Author: Lauren

I'm a reader, over-thinker, idealistic cynic, and hopeless knowledge seeker living in the wilds of Seattle, Washington. I write, but am not sure I'm a writer yet. I'm blind. I was an activist in my former life for the LGBTQIA etc community and still love reading about and discussing sexuality, queer issues, and living an out and authentic life... plus the constraints our society places on allowing us to exercise that right. I write about what it's like having a disability (I'm blind, you dig?), things I love about Seattle, and my hopeless addiction to all things culinary. Also, I'm on the bus a lot, so I write about that too.

It’s hard to not feel as though I’ve failed. I wanted to take a risk, to have an adventure, and I honestly did not think I would look back much. I hoped I wouldn’t? I often wonder what was wrong with what I had, why I left in the first place, and the “wrongness” wasn’t so wrong as it was the same, and I felt the same, and I wanted to feel different, to stretch myself. And, if that were everything, I have, definitely, stretched.

I wanted a writing community. I got that. Now it is faltering, broken, unsteady. I hope, as we scatter, it will rebuild and remain strong.

I got a taste of wet, snowless winters, lavender growing all year, wild, thorny bushes, flowers blooming in February. There is also lavender everything: macaroons, lattes, hot chocolate, cookies, ice cream. There’s the scent crushed from the buds under my feet. God I will miss the lavender.

I found food here: so much food. I could eat for days: lavain and dumplings and pain au chocolat and slurpy noodles and jolting espresso. I learned to love an Americano, something I thought was always too bitter for me. Now I drink it like it’s holy.

I found air that always smells so green and alive. Knowing there is always growing gives me a hope I never experienced in snow, which nothing seemed to live through. I just barely did.

I found a place, a city, that I love, that it hurts me to leave. Seattle carried so much want and need and hope. I even found a few people whom I love very much.

I guess what I didn’t find (yet) is community: that all-enveloping support from all sides, the years that are put in to friendships and intentional space. I could probably get it here, eventually. After years. But, why wait when I already have it, when I can feel the power of it even from here, just from reaching out and saying, “I’m coming home.”

I worry, though. I know that when I return, the first few months will be glory: summer and friends and lakes and re-learning all my places. Then what? When fall and winter come, will I feel just as restless? Will I want to leave? If I leave again, can I ever come back? How many chances do I get in a life?

I’m trying to think of it less as “going back” and more just as “going” and “bringing” and “sharing” the things I’ve learned and “reveling” in the things I’ve missed and “giving” my energy to the people I love and whose love I cherish. I don’t want to return to Minneapolis and try to “forget” Seattle ever happened. At first, I did. After NILA announced its closing, all I wanted was to forget, to pretend I’d never even heard of Whidbey Island. But that would be doing a huge disservice to the NILA community, to this year of growth, to this opportunity I took.

I love Seattle. I am already thinking how I’ll miss it. I love Minneapolis. I’ve already missed it for way too long. Somehow, in some way, there has to be room for both.

Battle Cries and Good-Byes

I moved to Seattle, first and foremost, for a little writing program on       Whidbey Island, a program run by writers, for writers; accredited, but removed from the institutionalization of academia, built and carried on the backs of people who fiercely believed in writing as a profession, a priority, and a way of life. I had lived in the Twin Cities for 10 years and desperately wanted a change, I wanted to take a risk and see where it led me. I’d tried to move before but hadn’t because of relationships and work and fun stuff I was doing. And none of that had changed, but my thirst for change grew nagging and constant. You know all this. All this is why I came here.

 

Now, 14 months later, I’m in my third semester at NILA. I’m working on my thesis. And NILA, this school that has been a constant for me in this year of transition, is closing at the end of this term due to multiple financial crises. We got the word on Thursday, March 3, three days ago. The fact that this program that has touched and shaped and challenged so many of the best people I know is going the way of so many MFA programs is no less than devastating. For such a special place, I’m astounded that it will inevitably succumb to something so frustratingly, unfairly ordinary.

 

I have so many emotions it’s hard to cull them all. There’s anger, so much anger. Denial, wanting to do everything I can to help save us. This is a state where Microsoft has billions, where real estate is through the roof, where the extremes “way too much” and “way too little” seem so stark. Most of us, there’s sadness, so much sadness for the end of this little, far-reaching community, so much unknown as we all try to grapple with the gravity of our loss.

 

People are asking what’s next. People are saying, in a well-meaning way, that I’ll just go somewhere else and get my degree. It’s so much more than that. Of course, there’s the practicality that many grad schools do not take transferred credits, even within the same discipline, because of the “specialized” nature of individual programs. It’s possible that my three semesters won’t mean much in applying to other schools, and that’s a lot of money borrowed that, on paper, won’t amount to much. There’s also the emotional reasons, the little kid tantrum of, “But I picked THIS school! I don’t want another one!” Long term, yes, my goal is to somehow, some way, finish my degree. Short term, though, it’s very painful to try to look ahead, even though I eventually must.

 

One decision that I have made is to move back home. I left to pursue my degree, in spite of my relationships and community. And now, I return with an open heart because of them.

 

I think it’s easy for us, students and outsiders alike, to criticize NILA’s financial issues. And certainly, the term “mismanagement” has been bantered around so much it’s almost cliche at this point. I’d like to suggest that we as a collective do a horrible job of talking about debt. The shaming, disdainful way we criticize people who have debt, the way we, as a society, equate “stability” and “success” so heavily with having a specific amount of money; and also, that money has to be “earned” and not “taken” or “borrowed” or “asked for”, because that’s a sign of instability, of weakness. Tons of people have debt. Most institutions have debt. It’s easy for us to say, “Well, NILA should have done this” or “NILA should have done that””, when we have no real idea what Nila should or could have done to save itself.

 

At its highest, I had about 11000 dollars in credit card debt, amounting from college and years of unemployment where it was the only way I could pay my bills. Since starting my job three months ago, and not getting paid that much at my job, I have that down to a little above 9000. I have been paying it down very aggressively because I don’t know how long this income source will last. I imagine by the time my degree is done, I will have around 100000 dollars of student loan debt. That’s why I call it my “student loan mortgage”, and why I will likely never own a home. Why am I telling you this? Why am I putting this out, publicly, starkly, on the Internet? It’s not for you to feel sorry for me. It’s because I believe we are grievously bad at discussing poverty and debt in this country, because people are ashamed to talk about the real figures for fear they will look irresponsible, volatile and unstable. I want to change that, in my tiny corner of the Internet. I want to talk about the disparity in the distribution of wealth, and the favor given to those who have the “right” kind of skills.

 

And I want to stop the shaming of NILA about its financial decisions before it even starts. As individuals, most writers don’t have a lot of money. As a writer, I joined an MFA program because my need for writing and for a community of writers finally, brazenly, overtook my fear, my self-doubt, and my lack of money. I hate to imagine the words we’ve missed out on from writers, especially poor people and minorities, who, understandably, feel crushed by the way society stifles their voices. And with NILA closing, that’s just one more outlet for creativity and catalyst for change that will no longer be available.

 

Meanwhile, on a practical note, NILA still has financial obligations to fulfill before its closing: paying back board members, paying faculty, (though many have said they would donate their time for the rest of the term), and paying for this year’s graduation. I know I am just one voice, a small voice, but if anything in this post has moved or inspired or made you feel something, anything, and if you are able, I’d compel and encourage and plead for you to donate to NILA. It’s uncomfortable for me to ask, but it’s so very important to me and to so many others whose livelihood was based on this program and whose strength and vitality and love run through it like a heartbeat. If you choose to donate, I’d love to know that you did, so I can thank you. And, in the meantime, we will keep writing, because there’s theses to draft and voices to hear and words to bring us strength. We’ll keep writing because, somehow, we must.

You can donate to NILA here:

http://www.nila.edu/donate

My friend Arlie has a t-shirt with a picture of an old-school computer and the phrase: “Computers use to suck” underneath. I would like to fight whoever decided on the “used to.” Because, I am about ready to throw my BrailleNote and my Iphone out the window.

This is a long tale, a veritable slog through the frustration of trying to make computers that supposedly only “used to” suck do the things that they supposedly are designed to do. It is a tale familiar to everyone who has ever tried to do this and failed, so that’s basically everyone, unless you’re the smartest person in the world. (You know who you are.)

This tale begins with my completely radical notion that I would like to be able to type faster than ten words per minute on my Iphone. I thought, hmm, I should get a bluetooth keyboard. Then I remembered way back in my brain that at some point before acquiring my Iphone, I’d read that you could pair it with a BrailleNote. Hark! I thought, (whatever that means), I shall see about doing that instead of spending money on a keyboard that will not only be expensive, but also I’ll have to carry it around and who wants that when I already carry my BrailleNote around everywhere?

Now, I will admit that from the very beginning, I messed up. This is where having a little knowledge is a bad thing. I had already paired many bluetooth devices with my BrailleNote, so I assumed this would be the exact same process. So, I paired from my BrailleNote; my Iphone popped right up. I typed in the stupid, stupid authentication code. Later, you will hear why this code is going to put me in an early grave. Everything seemed to be paired. The BrailleNote actually said, “Iphone, paired.” But nothing else was happening. Which was strange. If I’d done it right, the BrailleNote should now be displaying the apps from my phone.

So, I went to Google. The manufacturer of the BrailleNote, Humanware, provided me a tutorial. It said that I must turn the “braille terminal” from “USB” to “bluetooth.” Okey dokey, that made reasonable sense. So, I did that. Still nothing. I did more Googling. HUMANWare informed meof this: “The BrailleNote Apex and the Iphone, a winning combination!” I was still slightly hopeful, but was definitely anxious for the “winning part.

Oh, good, Here we have “trouble-shooting.” My first mistake was that I needed to set up the pairing through the Iphone, not through the BrailleNote. Oops. And, you don’t set it up through the “bluetooth” menu, which to me makes the most sense. No, you must go to “settings”, “general”, “accessibility”, “voice over”, and THEN “braille”, and hope that your Braille display will show up there. Mine did. When you double tap to pair it, you have about 10 seconds to type in the authentication code before it tells you the pairing is unsuccessful. You may think this is easy, but here’s the thing: the code is 0000. To type it, you must double tap on the 0.” This means you must find the 0 on the number pad, and tap it eight times. One more time than eight and you’re effed. My finger was extra tappy due to the coffee and my annoyance, so I ended up messing up a lot. If you manage to type in the four 0’s, you must then navigate back to the “pair” button which means swiping left through the numbers 1-9, out of the “PIN” box, and then to the “pair” button. Ok, maybe I am just incompetent, but doing this in 10 seconds was giving me all kinds of whiplash. Oh and I forgot, if you don’t succeed at this in three attempts, you must START OVER, which means going back to the bluetooth menu, telling the Iphone to “forget” the BrailleNote, and then go back into the “Braille” menu to search for it again.

I did this approximately 10 thousand times. Nothing. Just the same error message, “Unable to connect to Apex”, with an “ok” button. Or, a few times, “unable to connect to apex. Makes sure it is turned on and within range.” No shit. OR, once or twice, “unable to load Apex driver.” Omgomgomg.

So, now what? The trouble-shooting instructions mention that if you tried to pair with the BrailleNote first, it might still be trying to pair, so do a hard reset. (This effectively restores all factory defaults. The only thing more extreme is a different reset which deletes all your files, from what I can tell.) So, I did that, to no avail. Also, suggested: make sure your BrailleNote name is correct in the “computer name” menu or the Iphone won’t recognize it. All righty, did that. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Back to feverishly typing in the authentication code: (what in the Goddess’s name is this for, anyway? It’s not a password, because it’s pretty much universal for all bluetooth devices. Just, why?)

Agh, I might have to call tech support. I really, REALLY don’t want to. I have never had anything good happen while calling tech support, except:
a. they tell me I need to learn to follow directions.
B. They ask me if my computer is actually on.
C. They tell me to “send it in”, which takes three months and never costs under 1000 dollars.

All I have to say is, really? Could we make this more complicated and unintuitive? And we’re telling ourselves that computers “used to” suck?

OMG, Sarah, get out of my head. 1 through 3 are, like, the most annoyingthingsever. 4, even though I don’t have to deal with it, sounds like it would annoy me. And if you’ve ever spent time reading my blog, you know I would do anything for a dog-vomit sensor that isn’t my bare feet.
What it really comes down to is assumptions. We could all do well to keep them in check.

Ok, Molly’s is pretty good, too.

Belated Thanks

This goes against all my Midwestern sensibilities, but I wanted to share a highly ridiculous compliment from my thesis advisor.

  • “It’s funny because often I ask questions like this of writers and they’re like “oh I don’t know, I have to think about that.” Not you. You say: Right, and this is how it works. That is part of what makes you such an excellent essayist.”

 

Squirm blush squirm. I will not do that again for a reallyreally long time. Promise.

I lead with that quote because I was recently reminded of this post from last fall, and that I had intended on writing a follow up to publicly acknowledge and thank those who responded to it and, in the interest of transparency, tell you how I used the donations. And really, I can’t thank you enough.

So, thank you a million: Stuart, Patrick, Arlie, Margaret, and Ski. And Arlie again, who told me he feels like a “celebrity” when I post about him, so I’m gonna embarrass him now. whattup Arlie! And it should be said, it was Arlie who reminded me that I wanted to make this post because, despite the “one-time donation” on the button, he donated twice.

My intension with the funds was to put them all into writing stuff, or things I could write about. I bought a new GPS app, BlindSquare, which is for the Iphone and is the most inexpensive app I’ve ever seen for blind users of GPS. The one I formerly used with my BrailleNote was over $1000. My idea was to review BlindSquare, which I am working on learning.

I also paid a hefty chunk of the fees for my deposit on my spring semester at NILA.

Plus a spare power cord for my Braillenote. Not at all sexy, but it’ll be great for one this one dies, which will likely happen sooner rather than later. They don’t tend to last more than a year.

So, that’s it. A huge thank you again, and I am so grateful to be able to use these funds for wordsmithing, writing, and essaying. It fulfills so much of my need for creativity and making sense of the world, and I’m so humbled that you all think that’s important, too.

 

 

Palate Cleanser

Thank you, all, for the kind comments on my last post. The overwhelmed is still overwhelming, but less so because of your support. Seriously, thank you.

 

Maybe we should have a palate cleanser. Ugh, puns, I occasionally can’t resist.

 

If you’ve ever cooked in my kitchen, or watched me cook in my kitchen, you know I get very anxious about where things go, or how much of a mess there is. If there’s a mess, I want it to be my own, because I’ve made it and know exactly how I’ve made it and how to unmake it. If someone else has made it, and hasn’t cleaned it up before I encounter it, I get very grumpy. I did not make this mess. I don’t understand it. Everything is out of order. It must be said that I appear very grouchy and ungrateful in these moments.

 

I felt slightly validated this week while listening to Christine Ha who was interviewed on Eyes on Success, a weekly podcast that showcases cool blind people doing cool things. (Also, behold the hosts’ kind of alarming and kind of amazing New York accents. Or maybe they’re New England accents. My East Coast accent identification fails.)

 

I’d heard of CHRISTINE Ha before, only because she’d been on Master Chef in 2012, and an ex of mine said he was watching it because of her. “She reminds me of you,” he said. “Her voice is like yours.” I’m not sure about that, after listening to the interview, but we do have some things in common. She said she started her blog in grad school while getting her MFA, as a way to just freely write without having to scrutinize and perfect every word. Whattup, Christine! And, her number one dictum for blind people in their kitchens is to be organized. So, don’t just take my word for it.

 

I’ll disclose that I’m not as organized as I’d like to be. My spices are an absolute nightmare, (Christine labels hers in Braille AND alphabetizes them). Likewise, my cupboard of snacks and baking stuff always seems to be going a little crazy, though I do have specific shelves for specific items, and feel totally crazy if something gets placed on the “wrong” one. But overall, I am pretty organized and I do find that it helps immensely, and though it is a joke amongst some of my friends, that if I am freaking out about dirty dishes all over the counter, open jars by the stove, and even if I’m sitting down to a meal that I didn’t cook (and no matter how thankful I am), I still think it’s an important thing for sighted people to be aware of. Moving something somewhere else, leaving things out, putting something somewhere it doesn’t “go” can be a big deal and can definitely take up a lot of my time trying to find it. But don’t take my word for it, Christine says so too.

 

You can listen to the interview and the accents here.

I actually had this thought while drinking my Americano this morning: “This coffee feels like a warm, reassuring, uplifting hug.” Yes, these are the innermost secrets of my brain. It’s good that it can substitute for a hug, because I doubt I’ll be getting a real one today.

I get on my second bus and the driver says, “Where ya going?” Where AM I going? I can’t remember. I mean, I know I’ll KNOW it when I get there, when I hear it called out, I’ll say, yes, yes, that’s where I want to be, that’s my place. But still, I’m shuffling and stammering and what is that stop again? Finally I say it: “Overlake. Overlake!” I laugh awkwardly, feeling stupid. He’s already moved on to someone else, which is just as well.

I’m feeling overwhelmed. It’s work and my way-too-long commute and wondering if I’ll ever have a job without a way-too-long commute and writing my thesis and feeling inarticulate and unfunny and unsmart and there’s another class I’m taking, too, which hasn’t gotten the thought and attention it deserves. It’s my relationships and trying to keep in touch and feeling like I am forever failing and not knowing how to communicate “it’s not you, it’s me”, which is absolutely true and absolutely cliche, so no wonder no one believes me. It’s that I can’t sleep because my mind is racing and when I do sleep I have weird dreams about strange men breaking into my apartment at night with knives and frying pans and loneliness, because I just read While the City Slept by Eli Sanders, and I can’t believe something so inexplicable, so undeserved, could happen in my city, in the place that I am growing to love. It’s that things like that happen in every city, in every place someone loves, and that may be the most overwhelming thing of all.

Feeling overwhelmed makes me feel ashamed, because I know that I am privileged beyond reason, that I am loved somewhere, that I only have to look after myself and my dog. That everyone is overwhelmed. I’m trying to tell myself that just because everyone else feels something, that I’m going through something millions, billions, go through, it’s still valid. It doesn’t make it illegitimate. My telling isn’t helping much.

So I sit on the bus going where I’m going, feeling overwhelmed. I play with my dog’s ears, rolling up their floppy softness like a tortilla, and she leans her head on my knee like it’s the best pet she’s ever had. I’m pretty sure it’s not, that she’s merely tolerating my ear-curling, because she somehow knows it’s making me feel a little less anxious. I give her extra head scritches, trying to make it up to her. I am intensely grateful for her tolerance. It’s almost as good as a hug.

I’m about to do something totally unbecoming. I’m warning you so that you can skip ahead, or stop reading entirely.
I know it’s awful to be all braggadocio about your weather, especially when you are from the Midwest, and the weather in the Midwest in February is the last thing anyone has ever bragged about. The thing is, though, that I’ve questioned my move to Seattle enough times, publicly and privately, that I need to set the record straight.
Yesterday, it was 55 degrees and the sun settled on everything: warm, intimate, embracing. Kiva all but pranced. I think I did prance. On the bus, the windows were open and there was a breeze and I was reading a book that didn’t, as my classmate Cynthia says, “feel like reading sandpaper.” This is why I moved here, for days like this, slivers of February that feel like April. I know the rain will be back, but right now, and for the next few days, we have sun and warm-ish breeze.
After getting home last night, and in celebration of the sun, I made marmalade. I have to confess I’m becoming kind of giddy about making jam. It’s strange because I prefer my toast only with butter, if even that, and find most store-bought jam too sweet. Yet, there’s something nourishing to me about a cupboard full of squat glass jars, each holding some preserved essence of a particular time and place. I started buying farmers’ market and small-batch jams to get that cupboard-full feeling, and found them to be a bit less sweet and a bit thinner than supermarket ones, which lends well to stirring into oatmeal or yogurt and granola, the hippie breakfast of champions. But, of course, because I am over the top, I bought way too many jams that I wasn’t eating. So many flavors that I’d never heard of, I had to try them all. Except they just sat in the cupboard, because I also liked just looking at them there, picturing their vibrant colors and textures behind the glass.
Now, I make jam. I am not allowed to buy jam that I think I can make at home. And citrus marmalade, which I love for its bitter and its sweet, seemed fitting for a warm day in February.

I decided to use Meyer lemons, which I’m guessing you can get in the Midwest somewhere, but which seem to be everywhere here since we’re so close to California. I just discovered them this year and I adore them. Their skins are thin, their juice is almost sweet, and they smell floral and almost unreal. I’ve been keeping a bowl on the counter so that I can smell them every time I’m on my way through the kitchen. Breathing them in, I picture living in a house with a Meyer lemon tree outside my bedroom window. And people accuse me of not being romantic!
Anyway, the marmalade splattered wildly and gave me a blistery burn on my knuckles. Not romantic at all. It started out a gloopy mess of water and sugar and rind and seeds tied in a bundle that I thought would never, ever reach its set point. Jam-making is like baking bread in that way. When I first started playing with dough, and even sometimes now, several years later, I can’t believe my first few minutes of kneading will produce anything resembling bread. The dough is too dry, too sticky, too craggy, sometimes, somehow, all of the above. Then, things somehow start working, despite or in spite of my uncertainty. Same with jam. I stare at the pot of fruit bits suspended in syrup. I stir it. It is wet and sticky and unappetizing. It does nothing for twenty minutes. I’m worried my jam will need to be renamed: “fruit bits in syrup.” And then, somehow, without much input from me, it sets up. It clings to the sides of the pot like it’s supposed to. It sustains its temperature, even after I stir it down. I can hardly pat myself on the back, because all I did was worry it wouldn’t come out right.
So it was with the marmalade, and yet, it gelled nicely, after about 45 tedious minutes. It remained wickedly bitter and retained its texture, which I like. And now, I have two pints of marmalade to tuck away for a rainy day, when toast and tea and a sunny yellow preserve is in order. I’m certain there will still be many of those before spring.

I was recently doing some “research for my thesis” about Daniel Kish, the blind guy who uses echolocation to get around instead of a cane or guide dog. I say “research” in quotes mainly because it makes me feel pretentious and academic in a way that it has become clear I am not and am not likely to be. “Research for my thesis” implies that my thesis has a formal research component, when what it actually means is that I spend lots of hours Googling stuff I’m not even sure I’ll use, and skittering down various information rabbit holes. And my thesis is no more defined than it was last month or last year. But I digress.

So, spoiler alert, I find Daniel Kish and his echolocation perplexing at best and annoying at worst, but that’s not the point here. The point is that as I was reading about and listening to interviews with him, he mentioned that he had gone to elementary school with another blind kid. Unlike Daniel, the other blind kid (TOBK) was more or less helpless: he ran into walls, people carried his books for him, and he sat out in gym class. Daniel didn’t run into walls, carried his own books, and killed it in gym class. Or at least, climbed a bunch of trees and rode his bike around the neighborhood.

Despite their differences, Daniel said, eventually people started lumping them together. They were “the blind kids.” They got called each other’s names and eventually got the same treatment, which defaulted to over-helping, because, well, they were the blind kids. And as annoyed as I was by some of Daniel’s opinions, I was completely on board with this situation being absolutely infuriating.

I haven’t been around many blind people for large parts of my life, because I was “mainstreamed” from preschool and was the only blind kid in my class. But I have noticed that every time I’m around other blind people, we become an indecipherable blob of white canes and guide dogs and robotic screenreaders.

This has become clear to me most recently working with other blind people. I worked with people with varying assistance requirements. Some needed a person to sit with them the whole time they were operating a computer. Some needed an escort to the bus stop. It’s not really my place to judge whether they “should” have been able to do these things without assistance, but it did start to irritate me when my sighted coworkers defaulted to trying to help me do the same things as some of the others. It’s like they forgot we were all individuals, and assumed we all needed as much help as the most helpless.

I admit to being someone who stubbornly refuses help, at times to my own detriment. My stock response to this acknowledgement is: “I’m working on it”, which I am, kind of. I bristle at the thought of having someone looking over my shoulder while I’m doing anything on my computer. If I have someone walk me to the bus stop, my goal is to pay rabid attention so I can do it myself next time. I mostly just want to be left alone, and if I need help, I’ll ask.

But the assumption that blind people need help all the time is pervasive. A few months ago, I was crossing a busy street in Downtown Seattle. In the middle of the street, while I’m concentrating on not getting run over, a woman who was also crossing says out of the blue, “Do you need help?” I had made it to the middle of the street without help. I was walking upright, in a straight line, presumably not giving off an air of desperation. But she asked anyway. I said, “No, I don’t.” She said, “Ok, well, I’m getting my degree in care-giving, so I have to ask.” To which all I can say is: no. No you don’t.

Sure, ask if the situation seems dire. Ask if someone is walking around in circles, looking super lost. Ask, if you can, out of a sense of genuine compassion, not to feed your ego or give you the opportunity to talk about your education. I’d be willing to bet most people in the middle of the street really don’t care about that, and would much rather just get to the other side in peace.