I’ve written answers to questions I assume people have wanted to ask me in the past, or questions that people have actually asked me. Today I want to ask you questions, dear reader. No big preamble this time, I just give you ten things I’ve always wanted to ask a sighted person.

1. How can you tell from someone’s back who that person is? Are things like hair and shoulders and walking feet that distinctly personal?
2. Do you ever consciously know what street you’re on when you’re walking? Or do you just go by what looks familiar? (Third option: do I always just ask for directions from people who have to go run ahead to look at the street sign? Or look it up on their phone?)
3. You can tell me all you want about what the sun looks like when it’s setting, or how bright the moon is, but how do those things make you FEEL?
4. How do you get anything done in a day when there seemS to be just so much stuff to read?
5. How do you communicate complex, intricate messages with someone all the way across the room?
6. When you see a person with a disability, do you see other things?
7. What is the single best thing you’ve ever looked at in your life? Or the top five things? Oh, hell, what’s one really good thing you’ve looked at in the past few days? Why was it so amazing?
8. When there are so many people in the world who don’t or won’t or can’t, why did you decide to talk to me?
9. Be honest, do you REALLY know the difference between fire engine red and cadmium?
10. If I could see for just one day, or even just one hour, what should I look at first?

What would you do
if you weren’t afraid of making messes?
Would you have that shot you thought would do you in
(espresso or alcohol, your call)
Would you see how it felt
to have that hard conversation
if you knew the words would come cleanly off your tongue
and all you’d have left was the reaction?
Would you walk a little faster, tip your face a little higher
Would you go ahead and make that big mistake
on purpose?
Would you hold my hand when it mattered?
Would you tell everyone you were in love?
If I could make a mess, I would be freer
I would certainly be a believer
in words like “long-term” and “change.”
And contrast.
I would run until I couldn’t think,
and not feel forced to tell you why.
Because messes are really just arbitrary things
One person’s mess is another’s joy in being
and whoever judges one’s mess is wishing they’d made it first.
If Life makes a mess of me
If I make a mess of Life
I lived
I lived
I lived

“Let this be a warning,
said the magpie to the morning,
don’t let this fading summer pass you by.”

Summer is leaving a sticky sheen as it tries to hold on, cotton candy colors and high grass smooshed into the mud around the lakes. They smell sweet with rotted wood, weeds, and whatever else I’m too squeamish to think about clogging their once-clear water. It’s time to relinquish, summer. Summer doesn’t want to, but it’s only ever had a tenuous grasp on its own immortality. So, I walk the heat-heavy lake paths with light feet, knowing that it should all be over soon.

“Trick of the light, turn of the tide”
Winter is for staying home, summer is for playing; spring is for simply breathing promising air, and autumn is for coming together. We gather around tables, around fires, in backyards, in droves hauling the farmers’ market harvest. My walk is brisker, my lungs feel revived. I want to surround myself with everyone I love or kind of like or didn’t really like at first but just might if there’s enough rum-soaked hot cider in my belly. From my desire to gather close and from my feelings of cradling abundance, my compassion blooms riotously.

“The same things look different, it’s the end of the summer,
the end of the summer, when you move to another place”
Every year, I feel restless in September. I sense the season’s change and I sense another closing of another year. I fight the urge to just pack it all up and go, with no plan or expectation, to a warmer place where I can over-winter with grace. I relish the idea of leaving obligations, of finding new ones and new things and new people who also have restless roots. I wonder how many more years I will be in this place. I wonder if I’ve even grown at all in the past year, and what it would take to help me feel as if I’d accomplished the living of a full life.

“When the swallows fell from the eaves,
and the gulls from the spires,
the starlings, in millions,
would feed on the ground where they lie.”
MY compassion has turned to grief. There was a moment where they both played for my attention, and now only my grief is left.
It got cold suddenly, and I was unprepared. I stood outside, shivering, I hadn’t dressed well, my head was aching in protest and the insipid winter drip started sneakily at the tip of my nose. My breath felt like steam. My fingertips like they were separate from my warm core. I worried about the birds. I went home alone and tried to cry, but couldn’t. I wanted someone with me, but the work to get them there seemed disproportionate to how much I wanted it. I thought about souls, and if we are slowly distancing ourselves from them. I wondered if the twilight of the soul seems imminent not just to me this time of year, and the connection between the living and the dead so intimate. My grief held and comforted me. Did I really need anyone else?

“But I miss you, most of all,
my darling,
when autumn leaves start to fall.”
The thing I remember the most about autumn in Granada is chestnuts. Growing up, my only familiarity with them was that they were always roasting over that open fire in the Christmas song with the jackfrost and the tiny tots with glowing eyes. Chestnuts seemed like a weird mystical fairy fruit that no one actually ever ate. I had never smelled chestnuts before, and have never smelled them since, but I’m sure if I ever do, in an evocative instant I will be right back there with the pigeons wheeling around my head, the throngs of people in a hurry to get somewhere to not be in a hurry, and the burnt-sugar roasted-meat smell of chestnuts. Much softer than a peanut or almond, not much crunch between the teeth, they were often too hot to eat but I ate them anyway and burned the roof of my mouth. One day, I bought Laura, a girl who volunteered in one of my classes, a little bag as she walked me to the bus stop in the smoky November air. I had a wistful little crush on her. She, having grown up in Spain, but also being by nature incredibly gracious, was not as impressed by the chestnut gift as I had hoped.
I’ll be perfectly honest here, I’m not sure if I liked the chestnuts that much, or just the idea of the chestnuts. The smoke filling the air, the crackle, the warm paper parcel clutched in my hand, the promise of going “home” and resting my feet on the warm brasero all through dinner. That’s what autumn was for me in Granada, with its mountains and palm trees and the medieval Alhambra watching over its modern city. Autumn is everywhere, no matter where.

…
Song Lyrics Bibliography
“”Magpie to the Morning” Neko Case
“October” Tung
“The End of the Summer” Dar Williams
“Rooks” Shearwater
“Autumn Leaves” Eva Cassidy (and many, many others, but hers is my favorite)

Please enjoy this post from my old 2011 blog. Call it Throw Back Thursday, if you will. Next week, when I am not busy with other things, I promise a shiny new blog post. Well, at any rate, new. Shiny is subjective.

If I had a dollar for the number of times someone has told me that I am “brave”,
then my ongoing unemployment would hardly matter, at least monitarily speaking. To
hear others talk, I’ve been brave my whole freaking life. I was brave for crossing
the monkey bars when I was five, for dancing high on the risers in show choir, for moving
out of my parents’ house after graduation, for getting my bearings and traveling
independently in Spain, for teaching high school students “by myself”, for trusting
people every day. Hell, at this point I should be brave just for breathing, right?
But I’m going to tell you something that many people with disabilities don’t want their able-bodied peers to know. That is, I’m
one of the scaredest people ever. I’m scared to try, scared to fail, scared of the
dark, of grasshoppers, of being alone. Sometimes I’m scared of my blindness and the
vulnerability it can create in my day-to-day life. Sometimes, the only thing that
goes through my head when I’m doing something new is, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m
afraid.”
The truth is, I think it’s the fear that is partly responsible for my ability to,
if not conquer challenges, then at least look them in the face. Part of my fear is
of having regrets, and that I will use my blindness as a crutch to explain why I
didn’t try. Blindness is something to be embraced, but not something to lean on.
Most likely, that fear turns into the encouragement that drives me to walk out of
my house every day.
In full disclosure, I have had a period of my life in which I didn’t leave the safety
of my home unless I absolutely had to. The anxiety of something happening beyond
my control, either in a social situation or one in which I was helpless and alone
and outside my comfort zone, paralyzed me with anxiety. I second-guessed and doubted
myself. It was probably one of the hardest times of my life, but now that I’m on
the other side of it, my determination to live fully and joyfully has been further
cemented.
Maybe bravery comes with the admission of fear, and maybe we are all brave in our
own way. Or, maybe I’m just trying miserably to explain something about myself that
is so contradictory and temperamental that it’s hard to put into words. In any case,
I may as well use this space and this overly serious post to say thank you to everyone
who has bravely and unabashedly supported me and all of my fearfulness. You know
who you are.

Based Blatantly on the prose poem, “If My Father Were to Ask” by S. C. Hahn
If another woman were to ask, “What’s a pole dancer?”
I would take the word “dance” and fling it far enough away
that I wouldn’t be tied to its connotations of grace and beauty.
I would replace it with a word like “explorer” or “learner”
or ditch the whole adjective-noun sequence all together and just say “poler.”
Two syllables to describe
the strength of my arms as I hang on their reliance
the muscles that tighten in my legs as I climb up and up
the slight swoop in my belly when I realize
I must make a sweaty-handed, power-drill-screechy descent back to the ground
I must always pay a small price for being up so high.
I would say that
the pole gives me an anchor
a place from which to spin out
a place to always come back to and recover.
Being a poler doesn’t make me sexier than you.
Or better in bed
or more willing to undress.
It doesn’t make me cheap or brave or slutty or badass
(if I am those things, I was them before)
It does make me feel free
and really,
that’s all you need to know.

The biggest weakness in my writing is my constant need to apologize for the things I say. There are many things to blame for this: my midwestern upbringing, my sorry-slinging genetics, my constantly crashing into things and people, my somewhat awkward personality. The fact that I’m a little weird, a little quirky, a little unstable, and a lot nontraditional. Having a disability means society, as a collective mass, takes me less seriously. Plus, I don’t have a husband, babies, or a career tragectery, the things which traditionally are expected of a woman who is almost 30. That, apparently, makes it harder to take me seriously. I like to be alone, and extroverted society thinks I should be with people. I like to be quiet, and because I’m not talking, society thinks I have nothing to say. And for that I so often apologize.

When I first started this blog, I was very conscious of my readership. I desperately didn’t want to offend anyone with what I had to say, particularly the people I love the best and who may have done some of the well-meaning but demeaning things I held up as examples of disability faux pas. I got tired of writing disclaimers, but I felt there was no way around them. Reading back over old blog entries (from the blog I started three years ago which lives in a different Internet location), I find some of the writing simpering and weak. The thing is, I am slowly beginning to recognize the strength in what I WANT to say, and more quickly beginning to detest the weakness disguised as apology in my words.

Apologies are crutches I use when I feel I’m being judged. When I apologize to a stranger who has asked me an awkward question that I won’t answer, like, “How much can you see?”, what I’m really sorry about is that I have to have this conversation AGAIN; that yet another person thinks they’re entitled to personal information about me when they don’t even know my name, information that could be used to their advantage if they were so inclined. I’m apologizing because I’m sorry for that person, that they seem oblivious, that I am in this situation, that I’m not cocooned in my apartment under a fuzzy blanket reading something intriguing. I’m not at all sorry for not answering the question. I’m most sorry that I’m being asked.

(This apologizing runs so deep that upon reading over that last paragraph, I just had an overwhelming urge to clarify it, to smooth the top and shape it just so, so that no one would think I was personally attacking them. To clarify what types of questions I actually don’t mind answering. To “educate” you on the difference between an appropriate stranger enquiry and an inappropriate one. But I don’t want to always educate, and I am tired of apologizing, and so I’m not going to tell you anything. And, I’ve got faith in you. You can figure it out.)

If I can’t stop my traitorous, “I’m sorry” mouth in my every day life, I’d like to stop it in my writing. As a reader, going back and slogging through the sorrys is tedious and makes my writing feel less. It might be “less” by literary standards, but it is mine and I want to say what I need to say without shame, compulsion for clarification, or concern for upholding some veneer of politeness. I’m who I am, and I’m not sorry.

I dreamed that Emily Dickinson took me for a walk.
She stopped to show me Autumn in the briny scent of pine cones
she placed one after another in my seeking hands.
We barely said a word.
She and I, two inward-turned observers
of vermilion-tinged changing leaves
I knew their colors without words.
I knew the ticklish, teasing breeze
that hinted iron chill but still held fleeting warmth.
My hair tingled with sensation.
Emily braided it with goldenrods.
She told me, her voice in the wind,
“Nothing Gold can Stay.”
I said, “Wait, isn’t that Robert Frost? Your own words say it better.”
She said nothing, but
cried salty raindrop tears.
I held her while the leaves blew
coming to rest on her crackly cheeks
She wept in my sticky, sap-splattered arms
Just once,
I may have saved her life.

Blind Perfectionism

There was a guy on the bus the other day who complimented me on Kiva and how beautiful she is, asked me how old and what breed she was, and a few other questions I could answer in my sleep because I’ve answered them so many times while I’m awake.  I answered him politely but briefly.  (I was reading a book on the art of making Asian pickles, and I was on the kimchi chapter.  It was intense.  Also, I am NOT making this up.  The questions part or the kimchi part.)

Presumably because he failed to capture my attention, he turned to the person next to him and started talking to HER about my dog and how beautiful she was.  Then he started going down the rabbit hole of completely ridiculous: “Those dogs are so smart.  They know exactly when to get off the bus.  They just lay down and when their stop comes they’re up and ready to go.”

I’m sure most of you, dear readers, know this is not true.  And if you don’t, a tiny foot nudge from Logic is all you need to realize it isn’t true.  I take five buses consistently, and various other routes as needed.  In order for Kiva to know what stop we want, she would first need to know which of these routes we were on by reading the route number.  Since more than one route stops at my usual stops (for example, I go to the same place to catch the 4 and the 2), she would not be able to think, (cue doggy diva voice): “Ok we’re on Franklin and Lyndale, we must be going to that one place I love and not that other place I also love, omg I am so smart.” Even if she had any notion of being on Franklin and Lyndale, she would not know whether we were on the 4 or the 2 without being able to read the number, and there are a number of places we go on both those buses, so she would have no idea which place that would be and thus would not be able to stand up at the correct stop.

That was exhausting.  Have I lost you? I hope not, because it gets better.  (Who am I kidding, no it doesn’t.)

The bus guy making overblown statements about guide dogs then started making equally bombastic comments about blind people.  “Yeah, they always know where they are,” he said.  “I know a guy who doesn’t even need the driver to call the stops.  He just knows where he is all the time.  I guess his other senses just tell him where he is. …  Not saying they shouldn’t be callin the stops, but these people always know where they are.  It’s incredible.”

The part of flabbergasted and annoyed normal not-special-unicorn blind person will now be played by Lauren.

I don’t know who this mythical blindie is that this dude knows, but I sure have never met them.  And I hope to the deity of public transit that the driver wasn’t listening to this guy and thinking, hmmm, maybe I just won’t call the stops any more, since they all know where they’re going.  NO WE DON’T!!!! We don’t have some special snowflake internal compass plus navigation system that tells us where in the world we are, nor do our senses, heightened or not, give us any indication where the bus is.  I suppose if I really wanted to, I could go on one of my regular routes and count the turns and stops and MAYBE be able to figure out where my stop is.  But while I wasted time doing that, I wouldn’t be able to read about kimchi or eavesdrop or do anything short of remembering to breathe, and even that might be too much to ask.  Ok, maybe if I stopped breathing, I’d suddenly know exactly where I was all the time.

The Daredevel-blind-people-as-extraordinary trope in which the media portrays us doesn’t help.  If the media had its way, we would all walk around touching everyone’s face, being superheroes, and finding our clicky way via echolocation from the moment we emerged into the world.  The pedestal on which the media and society places us is not one that I relish or intend to stand on.  In stepping onto that pedestal, we also place distance between blind and sighted, an “us” and “them” mentality that casts neither party in a good light.  While perpetuating the inaccuracies of blind perfectionism, we create a construct where blind people are fun to gawk at and marvel over, but not to talk to, to touch, or to treat as the multi-dementional individuals we are.

Admittedly, I’m part of the problem.  I didn’t say anything.  I probably should have, but couldn’t find the energy.  But I’m saying something now, and that something is that I AM NOT PERFECT.  And if you see me on the street and I look lost, yup, I probably am.

Well-meaning folks ask me frequently what my “dream job” is. Besides being an obnoxious expression, it’s a question that I tend to shuffle around gracelessly because my “dream job” is one that we deem inappropriate, in our society, for someone who has reached a certain educational level. Nonetheless, I’m putting it out there today. My “dream job” is to be a barrista and to make your coffee. Yes, yours.

When I was a college freshman, I schlepped my coffee maker, coffee grounds, mugs and filters to my campus dorm room and set up shop. Luckily, though my roommate didn’t like coffee, she liked the smell, because to be quite honest, our dorm room smelled like a Starbucks with a decidedly underachiever complex. However, this story has a happy ending: today, I sometimes see Facebook statuses from my former roomie along the lines of, “Ugh, I neeeeed coffee stat!”, and I’d like to think my little dorm room coffee corner influences her coffee-guzzling ways.

During the second semester of that year, I worked at the campus coffee shop. It was located in the basement of the chapel, and therefore called Holy Grounds. Even as a skeptic, I’ll admit there was something holy about the espresso shots that I downed after trundling across campus in the freezing cold winter. I spent my morning in warmth: steaming milk, pumping syrup, and perfecting tiny foam caps on the top of cappuccinos. We arranged the milk just so: 2 percent to the left, skim in the middle, soy to the right. I made smoothies and Italian sodas as the weather warmed, and marveled at my philosophy professor who came in practically on the hour for a double shot topped with black coffee.

I suppose this sounds rather idealized. It was, and it wasn’t. It was repetitive work, hours on my feet, and it was the most “Zen” I can remember ever feeling. I learned very particular things about people by the way they took their coffee. I learned to anticipate what someone might also like, based on a beverage they liked to order, and to recommend it when they wanted something new. It became a grand social experiment for me. It also cemented my faith in the coffee shop as a “community experience”, which has influenced me to seek out that experience as I’ve moved around the Twin Cities. Being a participant in the coming together of a community, and a facilitator for making that together happen, was something I needed then and something I still enthusiastically seek now.

Throughout my job seeking years, I’ve listened to people belittle barristas, retail employees, servers, and bartenders, or say, “Well, at least it’s something”, with the assumption that a person can and should do better. But people who work in those industries are vital, noble, relevant, and necessary. I’d love to see the “just” taken out of, “Oh, I just work in a coffee shop.” Helping someone feel caffeinated, engaged, and happy isn’t “just.” It’s an important thing.

Even though I have barrista experience, I’ve been unsuccessful at getting “just” a coffee shop job since my days at Holy Grounds. Corporate shops like Starbucks, Caribou, and the Barnes and Noble cafe worry that I won’t sling lattes fast enough, and that in turn, having a more concise system to where things like syrup and milk are placed will slow down other employees. In my opinion, better organization makes good sense for everyone, but my opinion lacks corporate flavor. I’ve been unsuccessful at getting interest from indie shops as well, though they definitely represent the more hopeful side of the spectrum. If I had extra thousands of dollars, a willing partner, and a city that needed it, (mine doesn’t), I might consider opening my own shop. We’d have Braille menus, an accessible app, and comfy community couches that go on for days. “Dream job”, for real.

Things are going to get real today, dear reader. First, because I’m going to talk about being unemployed, and second, because I actually, shockingly, did a tiny bit of (albeit Google) research for this blog entry. So I’ll be slinging some figures, and not just braindumping in my usual manner.

I just finished working for a year at a nonprofit organization. Before that, I had been unemployed for three years, besides a two-month summer teaching job in 2012. During those three years, I consistently looked for work. I had consistent interviews. At first, it was exciting and I nerdily took to the task: taking copious notes on my answers for the most difficult questions, asking for detailed feedback when I was not the one chosen for a job, etc. I did learn a lot. But it soon became a vicious circle of application, interrogation, and rejection, and my energy flagged rapidly. I still did all I could think to do, but it was exhausting, frustrating, and discouraging.

I know well the hell that the job market has been over the last few years. Graduating from college and into a recession has deeply impacted many people of my generation. However, I’m also a realist, and know that in the eyes of most employers, hiring me is not the easy choice. Given the choice between a sighted employee who would require no accommodations, no matter how reasonable, or a blind employee who is just as qualified but may require things done a bit differently than the workplace has ALWAYS done them, the employer will, almost inevitably it seems, pick the former. Because it’s easy. Because it requires fewer resources and brain cells. And because people are afraid of change and of difference, easy is what, by and large, they choose.

I’ve gotten some push back for these assertions over the years, but I stand by them. I’ve had too many interviews to not see a pattern. I’m the one who hears the hesitation when I tell someone who’s called me for an interview that I’m blind. It’s always amusing to me to do phone interviews and then, if they want me for an in-person interview, to disclose that I am blind and to catch the surprise in their voice. Because somewhere deep down, the best, most open-minded people are still subconsciously surprised that they just had a meaningful, relevant conversation with a person who happens to have a disability.

If my empirical evidence isn’t convincing, here’s a figure that you’ve probably heard me spout if you’ve been unfortunate enough to get my full rantage on this subject: according to the American Federation for the Blind, the unemployment rate among blind people was 75% in 2010. More hopefully, in 2012 the National Federation of the Blind conducted a survey wherein the employment rate among the participants was 37%. Of course, we have to take into account several factors, such as how many blind people are unemployed and actually looking for work, versus how many have given up looking; what the term “blind” actually means in different contexts; and an individual’s circumstances, such as socioeconomic status and access to resources. But the 75% statistic is one that I’ve heard bantered over most of my job-seeking life, and have reason to think is, unfortunately, stubbornly immobile.

Now, finally, I come to the purpose of this post: I’m unemployed, and it’s probably going to take me longer than the average person to find work. My last dance with unemployment was stressful financially, but also socially. Many things that my friends wanted to do were beyond my means, and I spent a lot of time feeling anxious and guilty. I declined several invitations to go out for dinner or drinks, because those things add up, not to mention more expensive excursions. I receive $660 in disability payments per month. I am extremely fortunate that my parents pay my rent. Once I pay all my other bills and buy groceries, I have about $150 a month leftover. That will go to things like household necessities, food or other necessities for Kiva, etc. In that chunk, there may be funds for friend time, but it’s hard to tell at the beginning of the month what will come up.

What the hell can you do with me then, you ask? Well, I can cook you dinner, or we can cook something together. You can show me your favorite movie of all time, because chances are I’ve never seen it because movie watching is something I don’t do on my own. We can walk around the lake or a park or just on the boring old sidewalk. Oh I know! We can build a fort, like all those “10 romantic things to do with your significant other” blogs tell you to do. (Don’t worry, we don’t have to make out in it if you don’t want to.)

All kidding aside, this is where I’m at currently. If I can’t do money-requiring things with you for a while, it’s not because I don’t like you. It’s because I’m the 75, and I’m working to turn that around.