Blue Way

We had some nice breakthroughs in rehearsal today. And then we realized that Blue Man Group did it all first:

What Color Are My Clothes? Part 3

Apparently I'm in good company when it comes to not knowing the color of some cloth. Nearly 30 million people are in on the debate about this dress. If you haven't seen it yet, look at the photo and answer the question, "What color is this dress?" before reading any further.

The dress has sparked a Pantone civil war that's spilled off of the internet and into people's private lives. One camp declares it to be blue and black, another decreees white and gold. I myself saw blue and grey, but then the suggestion that the grey was black makes me see it as black.

I'm not interested in the gossip, how this dress broke the internet or destroyed relationships, or even what Taylor Swift has to say about it (what is she a mantis shrimp or something?) What truly interests me is the science behind the dispute. 

Somewhere in the murky depths of BuzzFeed is an explanation for the debate stating that, "it’s not monitor settings" because two people can see it on the same screen and perceive different things. BuzzFeed also says, "It’s probably not about the cells in your eyes," (unless you have a retinal condition like me, in which case retinal cells might be a factor), and then goes on to explain how our brains are always deciding what they're seeing.

“In the case of the dress, some people are deciding that there is a fair amount of illumination on a blue and black (or less reflective) dress," says Cedar Riener, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College. "Other people are deciding that it is less illumination on a white/gold dress (it is in shadow, but more reflective).”

These differences in perception are based on individual experiences and "top-down" processing in the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist John Borghi of Rockefeller University explains, “It could also be that you’ve seen dresses (or fabric) with the same texture or shape before, which could also affect your perception.”

Here's what Adobe has to say about the dress,
though when I did this on a photo of my
sweatshirt, the results were inaccurate.

Aside from all of us having wasted tens of millions of person-hours on what's really just a shoddy photo of a nice dress, I'm glad people are talking about this because top-down cognitive processing has bigger societal implications than mere disagreements about colors of clothes. I touched on this in earlier posts about cultural astigmatism, race, and posted a clip that postulates that people can look right at something and not see it. In each of these posts I discussed how our prior experiences and cultural preferences have us constantly deciding what we each see when we look at the same subject.

Today online, that debate is about the color of a dress. Another day in the street it may be about the color of someone's skin and what that means to me or you or someone who holds power over that hypothetical person. Our experiences compose our vision, our vision comprises our perception, and our perceptions influence our actions. Look forward to more dialogue on this soon.

Pity Me, Mitsubishi

Any one who's heard this piece about car dealerships knows that they need to make a monthly quota, and at the end of each month the salespeople go bananas trying to sell their cars. So with three days left in February, I got the call. She asked for me by name and tried to sell me a car. "Where'd you get my number?" She told me it was through Capitol One, a credit card company that sends me all kinds of junk mail. I cut to the chase: "Do you know that I'm blind?"

It was a ridiculous question and a somewhat extreme way to phrase it. I'm not completely blind, just blind enough that I should never be driving a car anywhere ever. And of course she didn't know that I'm blind, or else she wouldn't be calling me to try to sell me a car. But this isn't the first time this dealership has called me, and I've told them this before and asked them to take my name out of their database.

The most intense part was her reaction. How do you respond when you call someone, assuming that they can drive (and that they can see) and then suddenly, SHAZAM—they're blind! "Oh, I'm so sorry," she moaned. From her perspective, it was a great tragedy—I'd lost my vision in a matter of seconds and it was all her fault. If only she hadn't called. Now I felt bad too. "That's okay," I said, "Now will you please take me out of your database?"

People with disabilities do not live in a constant state of tragedy, nor do we want anyone's pity. Unless we are provoked. Then yes, do apologize, but only if you can back that apology up with action, i.e.: take all of us off your mailing lists. At least until the self-driving cars are ready to roll.

Blind Film #8: The importance of the worst cartoon ever made

What else can one say about that one-joke wonder, Mr. Magoo? As a kid I suffered through this poorly animated cartoon about an oblivious old myopic white guy and his manservant Charlie, depicted as a pigtailed, slanty-eyed, bucktoothed, Asian stereotype who's always shouting, "Mistah Magloo!" and calling the man "Bloss."

Hoo boy. A popular cartoon that's racist and ableist. I'd like to say that I can't believe I was allowed to watch it, or even that the TV station was allowed to air it. I'd also like to say that it's been discarded and forgotten as an antiquated artifact from the pre-PC era, but none of these statements would be true: Magoo lives on into another century, perpetuated in part by Disney's live-action remake. They even tried to PC-ify their version by transforming Charlie into a pan-global female love interest for Magoo's nephew, and then inserted this end-of-film disclaimer:

Siskel and Ebert sum all of it up in their review:

So Disney made a crappy film, based on a crappy cartoon. But Magoo serves an important role in popular culture. While other movies portray people with visual disabilities as having absolutely no vision, Magoo is one of the few mainstream media representations of someone with low vision. He's become an ableist cultural icon, an insult lobbed at people who act like they don't see something that's right in front of their faces. Magoo also gives context for understanding how people with disabilities can be misunderstood when they pass as abled—like a very nearsighted person who doesn't walk around with dark glasses and a white cane. To Magoo's credit, his antics are somewhat accurate. Too bad they couldn't have done that with a good film.

Believing is Seeing: Blind Film #7

The film's title asks, What the Bleep Do We Know? One thing I know is that the phrase, "A wonderful story that I believe is true," might not be the strongest line to open a scientific statement. Many scholars and scientists have dismissed this movie as such tosh peddled by charlatans, but in light of mirages and other illusions that we experience on the sea, why not this phenomenon? Provide your anwers in the comments. I'll give mine in a future post.

Be Dazzled

I recently posted a video featuring people with faces painted like the band KISS. The clip hgihlighted three forms of figurative blindness: one mentioned in the song, one perpetrated by the fans, and third as a quasi-hallucination created by the makeup. While one person done up in that signature black-and-white face paint may look iconic (and even ironic), another effect occurs when entire crowds do it together: the individual disappears into the group, and the group participates in a visual effect called disruptive camouflage.

Disruptive camouflage occurs in nature, famously in zebra herds whose converging stripes throw off predators as to their number, individual identity, and direction they're facing. The Brits have taken two important cues from the zebra: the crosswalk (which they call a "zebra crossing') and a practice of painting ships that came about in World War I when they hired painters to decorate both war and commercial vessels with striped patterns. This was also an attempt to throw off predators—in this case German submarines, whose crew had to estimate a ship's distance and course before firing a torpedo at it. This "dazzle camouflage" could fool the enemy into thinking that a ship was turning or moving in a direction that it wasn't, throwing off torpedo calculations by as much as 55°.

A person with a retinal condition might see many things as if they were decorated by a dazzle camoufleur, only the cause of disruption is not tactical, it's the consequence of retinal cells being interrupted. The result is gaps in vision that the brain fills in with made-up stuff, including the whos, whats, how-manys, how-fars and where's-this-goings of people and things of every stripe.

The brilliant podcast 99% Invisible has an episode on dazzle camouflage. Listen to it here.

The other memorable scene from The Miracle Worker

This would never happen on Mr. Magoo:

Blind Song #10: Kiss Me, I'm Blindish

In an age when it's cool to say that this band sucks, I say that this song is incredible.

I wonder what Gene Simmons was inspired by when he wrote this more than 40 years ago. My theory is that he was 23 at the time and writing about a teenage girl, but by making the protagonist 93-year-old man who's losing his vision attempts to swap some of the creepiness for absurdity. Does it succeed?

Also look for all the ways that "blind" could be applied to the crowd—there's a patriotic fervor to their fandom. Also the hallucinatory quality created by the replicated makeup on the members of Melbourne's Symphony backing up the band is reminiscent of the black-and-white dazzle camouflage used by Britain's navy during World War I, and by zebras for as long as zebras have been zebras:

Vampire Family

A family phenomenon: we with cone dystrophy sit with our backs to the windows. Daylight from outside hurts our eyes, and if we sit across from someone who's backlit, we only see them as a shadow surrounded by a painful white halo of glare. So we always sit with our backs to the window, like Nosferatu covering his face with a cape lest he disintegrate in the rays of the sun.

I once took my dad and aunt, who both share my eye disease, out for Vietnamese food. My kid brother was there and got confused when we all walked around to one side of the table and just stood there, silently wondering how three of us were going to fit into the two chairs that had their backs to the light. As the youngest dystrophyst, I let them take these prime seats and faced the glare. I can deal, and besides, I already know what my dad looks like.

When I meet new people, I'm more discreet—It's like if they find out what I really am, they'll just pull a stake out of their bag and drive plunge it into my heart. Like today, I was meeting a stranger in a café. "I'm in a blue coat by the window," she'd texted, and when I arrived she was, of course, nearly impossible to see, just a glowing ball of light over in the corner. So I got my tea and sat down, trying not to squint, and with it being three degrees outside, she was huddling inside that blue coat of hers. "Hey," I said, "it's cold by this window—Let's go sit over there!" and I took us to another table, nabbing the seat with its back to the light without revealing my actual vampiric nature. Coast clear, stake free.

There's a spectrum of empathy around this photophobia. Strangers and acquaintances don't understand it. Friends and kid brothers need some reminding (but the now-teenage brother is as down with allyship as my cousins have long been at helping my aunts across the street). However, its only we with cone dystrophy who can all stand on the same side of the table and wait, communicating with our Draculean powers of telepathy, until the sun goes down.

A Clockwork ERG Simulation: Blind Film #6

Sometimes blindness takes the form of someone being forced to see something one doesn't want to see—something painful…physically, emotionally, or both.

An electroretinograph (onomatopoeically abbreviated "ERG") is a test that measures the electrical responses of  cells in the retina—rods, cones, ganglions, and so on. When they administer it, they dose the patient with some very strong eyedrops that can dilate the pupils (and severely blur the vision) for up to three days. Then they pry the eyes open and insert an oversized contact lens attached to an electrode, along with several other electrodes that get taped to the face and scalp…that's the easy part. Next they subject the patient to three barrages of flashing lights: one minute of metronomic blue flashes (painful), one minute of metronomic red flashes (worse), and then 10 minutes of stroboscopic white light (unquantifiably bad), after which they remove the electrodes and the lens and repeat the whole thing with the other eye.

I've had the ERG three times in my life with varying results. In my teenage years between session #1 and #2, I saw Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange, about a gang of longjohn-wearing protopunk hooligans on a spree of what they termed "ultraviolence." To cure one of them of his psychopathic behavior, they strap him into a cinema seat, pry open his eyelids, and force him to watch footage of Nazi warcrimes while an orderly administers drops of fluid into his eyes, an experience that, from where I sat, was astonishingly like the ERG.

Sometimes blindness takes the form of someone being forced to see something one doesn't want to see—something painful…physically, emotionally, or both. That pain can be illuminating, and it can also be blinding. The line between the two is a fine one indeed.

Giving Up On Gardening?

My mom and I would go to her community garden plot on weekends. She grew flowers, rarely any edibles, save for some occasional snap peas that fruit in early spring. Years later I started my own vegetable garden in buckets on the porch roof outside my bedroom windows in a West Philly collective house, and then graduated to a community garden plot that I still have a few blocks from where I live. I've invested a lot of work in this plot, landscaping it, nurturing the soil, and planting crops strategically so that I can harvest food year round, all earning me compliments from other gardeners.

Gardening isn't easy for me, and because my eyesight is waning, it's gotten harder. Under the sun, down in the soil, I can't really see what's going on, what plants are what, and I get confused in the summer when tomato and squash vines revolt into tangles of wildness. A strategy I've adopted is inviting people to garden with me: Travis one year, Molly and Nick another, and then Alison, all of whom have moved away. Last season I gardened alone, and things went a bit amiss: cucumbers overripened, radishes grew huge and bitter, most of the tomatoes went to seed, and I'm not even sure what happened to the peppers, the garlic, and half the greens. And unlike doing things in my kitchen, I can't just draw the drapes to make the light conducive to work.

Now an email from a fellow gardener asks an important question: Will I keep my plot for the coming season? When I joined a decade ago plots were plentiful, but now we've a waitlist and I'd hate to deprive anyone from growing their own food. But giving up my garden plot would be giving up more than just my green thumbs: it would be me admitting defeat to this eye disease that (as you know if you'd read the rest of this blog) seeps into every facet of my life.

On the other hand, changes in ability are part of life, and accepting and accommodating for those changes is not a defeat but a victory—a triumph of human adaptation. So here's my question: What do I do? Do I pass my garden along to someone else in my community? Do I find another co-gardener to do more than their share of the work for the coming year? Do I try out all sorts of visors, tinted lenses and other assistive devices in hopes that it will make gardening more doable? Or is there some other option that I cannot see? Share your ideas in the comments below!

Blind Song #9: That's Doctor Sakamoto to you

The big hit when I asked friends for a list of songs that mention blindness:



 Ironies:

1. The hospital in the video is full of doctors, but nary an ophthalmologist.
2. The silent film era intertitles are more suited to the hearing impaired.
3. "A suitable case for treatment" refers to the film that I'm named after.

Thanks mom.

Retinal Readings

The reports are in from our retinal photography session! The verdict for my right eye is the presence "fine drusen" (those tiny yellow lipid deposits in the center of the retina) while the left gets "some geographic atrophy." While these diagnoses might seem like cause for a freakout, comparing my pics to online galleries of retinal porn (click at your own risk!) has me feeling in pretty good shape. I already know what my disease is and have a sense of where it's headed.

Oculus Dexter vs. Oculus Sinister—Who will win? 

What's more striking than the photos and what they mean, are the accompanying notes from the ophthalmologist and technician. Because reports like these usually remain in hands jutting out of labcoats, they tend to be about the patient (me) rather than to the patient (me again). While the labcoat-wearers here are all well intentioned and helpful, being passed these notes post-diagnosis makes me feel invisible—like a ghost eavesdropping on his own autopsy.

Also interesting is the technician's recommendation that, "Patient should continue regular follow-up care with their eye care provider." While this is again well-meaning, sound-seeming and gives the eye care industry some business, it's potentially unhelpful to the patient (yep, that's me again). Last time I completed a battery of tests over several visits to Will's Eye Institute, the ophthalmologist just said, "Looks like your rods are starting to dystrophy too," and then sent me on my way. These folks can tell me what's happening, but have never actually offered any support.

This is a big part of why we're doing this project, and why I'm really psyched to have a retinal photographer on board (and it's especially fab that she is also an artist and friend). The way we patients are treated (in both senses of the word) needs to change. Part of our research with this blog and the theatre piece that we're creating is to spark conversations around what that change could look like. How can eye care specialists go from being well-meaning to well- Add your thoughts in the comments below.

Blind Film #5: Scent of Machismo

Pacino plays the blind card to win Best Actor at 1992's Academy Awards. Scent of a Woman's pity party plot revolves around a macho ex-army colonel whose manhood has been besmirched by his disability. This scene's extra asset is a pre-gentrified view of Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood. You'd hit half of Etsy if you drove like this down there today:

My favorite part of this scene is at the end when the ex-army colonel uses his privilege to mask his disability. The same year this came out, Odd Squad's video for "Can't See It" also featured clips of a blind man driving, but unlike Al Pacino, MC Rob Quest is actually blind.

What Color Are My Clothes, Part 2

Update: The other day I bought a new hoodie, not really sure of its color, so I posted a swatch of it on this blog and asked for clues as to its hue. Someone wrote back saying it was mostly grey, and after hearing this I saw the hoodie as completely grey… Until today. 

This morning I was with my friend, wearing a red shirt and some maybe light grey or tan pants. When I put on the sweatshirt, my friend said, "How patriotic." Patriotic? "Yeah, you're wearing red, white and blue." Two pieces of news: My pants are off-white, and the sweatshirt is not grey, but definitively blue. 

With this new information, I now see my hoodie and as a vivid blue, when just a few hours ago it appeared as a drab grey, and a couple days back I was unsure of it being any particular color. My friend's certainty has stddenly cemented my certainty: it is blue. And that's all my eyes can see.

Stand Clear of the (Closing) Doors, Please

Today in Manhattan, the Uptown ① Train announced all of its stops. The Downtown Ⓐ said none. I tell you, riding the MTA without missing your stop can be a gamble when you're visually impaired.

Another gamble was getting into the PS163 where my friend was teaching dance. All doors are exits, but only one is an entrance, and nowadays a grown man walking around school grounds trying door after door looks sketchy as hell. Had I done the glasses-and-cane act, no problem—everybody wants to help the blind man. But even those who don't show up that way might still have trouble finding the sign that might be there saying, "ENTER HERE" so instead I just stand snowblind outside, waiting till 2:45 when all the kids are gone and safe from weird men fumbling around in the snow.

Owls?

Owls.

Sonar in Stereo

"When a sighted child gets hurt, we consider it to be unfortunate.

When a blind child gets hurt, we consider it to be tragic."

Before you read any further, put on your headphones and listen to this radio story from 2011. That was when I first learned of Daniel Kish.

Kish, who is blind, uses echolocation to create a mental image of his surroundings in the same way that bats or dolphins use their own sonar to navigate through their various dark corners of the world. This interview is truly amazing, not just because it highlights Kish's ability to ride a bike, but also because Guy Raz recorded the whole thing with a binaural microphone, meaning that when I listen to it on headphones, the surround sound effect makes it so that I can actually sense what Kish senses when he echolocates. I literally get the picture.

"So when I walk into a new area, the first thing I do is I take stock of the most prominent features. So in this particular area, the most prominent features would be that building, the umbrella in the middle of this table, and the tree behind me, and the canopy that covers this area. Now, further away to our left is another building that's slightly further away. And this building has a much more defined reflection than this building, which suggests that, a) the building must be at some sort of angle relative to us. and, b) that it must have more texture to it—pillars, alcoves, I don't know, maybe balcony structures."

Listen to that on headphones and you'll see what he's saying.

Kish got much greater exposure when Invisibilia and This American Life co-broadcast this hour-long story about him in early 2015. While it's clear that NPR loves him, a lot of traditionalists in the blind community are a bit freaked out by what he does and his advocacy that other blind folks follow his path. It brings to mind the hatred from the American Optometrical Association toward Dr. William H. Bates for his 1920 book that recommended people improve their vision without using glasses. What Bates was to those of us with low vision, Kish is to folks with no vision. In Kish's words:

"We have supporters, and we have opponents. Any time you have an established convention, the one who comes along and says that it can be done differently, it can be done better, it can be done faster, that person is seen as the renegade. And we are, I think, seen as renegades in many instances. We really want to bring the power of action back into the hands of the consumer, of blind individuals and of their families."

Links:

• Guy Raz's 9-minute piece on Daniel Kish for Morning Edition
• Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller's hour-long piece from Inviibilia/This American Life

More about Kish, Bates, rods, cones and the authors of these posts soon to come.

Blind Film #4: I'm Bah-Lined!

Anchorman 2?
Amazing.
Watch the scene.
Then read this review on the American Foundation for the Blind's website.

What Color Are My Clothes?

I like wearing bright colors. Probably because I have an easier time telling them apart. Today I bought a hoodie and I have no idea what color it is. Here's a close up. Clue me into the color in the comments below.

Face Blind Sometimes

Self portrait by face blind artist Chuck Close.

There was this person that I used to see around. But more often, she saw me.

When we'd meet, she knew who I was, but I didn't recognize her, and I saw her take offense, like I didn't find her memorable or important. But really I just couldn't see her that well and needed some clueing in as to who she was.

Someone had told her that I had prosopagnosia, better known as face blindness, a neurological condition where people cannot differentiate people's faces. True that many people with low vision cannot distinguish faces, but this is not prosopagnosia. What I have begins in the eye as an optical distortion, whereas neurological face blindness is a function of the brain, not optics. Even close friends, family members and loved ones can be indistinguishable to people with prosopagnosia, but I do recognize those familiar to me and can tell them apart, including my friends who are identical twins. It's people who I don't know so well that I get confused, and that optical conundrum does indeed become a cerebral muddle.

Despite the difference in diagnosis, prosopagnosia and low vision also share some characteristics, particularly on the social level. People can hide from those of us who have either condition and often wonder who it is we're talking to. The face blind fellow in this Radiolab segment from their show on "Falling" likens his experience to having someone "disappear into the crowd":

Here's a more extensive conversation about prosopagnosia with neuroscientist Oliver Sachs and portrait artist Chuck Close. Close's artistic method of breaking up images into pixelated squares is not unlike how I put together faces when I look at them. I can also relate to what both men say about social strategies around not recognizing people:

Funny how at the end of this segment, Sachs and Close reveal that they share another characteristic: they both see through only one eye, though Sachs has lost his vision in that eye, and Close shuts one eye to prevent himself from seeing double. More about when and why I see through one eye in a future post.

Does This Help You or Hurt You?

At the table in my friend's kitchen, she turned on the lamp.

"Does this help you or hurt you?"

Great question. "Neither," I said.
The question was more important than the answer. 

At second look, I saw that the lamp made colors in the room more vivid, and although it didn't affect my vision, the brighter colors elicited more cheer. The lamp also helped my friend, and that in turn helped me. 

So I changed my answer: "It helps."
But it's still the question that's important. 

Awkward Encounters in Academia

School is a hotbed for low vision mishaps. For me, ages 4-18 were full of socio-academic failure that dissuaded me from entering college altogether. Now that I'm suddenly in grad school with an adult grasp of navigating all sorts of social red tape, these mishaps take on a more situation-comedic (or even slapstick) quality. Here are few examples from a weeklong residency at Goddard College:

1. Arriving on Friday, I got greeted with a warm hug. Thought she was a fellow student that I sort of knew, then realized she's someone I helped hire and work with all the time.
2. Saturday in the cafeteria, a hand directed me toward a pair of professors. I walked over, said hello, then realized they were student friends. It took me 10 seconds to identify one of them, another 20 for the other. I know both people really well.
3. Graduating students left Sunday, but on Monday I kept seeing some of them sitting at dinner, even though I knew they weren't there.
4. There are these three students I visually confuse with each other. I hang out with each, but they are never with each other, so whenever I talk to one it takes me a while to figure out who she is.
5. Tuesday night I sought out a student and saw her walking down the path with a friend. Running up to her, she looked at me, wondering why I'd run up to her. It took several seconds to determine she wasn't the student I sought, but my advisor from last semester.
6. In group on Wednesday everyone sat in a circle of chairs except for one student across the room who knelt on the floor writing on a flip chart. When that student walked in through a different door, I figured out what I saw to be her was actually a hoodie hanging from a doorknob. Throughout the meeting I kept seeing a person over there, knowing full well it was just a hoodie.
7. At the Art Crawl I looked at many pieces that I couldn't really see.
8. I called out to and caught up with a professor I wanted to talk to. As I began conversation, I gradually realized that she wasn't the professor that I thought I'd called out to. I covered this up by awkwardly changing the subject to be relevant to her work.
9. Thursday night I emceed a 2-hour cabaret not knowing how many people were in the audience because I saw no one. This always happens. Everywhere.
10. My eyes are tired from spending time on this computer. Good night!

Blind Film #3: O'Brother, O'Dyssey

How many stories feature the blind seer? This one from O Brother Where Art Thou? is based on Tiresias in the Odyssey:

Blind Film #2: The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulan (and her blind friend)

I once sat with a friend by the lake in Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, and she described for me everything that I couldn't see—the bugs, the birds, the way the light played with the water. Looking at this clip, I wonder if she got the idea from Amélie. It's a good idea. Watch what happens after she leaves her blind friend:

Blind Film #1: Golden Age

So far I've posted several songs that reference or portray blindness. Now let's turn to cinema. Here's a memorable moment from L'Age d'Or (1930), the second collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali:

Outing My Self

I'm starting to talk about this more: this project about vision loss, and about my vision loss in general.

Today somebody said, "Are you alright?" because My face was this close to the screen in the computer lab. "Do you know that I'm legally blind?" I replied, and we had a great conversation.

Someone else asked, "What do you see when you look at me?" and it was interesting to explain how I saw her coat, her pants and her hair, how her bits of her eyeglasses glinted into focus while pieces of her face formed into some sort of expression. Then the rest of the room: the office desk phone and laptop were easy to identify, but the tape dispenser and cafeteria glass wore shrouds of ambiguity until I walked over to see who they were. But that dark thing—the one right under the clock—I still have no idea. 

Sometimes seeing (clearly) means doing some legwork. Get up. Take a walk. Look. See?

Orbital Ouch, Forgotten Binoculars

At grad school in Vermont. So much snow from below and so many fluorescents above make photokeratitus inevitable. That, and too little sleep, makes my orbits sore.

Everyone around me is oblivious to what I'm going through. A few know that I can't see who they are and take steps to fill me in. Otherwise I'm shy to out myself. I packed binoculars, but seem to forget to have them in pocket as I flit from presentation to presentation, unable to see anyone's work. 

Why do I do this? Why don't I? Perhaps the pain of seeing is too great today. So in my seat I shut my eyes and try not to fall into a much needed sleep.