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.

Sympathy for the Bevel

I was helping some friends move a couple hundred folding chairs. We hauled them from a van onto a loading dock, and then put them on carts, which we wheeled onto a freight elevator, up one floor, down some halls and into the big room where they'd live. The carts that we used were an assortment of dollies, flatbeds, tall bins on wheels, and grocery carriages from bygone supermarkets.

"Don't use that cart." someone said, pointing to a three-foot flatbed pushcart. "It's no good."

But that no-good cart managed to follow us, loaded up with piles of metal chairs that fell off and had to be picked up by other carts. After finishing the first round, I flipped over the no-good cart and saw the problem: one of its four big casters was loose, making it bevel in ways that prevented it rolling smoothly. I could've fixed it had we a pair of crescent wrenches.

We loaded all the carts back into the elevator and brought them down for another lot of chairs. Someone said, "Let's leave that cart here. It sucks."

"I looked at the cart," I said, "and I feel differently than I did before. I don't think it sucks, it's just injured."

Would anyone else—say someone less handy or unversed in dis/ability justice—have felt the same way about this cart as I did? Or do I overpersonify inanimate objects?

Triple Dissed

Funny how this year, as I've been focusing on my primary dis/ability, I've taken on some others for short stretches of time. Back in May I was walking with a cane for a couple weeks, and in April I lost my voice for a few days. And now I can't hear out of one ear due to an infection brought on by a flu that had me totally immobile for a spell.

Not seeing so well can be a bit disorienting, but hearing every sound come at me from one sound only amplifies that experience. Usually when someone calls my name, I know the general direction the voice is coming from and can wave over that way regardless of whether or not I see who it is. But that's blown for now. 

I'm realizing why a lot of people adapting to shifts in ability prefer to stay home: it's a source of embarrassment, a pain to explain, and very vulnerable territory both physically, socially, and emotionally. Going to the clinic to get my ears examined turned me into a three-ring circus of dis/ability, performed multiple times for receptionists and medical assistants and doctors. I need help filling out the form and repeat what you said please and boy do my joints ache right now. 

I've learned not to apologize for any of this stuff: I never say "sorry" for not being able to see because that's not my fault. Some of the people who work at these places are learning not to apologize either, and that's good because my dis/abilities are not their fault either. An apology is an empty substitute for help and as a person with a dis/ability (or two, or three, depending on the day) I'll take a singular act of help over a hundred apologies.

Good news is: flu is gone, no more body aches, but I still can only hear out of half of my ears. And of course I can half-see out of both of my eyes.

Stay tuned!

Watch My Bag

Who is the thief in this coffeeshop?

It's not your fault. It might be mine.

In a café some months ago a friend asked me to watch her bag while she went to the restroom. What was to watch? Especially in the years since that corner of our neighborhood got gentrified, right? No one goes into other people's purses anymore, especially in a bustling, brightly lit café. So I may have gone up to the counter to refill my tea, but only for a moment.

And then, a year later, came CONES, the show I made about my vision loss. And my friend saw it and said, "Now I know how that happened—How I asked you to watch my bag and all my credit cards got stolen out of it."

Huh?

"Yeah, I guess I shouldn't asked you to do that."

Hmm...

Let's return to the scene of the crime: A table at a coffee shop (that's what we used to call them before gentrification) with two chairs facing each other just three feet apart. My friend asks me to watch her bag, which is just three feet from my face, and I have no trace of being visually impaired—I am passing for able-bodied and, in all honesty, would clearly see if anyone were to start rifling through that bag for anything. Still, 30 minutes later, sometime after we'd had coffee and tea, my friend went to use her credit card at the grocery store, and it was gone.

Conclusions: People still steal stuff in gentrified neighborhoods. No one stole that card out from under my nose, they stole it from behind my back. And this did not happen because of my dis/ability, it happened because I got careless for a moment, and it only takes a moment for someone to steal something out of someone's bag.

Sorry about that.

So, who wants to go get coffee with me?
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Photo of "Awaken the Mud" by Beth Nixon. See her work at www.ramshackleenterprises.net.

Spicy Ally

I love cooking. I taught myself to cook when I went vegan more than 20 years ago. A big part of that was learning how to use spices. But as my vision has waned, I use fewer spices in my cooking, mostly because I can't see the labels on the spice jars.

This week a friend who was staying with me changed all that with some masking tape, a magic marker, and a little time spent organizing:

Big Change

Sometimes the clerk doesn't tell me my total.

"How much is it?"

The clerk points to the display on the register. I can't read it. In my wallet are a bunch of smaller bills that would probably cover it, but I hand over the bigger bills and let them make change.

I could say, "Can you read me the total? I can't see so well."

But I never do.

I'm Certainly Not Stoned

Under bright lights, I have to squint. Especially fluorescents. Like these at Target:

Clerk to me: "You seem tired. "

Me to clerk: "It's the lights."

Clerk to my friend: "I hope he's not driving because I don't believe him that he's just tired."

My friend to clerk: "No, it's the lights."

Not the first time that this has happened. And probably not the last.

We're Getting Where?

The motto for Philly's public transit system, "SEPTA, we're getting there," has most riders rolling their eyes. And even any sighted person who's tried to transfer between lines at City Hall knows how bad SEPTA's signage is. Imagine what it's like when you can't see. SEPTA is required to put up Braille signage to help blind folks find their way. I spotted this one on a column at 13th Street, formerly known as Juniper Station. This tiny plaque was on just one—and only one—of about 50 columns in the station, and the odds of a blind person ever stumbling across it are far lower than 1 in 50. I doubt that anyone who'd actually benefit from this sign has ever found it. So I looked around for others.

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This one's placement is good: right at the edge of a wall where folks disembark from the trolleys. But its text is confusing—remember, the station was renamed "13th Street", so blind visitors to the city would be very confused to read this plaque that says Juniper Station.

And then there was this one:

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Hot Noir

After a hiatus, I'm reopening this blog to resume reporting on my own vision loss and share news around the solo show I've made about it. One piece of news is that I'll perform the show again on December 6th. Get info for that here.

Another bit of news is that I'll be sharing space at a collectively run studio in a big factory building. The building's management has simplified the heating situation by installing pellet stoves for all their tenants—just buy your own pellets and you can heat your own space. Here's what the stove's control panel display looks like:

The contrast on this screen is far to low for me to see, meaning that I can't operate the stove. I wondered if taking a picture of it would make it visible, and then saw a camera setting on my phone called "noir". It made the display look like this:

Totally visible to me! I always loved film noir for the same reasons. The high contrast between black and white is easier for me to see.

Not Quite Face-Blind, Not Quite Blind

Last night we opened CONES to a big and friendly crowd. I can't really see anyone during the show (and if you've seen CONES or kept up with this blog, then you know why), so I invited everyone to come say hi afterward. Even when people I know come up to me one by one, it can take me a moment to figure out who folks are, especially people I don't see often. The irony is that I've written this blog and made this show about being in between sighted and blind, and immediately afterward everyone gets to test it out—each of them once, me over and over again.

A few months back I wrote about prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, a neurological condition that I do not have. Here's another podcast about face blindness from the excellent Aussie/Kiwi programme Paper Radio. In this one a guy name John shares firsthand accounts of the split between intelligence and emotion that comes with face-blindness. Again, even though our conditions differ, I relate strongly to John's experiences, especially in his having an undiagnosed condition and then discovering what it is, and also about the process of passing and having a coming-out ceremony.

• Download audio

CONES runs for two more nights in Philly. Details here.

A Battlefield of Bad Eyes

"If blind students can earn college degrees, surely we can make arrangements so that myopic children can see the blackboard without resorting to glasses. They can be allowed to sit in the front rows, the teacher can write larger, the blackboard can be better lighted." — Donald S. Rehm, The Myopia Myth, 1981, 2001.

In building out a science report scene for CONES, I researched some stats on eyeglasses. Though the numbers don't always add up and vary from source to source, the consensus is that most adults now wear glasses, and that the number of North Americans with myopia (nearsightedness) has just about doubled in the past 50 years. Most sources agree that the uptick in myopia is due to people spending more time indoors looking at screens, and that more "traditional" activities (i.e., hunting and farming) would be a way for people to prevent myopia.


What people disagree on is what to do to treat myopia. Modern optometry leans toward "correction" through prescription, and a lot the websites advocating for this are run by prescription lens companies and optometrists who do not mention vision therapy and lifestyle changes that could help strengthen the eyes. Meanwhile, more people are asking, "Do glasses make my eyes worse?" The optometry professionals at the top of a search results who say, "No," primarily defend glasses as a solution by citing age-related presbyopia, or farsightedness resulting from the harding of our lenses (the natural ones in our eyes just behind the cornea). But what about the myopia that more and more of us are experiencing earlier in life?

Donald S. Rehm, an engineer and founder of the Myopia Prevention Association, has an interesting treatise on how corrective lenses can make myopia worse. Rehm presents some good optical science and relates it to eye physiology to demonstrate how lenses typically prescribed for nearsighted people can do a lot of damage in attempting to correct a person's vision. While Rehm's view (and earlier, Dr. William H. Bates, who advocated for getting rid of glasses) is unpopular in mainstream optometry, it opens up many questions that many conventional eye doctors have long been silencing: Why has myopia been on the rise? And why do most people with myopia need to get stronger lenses every year?

My experience as a person with myopia is that optometry has been a battleground between these two camps. People like Rehm and Bates (who don't fully agree with each other), or vision therapists like Meir Schneider, are cast to the fringes for their outspokenness (and it doesn't help that most of these guys' websites look like they were designed by 8th graders in the mid-1990s). Many other functional optometrists share these dissenting views, but have learned to keep quiet about it in order to continue working. This is very upsetting to those of us with severe myopia, left as casualties on this battlefield, not knowing whom to turn to for support. This blog and the piece I'm making are a step toward finding that support.

"31 Eyes"

I have a confession to make: This is not the first blog I've made about vision. It is the second.

In 2010 I wrote a month-long blog called 31 Eyes (one for each of day of the month) that featured daily tips toward improving one's vision. See it here.

I based a lot of 31 Eyes' material on the work of natural vision therapists like William H. Bates and Meir Schneider. Today in rehearsal we looked at one of Schneider's "Yoga for the Eyes" videos. This one:


It's amazing to revisit this work and to remember how helpful it was in bringing relaxation to my eyes as well as improvements to my vision. 5 years after making 31 Eyes and 18 years after adopting Schneider's methods, I say watch this video, have a look at the blog, and try these exercises. We might also be doing some together during the show.

CONES on the Radio

Jonathan Pfeffer recorded me for the NPR show The Pulse. Listen here.

Unproofread = Unprofessional?

I've started sending things I write to proofreaders. This cone dystrophy of mine is a recipe for tons of typos. But I may need proofreading for more than just the things I write.

A snippet of CONES premiered at FringeArts' last night alongside other works in progress. They'd sent me this tech schedule:

 ...which was a little small, so I enlarged it on my screen:

I noted "3:30" on my calendar and asked my ride to come at rehearsal at 2:00. She watched a run and at 2:30 we packed up to hit the road before 3:00, but with bad traffic we loaded in at 3:35. The tech folks asked for my lighting and sound cues, and then told me that my tech time had been from 3:00 to 3:30.

How did I mess this up? I'd registered what I'd seen in the email and confirmed the time with collaborators. I felt unprofessional and undependable, but I swear I'd read 3:30. So I re-examined the original email and scanned around a little more to discover this:

Zooming in earlier, I'd only seen the end time for my tech slot and thought it was the start time.

Stuff like this always happens and I often feel like a goat at a banquet. Do I need a secretary to handle all my scheduling and other affairs? Or do I need to tell everyone, "Hey, I can't see so well. If I screw up, it might be due to that, not me just being a flake."

Last night's saving grace was that the power went out and the whole show happened with the audience shining 100 flashlights onto the stage. Everything looked great and the piece about vampires and vision loss especially benefitted from the circumstances.

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...