errand. It was after school and I wasn’t wearing sleep shades. But it was in a location I had previously been while under them. I was struck by how different the experience was – how much more information I picked up when sighted. It wasn’t strictly better, mind you – I’m much more attuned to relevant information when walking blind, because I have to be. But there’s a lot – what sorts of buildings or landscapes you’re walking next to, for starters – that you don’t and can’t get when you’re walking blind. It’s interesting how different the experiences are, even when you’re essentially walking the same terrain.
But enough about traveling. I should report before signing off that I made a whole bunch of hummus for an event at the Center this week. For a novice’s novice like myself, any sort of culinary accomplishment is a major milestone. And the hummus was actually pretty good, I must say. I won’t lie, though – making it was hilariously messy. I’m not at the point, and may never be at the point, where cooking is tidy under sleep shades. In particular, I still find measuring and pouring liquids to be absolutely maddening. I needed two and a half cups of olive oil for what I was making, but between what was spilled in the sink as run-off and what ended up on me, the food processor and the counter in the general course of events, I probably went through nearly four cups. I wouldn’t exactly call myself ‘fastidious,’ but I must confess that this level of chaos and disarray is a bit disconcerting for me. I hope I get a little neater as my kitchen skills progress.
Anyway, that’s about all for now. As always, thanks for reading, and feel free to leave comments and questions here or on my Facebook page. I’ll get to them eventually – I just tend to stockpile them for the blogger’s rainy day fund. Cheers…
I spent a good bit of time lost this week. On Tuesday, having pulled a somewhat unnecessary all-nighter to work on some music projects and generally faff around, I downed a massive cup of coffee and reported to my travel instructor. He sent me off on what sounded like a relatively easy independent trip to a breakfast spot in downtown Littleton. I knew where the intersection was. Piece of cake, metaphorically and, time permitting, literally.
It was not to be.
Even before I got up the stairs and out of the building, I started feeling kind of off. I felt dizzy and confused – doubtless a combination of sleep deprivation and over-caffeination. I hadn’t gone ten feet from the door of the Center before I was disoriented. I got back on track after a minute or two, but then was lost again before I made it down the hill and to the busy street that runs north/south about six minutes from my building. This was on my home turf, mind you. I thought about turning back – I was at this point feeling so dizzy that I had trouble walking a straight line –- but decided to forge ahead.
I did eventually, arduously, make it to my target location and back again, but I got lost every couple minutes and was in a bad way by the time I finally returned. I tried to participate in home management but couldn’t think clearly. I took a half hour nap, ate some food and….then was completely fine the rest of the day. It was strange.
Mostly, it got me to thinking how safe and successful traveling without vision can be a walk on the razor’s edge. I’m pretty good at travel. My program recently bumped me to another instructor / class because I was making such rapid progress. And yet, there I was this past Tuesday, utterly lost on familiar ground, temporarily unable to process the information my senses were taking in and to translate it into the kind of reasonably assured travel I’ve been working on.
I thought of this again on Thursday when a fellow student and I went on a long independent to a climbing gym about an hour away. This time, I had all my wits about me; and yet we still managed to get completely lost, despite the fact that we’re both fairly skilled travelers.
It didn’t help that we didn’t do nearly enough research ahead of time to let us know what to expect when we arrived at the light rail station nearest to our destination. Preparation is probably the most important key to traveling blind. It is helpful to know as much as possible in advance, because there is a limit to how much you can find out when you can’t see. We should have had a better idea of what streets to take, what direction they would flow in, etc. Instead, all we really knew was that we were to get off the light rail and head roughly west, and that the street the climbing gym was on would appear shortly after crossing a bridge away from the light rail station.
As it happened, the route we took wasn’t exactly a surface street at all, but rather a path that wound its way between two apartment complexes. When traveling blind, you are constantly looking for clues that sighted travelers don’t even think about – sidewalks that provide structure to the vast expanse, the difference in texture between a smooth parking lot and a rough street, the existence of traffic and the direction it flows most commonly in, etc. When you’re on a path with little to no traffic and limited curbs or sidewalks, you don’t have these clues. Without them, getting around becomes, as I alluded to in an earlier blog post, more like swimming. There are times when, without direct clues, you feel as though you could forge ahead in any direction and it’d be just as sensible as any other. That’s a bad place to be as a traveler.
We turned a 15-20 minute walk into an hour’s trip getting to the gym, and only managed to make it there in the end because of the kindness of a groundskeeper at a nearby apartment complex who walked us the last several hundred yards. On the return trip, we decided to try a different route that sounded like it would be more surface streets and less meandering paths – longer, but easier, in other words – but were given faulty directions. When we stopped another person for directions after 45 minutes or so, we got different but equally flawed directions.
It turns out that, while people generally want to be helpful, they’re not always very good at doing so. Without exaggeration, I would estimate that people confuse right and left about half the time when they give me directions. Actually, I’ve been tracking this mentally for the past couple weeks, and it’s more than half so far. A reader asked me after my last post to address the issue of how to be helpful to blind people out in the world: this is a great question, but one I’ll need to return to, probably over Christmas break when I have no new updates on my activities to bore you with.
Anyway, suffice to say that traveling is difficult under the best of circumstances. On Friday, I went to Office Depot to run an errand. It was after school and I wasn’t wearing sleep shades. But it was in a location I had previously been while under them. I was struck by how different the experience was – how much more information I picked up when sighted. It wasn’t strictly better, mind you – I’m much more attuned to relevant information when walking blind, because I have to be. But there’s a lot – what sorts of buildings or landscapes you’re walking next to, for starters – that you don’t and can’t get when you’re walking blind. It’s interesting how different the experiences are, even when you’re essentially walking the same terrain.
But enough about traveling. I should report before signing off that I made a whole bunch of hummus for an event at the Center this week. For a novice’s novice like myself, any sort of culinary accomplishment is a major milestone. And the hummus was actually pretty good, I must say. I won’t lie, though – making it was hilariously messy. I’m not at the point, and may never be at the point, where cooking is tidy under sleep shades. In particular, I still find measuring and pouring liquids to be absolutely maddening. I needed two and a half cups of olive oil for what I was making, but between what was spilled in the sink as run-off and what ended up on me, the food processor and the counter in the general course of events, I probably went through nearly four cups. I wouldn’t exactly call myself ‘fastidious,’ but I must confess that this level of chaos and disarray is a bit disconcerting for me. I hope I get a little neater as my kitchen skills progress.
Anyway, that’s about all for now. As always, thanks for reading, and feel free to leave comments and questions here or on my Facebook page. I’ll get to them eventually – I just tend to stockpile them for the blogger’s rainy day fund. Cheers…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)