Blind Love #2: I'm sort of seeing someone

Sometimes I'm dating someone. Sometimes I'm not. And often we're somewhere in between.

In that in-between state, someone I was dating once said, "I was across the street from your house. I could see you, but you couldn't see me."

This difference in vision explains a lot. About seeing relationships differently. And about existing perpetually in the in-between. Seeing someone...sort of.

Raod Cone Connoisseurs

Just like a gang of off-duty

cops, these cones shoot the

breeze over by the lamppost. 

My perception of road cones completely changed when I started making theatre with them. On the street I began perceiving common pylons as a population of inanimate actors whose job is to keep people and situations safe from each other. One the one hand they protect people from temporary urban circumstances, such as potholes or worksites, on the other hand they try to protect things as frail as wet paint or cement from the blemishes of oblivious humans. Like citified scarecrows, road cones exist as a scattered phalanx of passive uniformed guards, bearing two reflective stripes on their bright orange coats that silently say, "Hey! Watch it buddy!"

But this clean system of clean orange cones neatly demarcating messy situations is pretty imperfect. Not every street that needs a cone has one—sometimes the pothole, wet cement, or other hazard lives unguarded indefinitely. Conversely, not every cone on the street is on active duty, for after the pothole's filled and the cement's dried, workers often drive off and leave their cones behind for citizens to ignore, appropriate, or maybe make into art. What happens then is the intended job of the common road cone gets taken less seriously in a Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf sense: danger is not always signified with a road cone, and road cones do not always signify danger.

What are they doing
behind that plant?

There is someone in Philadelphia who cares about the job of the common road cone enough to tweet and post photos about it. Here's an article on her, and here's her Twitter feed. I love her perspective as an urban planner who invites an eye for the theatricality of these street scenes. And it's nice to know that I'm not the only one personifying inanimate objects. Stay tuned for a follow-up on this post in the near future.

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.

A Crossing Conundrum

In recent years I've seen several cities reclaiming their streetscapes for pedestrians. Half a block from me there's this 5-way intersection that was difficult to cross until a city project expanded the corners and demarcated them with big colorful chunks of granite and these 3-foot wide flower pots with all sorts of plants growing in them. The shorter distance between corners makes for safer street crossing, and I even a sense of ownership as a pedestrian when I sit on the granite slabs with friends surrounded by foliage.

This winter they've been ripping up the corner to do some work on the pipes below the street. When I went to cross this morning, I was confused, not so much because of the bulldozers and road cones and caution tape, but because the giant pots and obelisks had shifted to make room for the work. As I spent time trying to navigate the confusion, I realized that my ability to "see" at that intersection is based mostly on memory. Although I could not draw a map of where those pots and rocks normally are, I've become accustomed to having them as markers of place and safe passage. Move them around and I don't know where I am in relation to what.

Blind Car

I can see cars, but never the people inside them, so if someone makes hand motions or other signs from the driver's seat, that communication does not reach me. Tonight I stood on a corner motioning for a car to go, but it wouldn't move. I waved my hands vigorously like a traffic cop, and then amped it up into curtsies and bows, eventually genuflecting gestures that conjured a virtual street-wide red carpet for this car to drive upon. What was the driver doing? I have no idea. The car did nothing. In fact, I'm still standing on that freezing curb, waiting for the car to go.