We found a fantastic website called the Braille Bug, put together by the American Foundation for the Blind. I wish we'd found the site a couple days sooner because they actually sell kits that you can use to write in Braille, which would've been neat. Instead, we used their printable alphabet page to attempt to write in Braille using just pen and paper.
Justin is Batman
A couple things we noticed - it is darn hard to get the spacing right. Justin erred on the wide side, I erred on tighter spaces - looking back I think his system was better. My letters blurred together and it was harder to tell which dots belonged to which letter. Most notably - it took for freaking ever. I'm sure you get faster with time and the right tools, but there is something really elegant and smooth about the written word - the letters move seamlessly from one to another. With dots, there is so much start and stop.
Once we'd done some writing, we decided to take a few minutes to try and appreciate the challenges of being blind. It was a wholly unscientific exercise - and one that I'm sure basically everyone has done in their lives. Ever closed your eyes and tried to see how far you could walk or run before you started to get freaked out? That's what we did. But, like, all serious and crap.
...and coy. Serious and coy.
I attempted to retrieve food to assemble a plate and reheat it. It was fairly frustrating. I'm sure someone who has been blind their entire life would have more practice than me, but there are some things I noted in particular. I had trouble making my ears focus on the things I wanted them to hear. I tried to talk to Justin while the TV was on in the background and my parents were chatting on the other side of the room. Usually my eyes and ears work together and I can tune out the things I'm not looking at. With the scarf/blindfold (scarffold?) on, I had to ask Justin to repeat himself a couple times before understanding what was said. He also kept trying to gesture things to me without remembering that I couldn't see him.
The other thing I noticed is that cleanliness is vital if you can't see. My dad always said "a place for everything and everything in its place" when I was growing up -- I mostly rolled my eyes at that. Not out of genuine disagreement, but because I like to be a contemptuous little shit in my free time. No, mostly it was because teenage me thought listening was for chumps. That said, when you can see the mess you can avoid and then clean it pretty easily. When I went to reheat the food without sight, I had trouble finding counter space (dinner hadn't been cleaned up yet).
And then it was Justin's turn. After eating the leftovers I'd retrieved for him, his task was to clear the plate and put the rest away.
And be sexy, but that's always his job.
He noted in particular that it felt like everything took a long time. He took about 90 seconds (longer than it sounds) to walk across the living room and kitchen, but he asked if it had been five minutes when he dropped the plate off. Simple obstacles were harder to avoid and I will fully admit that I didn't help when I kept telling him to go right instead of left. It wasn't my fault. Left and right are fascist concepts that I reject for personal and political reasons.
Anyway, he made it and then Sydney decided she wanted to give the walking blind thing a whirl too.
Justin spotted.
She went from the kitchen, into the living room and sat on the couch. One thing that was particularly interesting to me about Sydney is that she immediately thought to move toward the warmth of the fire because she knew the couch was near it. She was a lot more in touch with her other senses right off the bat then Justin or I.
Overall, today was more of a learning experience than a celebration, in the strictest sense. It was really enlightening to, even briefly, experience life without sight. A couple dozen of the holidays we're celebrating are observances designed to raise awareness about a particular topic - on those days we celebrate by learning as much as we can and experiencing as much as we can in someone else's shoes. It was a more serious day and we learned a lot about the challenges of being blind. Well, a lot more than the roughly zero we knew before, at least.
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