Dizzyness, Our New Home, Rumster, and a Pun

Some poisons cause dizziness. That's why our ancestors evolved the vomit response to feeling dizzy or off balance - it's better to lose a few hundred calories than to die of poisoning. Get too dizzy and your body thinks it's been poisoned. If you stay dizzy long enough you'll throw up your lunch.

Last week my eyesight reached the point that everything seems tilted and off kilter. It's not just the picture of my wife on the wall anymore, it's everything.

If you're in a place with floor tiles or some sort of repeating pattern on the ground, look down. You'll see the parallel lines. If you look to the side you'll notice how the parallel lines slant because of your perspective, but the lines directly under you don't slant at all.

I look down and see parallel lines slanting, but that's all I can see. I can't see the rest of the floor or the walls, I just see slanting lines. It looks like the floor is slanted. My sense of balance tells me one thing and my remaining eyesight tells me something contradictory.

I've felt mildly nauseous for a week and severely nauseous every time I ride in a car. It's been terrible.

Being blind is easy - it's all the stuff that comes along for the ride that's hard. I wish my ophthalmology doctors had spent just a few minutes telling me about the other stuff but they didn't. They told me I was going blind and gave me a telephone number I could call to get a free white cane. They didn't prepare me for being nauseous, bored, or underestimated. They didn't tell me how useful Alexa would be, how useless braille would be, or how my sleep pattern would go sideways once I could no longer tell daylight from darkness.

***

We bought a home in Roanoke, Virginia. It wasn't the home we went there to see, it was the second of the three our realtor showed us. My wife absolutely lit up when she pulled the car into the neighborhood. It's a nicer neighborhood than anywhere we've ever lived. The excitement in her voice reminded me of a little girl on Christmas morning. When she whispered something like "Could a place like this really be ours?" I knew I wouldn't stop until it was.

I can't really describe the house. It has floor to ceiling windows that let in a ton of light during our tour. The sunlight washed out everything else so I couldn't see much at all. But I saw pictures of the place and it seems really nice. Swanky enough to feel classy but still practical enough to feel like a home instead of a museum.

My wife loved everything about it except for the size of the closet in the master bedroom. It's too small for all our clothes. I spent yesterday going through my clothes, deciding which half I wanted to keep and which half to donate.

Layne Jr. came by yesterday after work. We talked for a few hours. We talked about fatherhood, about the mistakes I made and the stuff I got right. We talked about how we each try to correct the mistakes our fathers made with us and how we often do, but also how we take for granted the things our own fathers got right. We assume they're easy because our fathers made it seem easy, then we find they're harder than we expected. We end up correcting some of the mistakes our fathers made with us but then dropping the ball on some of the things our fathers got right. We talked about jobs and chasing dreams and about how our dreams change. He's wised up a lot in the past few years and I'm very proud of him. He'll be fantastic when he becomes a dad.

He and his wife will drive us to Roanoke next month. They'll spend about a week with my wife and I at the new house before driving my wife back to San Antonio. During that week we have to get all the utilities and stuff switched over to our names, get internet and find a grocery store that delivers and a Virginia state ID and some cookware and utensils and bed sheets and a dozen other things we won't know we need until we get there and don't have them. I'm glad I won't be alone the first week.

My wife and Brian will move to join me in May or June. Many people have expressed concern about me living alone for over half a year but I think their concern is misplaced. They're concerned because I'm blind. I'm concerned because I'll be lonely. Getting groceries delivered isn't any harder for the blind. Please stop worrying about that. But not kissing my wife's hand while she drives? Not dancing with her at the eighties club every weekend? Not holding hands while walking on the Riverwalk? That will be the hard part.

Sara helped install a tracking app on my phone so my wife can always tell where I am. If I ever get lost in Roanoke all I have to do is call her and ask her which direction I have to go in to find something familiar. I don't think I'll ever need it but it makes my wife feel safer knowing it's in place.

We'll talk on the phone every day. We'll continue to text each other just like we do on days she's working. Modern technology has made long distance relationships easier, but when Alexa tells me there's rain in the forecast for San Antonio it will be hard knowing she's too afraid of the thunder to sleep and I'm not there to hold her.

It won't last forever. Next summer she'll be there with me in her dream home, in her dream neighborhood, in her dream city. I hope Virginia still offers the license plates with "Virginia is for Lovers" on them.

We'll have dozens of waterfalls to hike to, a new dance club to find, new restaurants to discover, cooler summers, cleaner air, a lower cost of living, and a grocery store only a mile away.

Worth it!

***

Rumster applied for a $50,000 grant from Reddit and we're in the final stages of getting it approved. It's an amazing thing he's doing. Part of the money will be donated to NVDA, a company that makes free to download software which reads text aloud. I use NVDA text-to-speech myself. Many people on r/Blind do, too. The rest of the money will go towards purchasing Alexa smart speakers and braille readers for blind Redditors who can't afford them. Rumster's been negotiating prices with Amazon and the manufacturers of the braille readers to get as many of these products as he can for the community with the grant money.

I've told him how proud I am to be his friend but I don't think he gets it, so I want to say it again here. Rumster, you're a rock star, Brother! You're improving our lives and doing all the behind-the-scenes work to make this grant happen. You don't understand the depths of my appreciation for everything you do for the blind community.

Anyway, once Rumster told the moderators of r/Blind about the grant people lost their minds. He was accused of not including the rest of us in the process, of wanting the money for himself, of not sharing the money with the mods who have been here the longest, and of everything else imaginable.

It's insane how the addition of money can turn former friends and allies into suspicious idiots. It's gobsmacking how butt-hurt we got when Rumster did this without asking our permission first.

Rumster is taking a few weeks or a month off from Reddit starting in October to get a break from the drama. He's also putting a new team of administrators in place in January, a move that makes me think he might not want to come back.

I wouldn't blame him if he hangs it up and walks away. The shit we've put him through since the grant became known would make me want to walk away if I were in his shoes. He's built this online community for over a decade, dealt with online trolls and people who think Reddit's terms and conditions don't apply to them, and he's got many large online websites to abandon their "Click all images with traffic lights" catchpas. He's given us a platform to express ourselves.

That's just the stuff I've teased out of him. I suspect the depth of his generosity and advocacy is much deeper. He doesn't talk about himself much. He's like my own father that way - quietly, consistently  excellent but never drawing attention to himself.

He's done it all for free, for years, and mostly from the shadows. One of the blind community's most effective advocates isn't even blind, he just cares enough to dedicate years of his life to making our lives better.

He won't let me defend him in mod chat but he can't stop me here =)

***

A member of r/Blind told me this joke a couple days back - A plateau is the highest form of flattery.

That's a terrible pun so of course I loved it. I loved it so much I looked up some more online puns for a laugh.

I read ten more puns, hoping at least one would make me laugh. Sadly, no pun in ten did.