Why I'm Paying for Typos

Of all the cool things that eye doctors use to test people's vision, none is a better indicator of what's going on in the retina than this simple grid devised by Professor Marc Amsler in 1945.

Cover one eye and focus the other on the dot in the center of the grid:

What do you see? And what don't you see? What's great about the Amsler Grid is that we know that it's a grid—a big square made up of smaller, evenly-sized squares separated by horizontal and vertical lines. But is that what you see? Try it with the other eye.

When I look at an Amsler Grid, here are the sorts of things that happen for me:

To my eyes, entire line segments are missing and others are distorted into moving, twisting shaped, indicating blind spots in the retina. Some of this is normal—the optic nerve occupies a chunk of space in the human retina causing a blind spot in everybody's eyes. The Amsler Grid lets us know where that spot is, and any distortion is what the brain does to fill in the gap.

My grid is bit more extreme because of the dystrophy in my retinal cells, and while the Amsler Grid demonstrates that clearly, it's also happening to everything I look at, including more irregular shapes like printed words. 

If you've read this blog, you've probably seen my typos and articles about them, and this week I had two more that were costly: The poster for CONES came back with "donation" spelled "doantion". No big deal—I'd only printed a dozen. But when 500 palm cards showed up with the wrong date on them, I had to fork out for a reprint:

JUNE 24 = WRONG DATE

JUNE 23 = CORRECT DATE

I had three different people proofread the graphic before I sent it off. No spelling mistakes, just an incorrect date that wasn't spotted. Anyway, they're back from the printer and they look great. Hope you can make it to the show. Just don't show up on the 24th.

Double Dissed...Again

Today, I fell off the stage. Twice. I can't really walk right now.

This happened because I was working blindfolded and tried setting things in ne places. Doing that threw off my spatial awareness.

Good news: My leg doesn't feel broken, just sprained. And I'm enjoying the irony of giving myself a disability while making a show about having a disability. 

Ears ≈ Eyes

I have a friend who's losing his hearing. He just visited me for a couple of days. Yesterday we were having lunch and talking when he kept turning his head and bending his opposite ear in order to hear me, so I said, "Do you want to switch places so that I'm facing your better ear?" We switched and then talked about it, and I told him stories about the visual equivalent where I sit at a lunch table facing someone and if the light is behind them I'll figure out some way for us to switch places. If they know me, I'll ask them, but if it's someone I do't know so well, I may have to do what amounts to turning my head and bending an ear.

So many of his stories about passing as a hearing person reflected my own in passing as sighted. We both have difficulty understanding everything that transpires in meetings. We are both sometimes interpreted as being aloof, distant, or just straight up assholes who don't acknowledge others, but really we just didn't see or hear something or someone. Sure, he could be brandishing an ear trumpet, and me sunglasses and cane, but there's a whole other set of baggage that comes attached to that, a passing as fully disabled and then being disregarded for a whole other set of reasons.

There ought to be a blog, and a theatre piece, about such stuff.

One Month Away

CONES: a solo show about vampires, vision loss, and ice cream (and the impetus for this blog) opens one month from today. Here's a peek at the front of the show flyer:

And the back:

You can join the event on Facebook here, see it on the Rotunda's website here, and on the Mediums' website here.

Hope to see you there!

Seeing Spots

Dr. Shinobu Ishihara created some of the most beautiful designs of the 20th century. Large spots composed of seemingly random patterns of smaller dots in various diameters and colors. I looked at them occasionally as a kid, wishing that I could have them to keep, as wall paper or curtains or clothing. But the only time that I was permitted to look at Dr. Ishihara's artwork was when I visited the eye doctor.

To me Ishihara's colorblindness tests have the chaotically gorgeous aesthetics of chameleon skin: a jumble of tiny scales whose pigmentation tends to change over time. But someone with better working cones receptors might see numbers or shapes embedded in these designs.

Do you see numerals embedded in these dots? I don't, at least not on the examples I've given here. I do a suggestion of numerals in some of these patterns, but in none of these could I tell you (or an eye doctor) what they are.

For folks with fully functioning cones, this example can clue you in as to what I do see. On the far right is how a person with X-linded reg-green colorblindness might see an Ishihara image with mixed pigment dots—that's not what I see. I'm the example in the middle—"partially colorblind"—and, truth be told, the leftmost image and the center image look identical to me.

When was your last Ishihara test? You can take one version of the test here. 38 plates, starting with number identification and then moving onto counting squiggly lines. It tracks all your answers and then grades each one as "correct", "partially correct" or "wrong", comprising an overall rating of red-green color blindness. I felt like my color blindness was strong, but it rated me as "moderate". If you take the test, I'd love to know your results and experiences. Leave them in the comments below.

Fonts for Flyers

What font comes to mind when making a show about eyes? Snellen, of course. Everyone will recognize the "E":

But this particular Snellen font is a bit off. The "E" is right, as are the "C" and the "O", but Snellen eye charts only use certain letters, so that really pathetic "N" is just Snellen's "Z" turned on its side. And the "S" they borrowed from a sans serif eye chart font called Sloan:

Better, but neither the Sloan font nor the title really says "this is a show about vision loss". I could hand-draw the missing Snellen letters, but unless I'm laying things out like an eye chart, it's not worth it.

I also came a across a font called "Colorblind". True to its name, it has no color:

But if I add color to it, it recalls Dr. Ishihara's well-known colorblindness test and then the name makes more sense. Here it is with our image:

Posters and postcards coming soon...

Bowling Blind

Last year I inherited my grandfather's shoes. But it was my grandmother who gave me her eyes and the cone dystrophy that's at the center of this blog.

Grandpa Dan had been a league bowler in Illinois. He'd once bowled a perfect game. But I have never and will never bowl a perfect game, because I grew up in Boston. And that means I grew up with candlepin bowling. 

I could wax nostalgic on this great New England pastime, but this is a blog about vision loss. I'll let this vintage article about candlepin bowling explain the game to all you barnies out there. And here's a photo of the candlepin lanes I once called home in Davis Square:

I started bowling when I was six, and even then I had trouble seeing the tall, skinny candlepins. Had I ventured up the lane, I would have understood their triangular layout, but from far away they looked like a set of clenched teeth waiting to be knocked out. And knock them out I did, like some maniac dentist who hurls 2-pound marbles into his patients' open mouths until someone tells him that the game is over. When it came time to tally the score, I usually thought my 6 was a 7, not because I was a cheater or a spoilsport, but because the ninepin was hidden behind the three and I just couldn't see.

On a trip to Boston last week, I went candlepinning with my mom. I know she reads this blog, and probably wasn't thinking of how much my vision has waned when she told me that I could do better every time I missed my pins altogether. I thought of my Grandpa Dan, the tenpin (a.k.a. "big ball") league bowler whose shoes I'd inherited, and how he'd also lost his vision, only it was suddenly when age-related macular degeneration set in. And I thought of how even into his 90s, even with a white cane and dark glasses, Grandpa Dan continued to bowl. 

So I, now, standing in my grandfather's shoes, wearing my grandmother's cone dystrophic eyes, breathe with ball in hand, tapping into all my senses. Legs run forward, arm swings back, and I bowl. I bowl a strike, and then blow it in the next frame with a gutter ball. I score a 7, but the now automated scoring system tells me it's actually a 6. No one to argue with, just balls to bowl, pins to fell, shoes to wear, and eyes that see differently with the passing of each frame.

I.D. Expired

The MBTA's 5-year pass for the visually impaired sure comes in handy whenever I visit Boston. And I now know the sound the machine makes once that pass has expired. I also know that, despite the signs posted at Back Bay Station, that the office to get a new card has moved to Downtown Crossing. A lovely walk across Copley Square, the Public Garden and Boston Common took me there. They gave me a number, and then a new card.

See you in 5 years.

The Problem With Beige

I usually practice yoga on a mat made from jute, plant fiber that's used to make burlap. I just acquired some pants, also made of natural fiber, that I practice in, both the mat and pants are similar in tone to my skin:

Sometimes when I'm practicing and the light is a certain way, I cannot see my own hands or feet. And now with these pants my legs have disappeared as well. 

Fanning Flames

I made my first protest sign when I was very little. There was this impending tax cut called Proposition 2½ that would impact public schools, and my mom and her friends were against it. My sign, drawn in red and orange crayon, had a picture of a flame and the words, "Proposition 2½ is like a flame: it fires people."

The next morning, parents and children and teachers gathered for the protest. We marched around an intersection. We blocked traffic. One driver got so pissed that he rammed through the crowd and carried a guy away on his hood.

I've always gone to protests. It's part of the American tradition. It's what we do—what we've always done when our government isn't working for us. We've refused to pay taxes. We've thrown bales of tea into the harbor. We've freed slaves. We've marched and stood and sat where we've been told we couldn't march or stand or sit. We've decreed the right of the people to alter or to abolish any destructive form of government, and we've done that. And we continue to do that.

150 years after the abolition of slavery and 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement, people of color are still getting a raw deal in the United States. Police and courts and jails carry on persecuting, prosecuting and executing African-Americans at much higher rates than other citizens. Folks are fed up with this, and they are protesting. So yesterday I marched. And people blocked traffic. And police came and I saw cruisers and horses and nightsticks. And I heard sirens and helicopters and shouting. 

Having low vision makes being at protests a little confusing. I can't really tell you everything that happened yesterday, because I couldn't see much. Sometimes this makes things scary, and sometimes my ignorance might save me.

Several years ago I was at a manifestação in Brazil where activists were publicly occupying a building. The police came and the crowd I was with suddenly shouted and ran away. I had no idea why. I'd only been there for a week, was just learning their language, their history, their laws, their culture. So I didn't know that Brazil's polícia militar can just pull out their guns and shoot them. And if they did this, I didn't see it. I just stood there. And if the tiras did draw their guns and I just stood there, they must have thought that I wasn't running because I wasn't a troublemaker, so they ignored me.

As I see less, I go out and protest less, but I think it should be the other way around. Even though no one is "doing" blindness to me, things are getting harder. And when things get harder, we need to raise our voices more. Yet as time marches on, I access fewer services for the visually impaired, not more. What's happened? Have I become the visual equivalent of a complacent liberal whose flames of discontent have been reduced to little embers burning dimly in the back of my eyes? Or has this blog become my protest sign that I waggle around from the safety of an armchair?

Happy May Day. See you in the street.