Howdy folks, and happy new year! My apologies for not blogging last week. I started writing a post but soon realized it was a bigger topic than I could easily get my head around. I’ll keep at it and hope to post sometime soon.
I am back in sunny, frigid Littleton after a nice couple of weeks off. Classes resumed Tuesday and, not unexpectedly, it’s been challenging to return to the routine here at the Center. I’d be lying if I said I missed wearing sleep shades while I was away.
In some respects, however, the return to training hasn’t been as hard as I anticipated it might be. For instance, I was afraid I would’ve forgotten a lot of Braille after two weeks away; but it turns out that I was really no worse for wear after the layoff. In fact, I had a really good week in Braille this week.
In addition to the 26 letters of the alphabet and a host of punctuation symbols (Braille does not use separate symbols for numbers – instead, 1-9 correspond to the first nine letters of the alphabet, with ‘J’ standing in for 0 and a number symbol in front to indicate you should read, say, ‘4’ instead of ‘d’), Braille also includes about 180 additional contractions to stand in for various words and letter combinations. These contractions can either be wholly new combinations of dots or, in the case of some contractions I learned this week, familiar letters that are simply displaced on the page.
For example, common double-letter pairs like ‘bb’ and ‘ff’ are represented by the standard letters ‘b’ and ‘f,’ with those letters dropped down one row in the cell. Remember that a Braille cell consists of two columns of three spaces each, with six possible dot locations beginning with 1 (top left) and ending with 6 (bottom right). Braille characters can have as little as one dot (dot-1 is the letter ‘a’) or as many as six (all six dots is the word or letters “for”). So the letter ‘b,’ which is represented by dots 1 and 2, becomes ‘bb’ if you drop it down one row and instead use dots 2 and 3.
I learned a lot of new contractions this week and am really enjoying the progress I’m making in Braille. Although my own speed at parsing the dots with my fingers is not really improving all that rapidly, the increasing number of contractions I am familiar with nevertheless means that my reading speed is increasing, simply because the number of Braille characters I now read has been contracted. In other words, instead of having to read individual letters for every single word, I now have to read fewer characters because of all the contractions I’m learning.
I doubt very much that I’ll ever be able to read Braille as fluidly as someone who has been doing so all his or her life. Seasoned Braille readers can read around 250 words per minute, which is around the average speed for a sighted reader as well. Even if I never get to that level, though, I am still excited that I am gaining speed and familiarity. Braille may never become truly practical for me, but it certainly is fun.
My progress in Braille, along with a seamless transition back into using my phone and computer without vision in tech class, was the good news for the week. Home management and travel, on the other hand, were far less successful.
Both days I tried to cook something this week ended with the kind of hilarious misadventures I’ve come to expect. On Wednesday, I didn’t have the heat high enough on my potatoes for them to get soft, so I ended up with bashed instead of mashed potatoes. Then Friday, while trying to make creamed spinach, I misunderstood that you need to prepare a roux in stages and so accidentally combined the butter, flour, and milk in the pan all at once rather than integrating them separately.
Nevertheless, I still feel like every little kitchen mistake begets a positive learning experience. And, even if the crockpot pot roast I attempted Wednesday wasn’t exactly fork-tender, it was certainly flavorful enough to enjoy. I think I’ll be making pot roast and gravy, roast carrots, mashed potatoes, and maybe something else later this month for my six-person dinner party, the first of my three home management milestones prior to graduating in April.
Anyway: home management travails were to be expected. I was far more surprised to struggle as much as I did in travel this past week, even if my difficulties weren’t entirely of my own making.
I did note that, during my first day back under sleep shades on Tuesday, I was a little less confident than I had been at the end of classes in December. My body was generally tense, as if expecting a collision at any moment; and overall, my sense of direction wasn’t quite as finely calibrated as it had been. My internal map of the Center and surroundings, too, was ever so slightly less definite than it had been before break. Still, while it took a moment to regain my sea legs, I felt pretty much back to normal by the end of the day Tuesday.
Then came the storm.
Beginning Wednesday afternoon and continuing overnight and then again Thursday afternoon, we got almost a half-foot of snow. All public schools in this and surrounding counties were closed, and the bus that normally takes us from our apartments to the Center was canceled. The government of Colorado was trying to send a strong message: stay the hell indoors, dummies! But the Center would not close.
I’ve talked a little in a previous blog post about the difficulties of navigating blind in the snow. Basically, snow renders a blind person’s cane almost useless, obscures the location of necessary landmarks and guiding objects like sidewalks and curbs, and even takes away valuable sonic information by deadening sound reflections. I discovered on Friday that it also really changes the sonic characteristics of busy intersections, in that cars driving through a lot of slush sound very different and, at least in my initial experience, are sort of disorienting to listen to because of it.
Suffice to say that getting around in the snow was an absolute nightmare the last couple days. On Thursday, my travel instructor took us to a nearby mall. With him leading the way, we managed to get extremely lost trying to get from our bus stop to the mall itself; and then we got marginally lost trying to get back to the bus after leaving the mall. Not that I needed anyone’s help getting lost – I proved within the mall itself that I’m perfectly capable of doing that on my own.
Can I just say that I hate malls? They’re bad enough with sight. Navigating a mall under sleep shades is a punishment I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. They tend to be enormous, echo-y spaces that confuse whatever sonic information one might otherwise rely on. They’re full of people walking to and fro with little order in terms of their walking direction. Their layouts can be confusingly asymmetrical. And that’s before you even start looking for a specific store, or, heaven forbid, try to shop. I’ll save you the gory details, but, long story short, I wandered around the air-conditioned nightmare of JC Penney’s for about 20 minutes before I found the exit and escaped.
Friday’s excursion through snowy downtown Littleton wasn’t much better. A good chunk of the sidewalks I was on hadn’t been shoveled, making it difficult to tell whether I was even on the sidewalk at all. At one point, I found I had been walking in the gutter instead of on the sidewalk for a good twenty paces.
Most troublingly, the wheelchair ramps which help me to orient myself at intersections and prepare for a street crossing were very difficult to find and navigate around properly. At one point, crossing a street I’ve crossed twenty times or more, I somehow got turned around and veered at least twenty feet off course – so much so that I was momentarily baffled as to where I even was and what direction I needed to head next when I reached the far side of the street.
My sense is that, while there are some techniques that can make traveling in the snow a little bit easier, it’s mostly just a real challenge for the blind. You can make it easier, but you can’t make it easy.
There was some comfort to be taken in my instructor getting lost (twice) on our way to and from the mall, in that it indicates that I shouldn’t get too down on myself when I, too, get lost – clearly, even seasoned travelers make mistakes or get confused from time to time. On another level, though, it’s hard not to see a different lesson as well: you can have all the training in the world, good instincts and a good sense of direction, etc.; and yet, you still may struggle with all your might and resources to get somewhere that a sighted person wouldn’t think twice about. And I think this lesson applies to more than just travel.
I’m closing on a pretty big note here, and one that deserves a lot more elaboration at a later date. But basically, while my training is building my confidence and giving me skills that allow me to live much more independently, it’s also showing me that there will be times when there’s simply no getting around the fact that being blind is immensely difficult and not something you can fully compensate for. It’s a delicate balance, thinking that I can do anything a sighted person I can and living my life with that as a guiding principle while also knowing full well that there are areas where this is simply not true. I suspect I’ll be navigating this conundrum for the rest of my life, to some extent. There is an inherent contradiction in wanting to push oneself on the one hand to never accept defeat, and realizing on the other that there are situations where not accepting defeat is just being obstinate and unproductive.
I’ll talk more about that some other time. For now, I’m off to enjoy the heat wave – it’s 26 outside. Stay warm, friends!
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