In my attempts to find a place where I can be useful or at least pay the bills, I have done a wide variety of jobs and have dabbled in many hobbies. I have had trouble fitting in because of being one of about 8% of the population who are visually impaired or blind and my inability to make up my mind.
It is my wide variety of experience, my desire to tell stories, and my somewhat unique perspective that motivates me to share with others. So, everything here is all me. Welcome to my head. It is a cluttered place filled with tangents and dingy alleyways of thought on many topics. Pretty much unedited and relatively unfiltered.
Finding and Keeping Friends When You Are Visually Impaired
I believe that my temperament is to be more reclusive as a whole but I do have friends. Some of them I consider good friends. I would say that as long as you have some friends you are never really alone, no matter how far away they are. Good friends will find you and attempt to keep in touch with you no matter your, or their, life situation. Good friends will strike up a conversation as though no time has passed, even if the last time they had conversed was years ago. Good friends will ask you how you are doing and actually listen to your answer, even when it delves into the minutia of medical difficulty and of course they will expect the same from you in turn!
Even the most social of us have very few good, close friends. This is normal. Being a good friend is hard work and if you attempt to be a good friend to everyone you will have no time for yourself, your job, your family or even your Chia Pet.
Before the pandemic, before the Internet even, it was often difficult to find friends. Many people collected friends from work, from church or from any number of social events that we managed to drag ourselves to. Finding friends takes time and hard work. It can also be quite expensive, depending on where you are looking.
As a visually impaired person, I find how you meet new friends even more mysterious than how you might attract, or repel, a date. Of course there is the basic shared interest. I have never understood how we go from, “I’m talking to you because we are both here” to “let’s meet outside of this.” I think that part of my lack of understanding comes from my visual impairment. I miss all but the largest of physical signals and even when I notice something I may not understand the reason behind the action. This makes it harder for well-sightd people to deal with. I do not send or receive many of the expected signals. This makes it harder for blind and visually impaired people to form and maintain friendships.
So, this is one reason I have had so many misfit friends. There are many people who do not fit into normal social norms, for whatever reason. Some of them are legally blind, some are in other ways physically disabled and some others just never did pay close enough attention to others to learn how to be socially acceptable. During my first years at university, 1990 to 1996, we did not talk about Autism Spectrum Disorder as much as we do now or social anxiety but I already knew several people who exhibited symptoms. I have had better luck being friends with people who for whoever reason don’t fit in with the popular kids.
I am fine with this.
There is one thing that does make me fairly unique. I do not only look for people who think like me. I sure do not look for people who look like me. Something I learned fairly early on is that if your friends think too much like you, or only share the same interests as you, get boring really fast. It is rather like visiting the same restaurant week after week. Even if you only go there once a week, you eventually have tried most everything on the menu. Or, even worse, you only eat the same thing each time you go.
That is not me.
Variety and diversity may add complexity but it also adds, well, variety and diversity. You learn new things, have new experiences and form new connections. If all of your friends are you then you become less flexible, less adaptable, less tolerant and I can not have that.
So, look at the people you keep as friends. Are they you in the way they think, what they say? Try to branch out. It will help you. This brings me to my next topic.
Inertia: Not Only for Physics
A few days ago the weather was nice enough to open the shed and bring out the bikes to get them ready for use now that the weather is warming up. Despite the day being warmer and sunny, I did not want to expend the energy. I wanted to sit around, reading magazines and watching my videos. Just like I have been doing most of the winter.
I got up off my duff and did it anyway. It started me thinking about inertia.
Inertia is the tendency for something to remain at rest until it is acted upon by an external force. That is, the dishes will not wash themselves. Okay, that is a bit absurd but you get the idea. If you leave a rock alone it will sit there until someone else comes along and moves it.
We usually talk about inertia as a physical thing but the idea also works for mental as well. Let us revisit those unwashed dishes as an example.
There may be good physical reasons why you will not do the dishes right now. Perhaps you are unable to stand or you have broken a finger. Those could be good reasons why not to do the dishes. I have none of those issues and my visual impairment does not drastically change my ability to wash dishes. I do no better or worse than most, I believe.
Now, how much energy, or motivation you have to get up and do something is a little more complicated. It certainly is part a physical issue but also has a mental component. If you are worried, scared, hungry, depressed or any number of other emotions you are less likely to have the energy to get up and do something like dishes.
Motivation, the energy we need to do something, is complicated. There are many factors that cause it to ebb and flow but how does this relate to inertia? A mind at rest acts just the same as a stone. Unlike a rock, a resting mind is not doing nothing rather it is doing nothing new. When you wake up and perform the same routine, eat the same food, take the same route to work, talk to the same people, wear the same clothing, you are not working your mind. You are reinforcing the connections in your brain that you have already made. You are, literally, entrenching, making these connections stronger. The more that you do this, the harder it becomes to break the routine. You are building mental inertia.
This mental inertia was what I was fighting against when I did not feel up to getting out the bikes. The longer you remain in your routine, the more energy it takes to get out. This is one reason it can be so hard to get people to change.
Mental inertia is not only boring but not exercising your brain leads to less adaptability and increasing your risk of mental disorders as you age.
I try and exercise my brain at least as much as I exercise the rest of my body.
Why Are We so Obsessed With Fireworks?
Ever since I was young I have been fascinated by fireworks. It has always amazed me how varied they can be in color, type and complexity of payload. A few things have always bothered me about fireworks. Firstly, how dangerous they can be, how so few people seem to care, how detrimental they can be to the environment and then just how loud they are.
Fireworks are used in celebration. I understand the release of noise and light can somehow be representative of the relief that people feel after making it through sometime. What I never understood is how we decided to celebrate the end of a war using something that makes it sound, and maybe look, like you are still in the war.
Long before I ever understood the phrase Post -Traumatic Stress I thought about people who have been through battle. I of course know nothing directly about being like because I have never been in one except once I was caught on the edge of a paintball exercise.
As blind as I am I still have noticed people who would flench and retreat from the noise. I never liked loud noises myself, even when I was the one making them. The more I learn about how our brains work the less sense fireworks make.
The noise that fireworks make can be traumatic to sensitive people and animals. The ones who are able will run away but that might not be an option for everyone. Have you ever heard a crying baby at a fireworks show? I have. I doubt that child is crying from joy. Children, animals, neuroivergent adults and people who just like things less noisy, do not like fireworks. I learned to tolerate it because I had to, it was what was expected of me.
The noise alone can cause people and other animals to flash back to traumatic events in their lives from war, random street violence, domestic abuse and natural disasters. Not exactly something to celebrate.
The flashing of the fireworks can also cause similar issues and has the added benefits of giving some people serious migraines or causing them to have seizures. Of course, there are costs to other animals which are barely researched. We already know that birds are disoriented by city lights and the constant glow of street lights messes with their, and our own, circadian rhythms but those lights are on all the time so those are much easier to study.
I have heard of one man having a heart attack during a local fireworks display. While it might not have been directly caused by the show, if someone had not noticed his distress, he would not have survived the episode.
After all this, we still keep shooting off fireworks. It is the American thing to do, even if we blow ourselves up or burn down the neighborhood because you are setting off fireworks in the middle of a decade long drought.
So, this all sounds like a winning combination? Sure, it does, if we are all a bunch of insensitive jerks who don’t care about anyone and have to celebrate it by demonstrating just how much money we can literally set on fire.
After all that rambling, I guess what we’re celebrating is how big our egos are.