Week Thirteen: Because I skipped twelve

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!

Week Ten: A Little Recap

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!

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!

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.

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…

Week Six: Ask a Blind Guy

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…

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!