Touching Base

Between packing boxes to take to the thrift store, calling to get internet and utilities at the new address, trying to work through two punch lists (one to sell this home, the other to buy the home in Virginia), and trying to hire guys to do some home repairs for us I haven't had time to write.

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There's a girl named Dottie who works at the local Dollar General. She's a life long smoker by the sound of her voice. Whenever a customer walks into the store she says something like "Hi, welcome to Dollar General!"

Whenever I hear her I say "Hi Miss Dottie!" She gets the biggest kick out of a blind man recognizing her voice. I'm not sure why but it just makes her day.

Lucky for me she was the one working the register when we showed up and asked to take some empty cardboard boxes.

I'm giving away all my books. That sounds like a no-brainer but it's actually a bit traumatic for me. I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember. My collection of math textbooks could take a beginner all the way through a master's degree. I have probably twenty different books on algebra and another dozen just on calculus. I kind of hope the collection stays together and I really hope they end up in the hands of someone who will appreciate them and use them as much as I did.

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When I was young I wanted to live in a home with a secret passage. That seemed like the coolest thing imaginable. When we remodeled our home five years ago I decided to add a secret passage just because I finally could. If you go into the walk-in closet in the second bedroom you'll see a dresser at the back. If you grab hold of one of the drawer pulls to open a dresser drawer you'll discover the entire dresser is fake - it's on hinges and swings open to connect to an identical dresser the closet of the third bedroom.

I hope the realtor selling our home doesn't point it out to the parents who buy this place. I want their kids to discover it, and I hope they enjoy it.

* * *

When I close my left eye and look at something using my right it looks slanted a couple degrees. When I close my right eye and look at it through my left it looks slanted a couple degrees in the opposite direction.

This is new.

When I was a teenager I spent quite a bit of time snow skiing. There's always some noob who falls down trying to get on the chair lifts so we'd often spend a few boring minutes sitting up in the air waiting for the lift to start moving again. I remember closing one eye at a time while looking down at the snow just to pass the time. I realized if I looked at the snow with one eye it seemed to have a very slight blue tint but when I looked at it with the other eye it seemed to have an equally slight pink tint.

I tried to replicate that experience a few times but never could do it. I concluded the sun must have been shining on one side of my face while I sat on the ski lift chair and my eye in the shadow saw colors a little differently than the eye exposed to sunlight. I don't know if that's the reason it happened and I don't really care since it never happened again.

But what's happening now, with one eye thinking things are slanted to the left and the other eye thinking they're slanted to the right, that's more important to understand. I think this phenomenon might be the reason I'm feeling off balance and might be a contributing factor to the motion sickness I often feel.

If I had to guess today I'd say my field of vision has become so restricted the visual radius each eye sees doesn't overlap enough to calibrate to what the other eye sees. I don't have a better eye, they're both about the same in terms of light perception and acuity, so neither eye is dominant. I switch between the two often, without noticing I've done it. But if the room goes from slanting to the left to slanting to the right every time I subconsciously switch dominance of course I'd feel like the room is tilting. Of course I'd feel car sick.

I would talk to my ophthalmologist about this but he's too expensive. And even if he confirmed the cause it's not like the symptoms will stop.

Not all knowledge is power. Actionable intelligence is power. The rest is trivia.

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I wish I could do more on Reddit but using the NVDA screen reading software is annoying and my eyes hurt too much to put in the time moderating r/Blind.

There was a post from a young man who's going blind about how his friends won't stop teasing him. He wants to know if he's oversensitive or if his friends really are jerks.

I wanted to answer him. I wanted to tell him how human it is to use humor to deal with fear. His friends are scared and joking about it - laughing about it - and that's the reason they're not crying about it.

I wanted to tell him he's lucky his friends aren't walking on eggshells around him. He's lucky they're close enough to not let his blindness divide them.

I wanted to write him a whole book.

But his post was 17 hours old by the time I saw it. It's already fallen into Reddit obscurity. I just can't respond in a timely manner anymore. Social media doesn't slow down just because I have.

I agreed to moderate r/Blind at a time when I could still see well enough to do the job. I feel I should keep up the pace the team expects from me even though my ability has tanked. 

It's stoopid. Obviously nobody expects me to do as much now as I could do last autumn, not with how quickly I'm losing the little bit of eyesight I still have. Nobody would think poorly of me.

So why do I think poorly of myself?

It took time to adjust to life without a job. It will take time to adjust to life without moderating r/Blind as much.

Going blind over time is both better and worse than going blind all at once. It's better because it gives someone time to make a blind bucket list and get their affairs in order.

It's worse because the grieving process never ends. Each new milestone is another cause to grieve. As soon as you think you're through and back in a good headspace some new problem arises and you realize you're not done grieving yet.

I wonder if I could be a grief counselor for the blind, specifically for the newly diagnosed. I might look into the educational requirements when life slows down after the move.