Difference and Disability

So then, this brings up the question of 'what is a disability?'. I can't answer the question without drawing on my own life, my own experiences and knowledge of other people. There is, however, a standard answer which certainly forms a part of my larger, personal one: a disability can be inferred in an individual testing below a certain level on an IQ test, and by difficulty in an agreed-upon number of 'adaptive skills' such as feeding, cleaning, or clothing oneself, mobility, communication, social fluency, and the ability to get and retain a job.

In my more expansive definition, the consequences of a disability are another way to diagnose its presence. If we are alienated from others, that is proof we have a disability. One obvious thing that produces this estrangement from others is difference: a different body or a different brain, obviously, but just as much a different home culture or religion, different traditions, a different language, illiteracy, poverty, mental illness, scars from childhood, selfishness, insecurity, jealousy, fear. These are disabilities because they keep us from interacting with others as richly as we otherwise could and, by barring us from truly connecting with others, from reaching our own potential to be fully human.

Because some of them have only transactional or contingent value, the difference is that with some of these afflictions we have the choice of whether or not to show our brokenness, a privilege not granted to every person with every disability. We may still be as insecure about our scrawny arms as we were in seventh grade, but if we bulk them up, or even simply walk with a swagger or a sidearm, no one need ever know. We have the luxury of hiding a fear of rejection, for example, behind a supercilious or dismissive attitude, but that fear, however well hidden to others, still exists and thus precludes true intimacy with others.

So I just think the overwhelming majority of us are disabled in significant ways. The manner in which our frailty manifests itself may not preclude abundant, pleasant, superficial contact with others but, inasmuch as it means we cannot fully offer ourselves to others, and thus receive the entire richesse, the whole, the true self, of others in return, it is every bit as limiting as all those things conventionally labeled 'disabilities.'

And, rats, I still didn't say what it was I was trying to say for months on this. God bless blogs: there's always tomorrow. Someday it will, despite all my best efforts, say precisely what I mean it to say...

Institutions vs. Institutionalized Strengthiness

I got a new job, which I am very excited about. It is as Job Coach for people with disabilities, for a great, passionate, very cool organization, whose values mesh up with mine very well. I had applied for a similar position with a different organization previously - and, I don't know, something, or, truly, a few somethings just weren't right as I went through parts of the interview process. And neither my passion nor my political or intellectual position on issues related to the job mattered at that place: it was to be a Job and nothing more. After having worked in many, many restaurants and seen the kind of ardor, dedication, and self-sacrifice routinely demanded of even those on the lowest rungs of the kitchen ladder, it was quite disturbing to find that, in a position where human psyches and human hearts would be affected as much by my approach as by my execution of the position, neither actually mattered. I still knew that I would rock at the job and be a great asset for the individuals I would support if hired, so I waited to see if I was called to the final level of interviews. But I wasn't, and I felt it was all to the best.

So now, I am excited. I met one woman I'm going to work with, T. She lived, for thirty years, in one of those horrific institutions we imagine don't exist anymore, only recently having been placed into community living. She was so great at her job in the institution's sheltered workshop that she earned about four times what she was 'supposed to' every month. Now, she has her own home that she decorated in her own style, a social life, hobbies and interests she can pursue, assistants who help her out with things she can't do for herself, and she is soon to get a job at a department store, where I will liaise between her and the company, and work to help her understand her responsibilities and succeed at her position.

The day I met her, my new boss and one of T.'s supported-living assistants were with us as we walked around the mall, but a major point of the trip was to see if T. and I would be a good match, so I hung back by her and tried to let her and her curiosity about the new person lead the interaction. After soliciting compliments on her new shoes, T.'s first real question to me was what I thought a person should do when someone is harassing or being mean to him or her. I asked her what she thought someone should do, and she said she would just ignore them, that some people just do mean things and you have to accept that and try not to let it bother you.

Alright, it's a simple truth. Fine. Ignore mean people and your day goes smoother. But being harassed or made fun of in the way T. meant it, in the way she has experienced much of her life, simply because she looks and acts as she does, is not something most of us have to contend with. Nor are our experiences with it so much a part of how we view the world, and our place within it, that we would want to bring it up with someone we had just met. It's not pressing for us. Being rejected in some fashion multiple times a day is simply not a risk most of us face.

But then, neither is that sort of open, heartfelt communication something most of us are willing to risk. Many of our disabilities are such that they keep us bound up inside our own perspectives, our own minds, in a functional isolation paralleling T.'s decades-long real isolation, but in our case masked by an abundance of superficial relations. We can't bear the risk of being truly ourselves and truly vulnerable with others, so we frequently fail to achieve true communion with them. We refuse, even after much time with a person, to lay our fears and weaknesses bare to even a fraction of the extent to which T. was willing to do unreservedly from the very start. We close those parts of ourselves off - the weak and the small and the yearning and the sad parts - that people with obvious disabilities are more often unable to hide. We are just as weak, and just as dependent on other people and community, as 'they' are, but out of our own fears of rejection we steadfastly refuse to present that side of ourselves to others.

Almost-on-the-Highway Robbery

My recent problems with car thefts got me thinking of the stupidest time I was robbed. --Aren't they all pretty stupid? you ask. Yes, of course, but some leave you feeling more like a hapless sap than others. Now, I admit that this latest round of car robberies does incline me to believe I was rather excessive in Standing on Principle by still refusing to lock my doors after the second round of thefts, but the Convenience Store Pocket-Pickers of '92 win by a landslide for the extent to which they added insult to ego to injury to my pocketbook.

It all began, as most of these stories do, with idiocy. When yet another one of my $300 cars died (was it the Rambler? the Nova? the Mustang II? the Dart, the Valiant, the Olds? I have no idea, but I loved them all), my stepfather (the nice one) took the situation in hand and said we were going to go to a real car dealership, and get me a real car. Fair enough by itself, but when we got there, after cursory handshakes with the avuncular sales agent, both parents sat down and read magazines, leaving me to deal with the car shark on my own, on the basis that I was (chronologically, at any rate) an adult.

I told the middle-aged salesman what I wanted in a car: large and lumbering; safe and slow. As far as features, I wanted power windows. With regard to design, I was hoping for lots of metal around me, and pedals I could reach. In other words, I wanted some granny's trade-in. What I drove out in was a ridiculous speedy Mustang with a bordello-red interior, a spoiler, and some 'sporty' thing over the back window. The salesman was a 50-year-old man, an authority figure, and I gave up standing by my criteria soon after he began prating on about how 'young ladies like you' needed 'fun, sporty' cars. It was a ridiculous accusation, but I was helpless to protest.

Well, the payments on this thing were a bit obscene, and I was not entirely successful in making them all the time. In the days before online bill-paying, when bills got too late the only recourse we had was to drive somewhere and pay the thing in person, which was what I had to do one sunny summer day in Orange County.

First, go back in time one day.

I stopped at my customary Diet Coke outlet, a convenience store just before the freeway onramp. To get in, I walked past two men standing just beside the door who would have looked more at home in a Dorothea Lange photo than in our sparkling suburbs. When I came out, they asked for money. They told of how they had driven from Oklahoma for work in 'that ole pickup over there' (pointing to distant hideous truck parked in front of the office-supply store), earned some money, but got robbed and now just needed to fix up their ole truck to go back home. I felt flush, having just cashed my paycheck, and it hurt me that decent, hardworking rustics would have such a cruel welcome to California. Again. So I gave them a twenty.

Now, go forward a day.

I had to go pay my current and overdue car payment in person somewhere way up north. For that I needed Diet Coke. Now, I had the whole of my paycheck on me still, most of it in a billfold I had stuck in the side pocket of a jacket, and a lot of it was going to the car. The same two guys were outside the store as I went in. I paid for the Coke with money in my purse, and the same one as before accosted me again with a story. They had come out from Nevada to help their ailing relative in that ole van over there (pointing to a sickly, rusted van parked in front of the auto-parts store), but got robbed coming out of the nursing home or graveyard or something, and just needed to get some money to get back home. I was only brave because I was angry, but I actually managed to give some version of a 'Say, look here, Mister' and express a tiny bit of my indignation at having given them twenty dollars the previous day for a different story.

Needless to say, I did not again contribute to their cause. --Not intentionally, that is. While the talky one was remonstrating with me about his need for gas money, the silent partner picked my jacket pocket clean of the billfold, and with it nearly all the money I had in the world. I'm pretty sure that's the time I feel most stupid about. At least until the next one...

It's the Emerald City, not the 'Paris of the Gobi'

Well, thank God: we are back to rainy and 60 degrees, so everyone can stop complaining about the sweltering heat and go back to 'Sixty-three? In August? Where did our summer go?'

And while looking for information on replacing the antique dome-light bulb in the beleaguered hatchback, I came across this poignant story of another vintage Mazda owner's travails. Dave Fox, also of Seattle, and a travel writer for our own Rick Steves, battled his crappy car's possessed horn rather than undiscriminating robbers. It is a sad and touching story, and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

--Or at least the refusal of crappy cars to go gently into that good night.

'Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal -

Tout ça m’est bien égal.'

So, my car got broken into last night. Now, when I say 'broken into,' I'm not being entirely accurate: I don't lock this car, on the basis that the window that would be broken in a break-in would be worth more than the rest of the car. Moreover, I don't need to lock it since I store my gold bricks and rubies elsewhere than in the mighty Mazda. And the stockpile of untraceable semi-automatic weapons? The hundred-pound cache of smuggled drugs? Elsewhere, too. There is not much in there to steal, most particularly since we're not in Oregon, where the stack of empty Diet Coke bottles might net up to seventy-five cents at the recycling station.

That fact notwithstanding.

They did steal a little cheap clip-on light from the visor, a hair clip on the same visor, a car cellphone charger that probably works when used in a car with a working cigarette lighter, one pair of pointy, high, terrifyingly green pumps in a size suitable only for me (in a fiercely festive mood) or an eight-year-old Miss Cutie Princess pageant contestant in Little Rock, and maybe about $1.75 in change. I imagine they were shocked and angry at their lousy prize package, because they also stole one-half of a few pairs of shoes, including a charming but too-tight-even-for-me set of size 4 1/2 loden-green wedges. Since I can only guess they have as much use for single shoes as the original owner, I have to assume the intent was solely to wreck someone's day.

What is goofy about this (in addition to the idea of any chucklehead thinking my dodgy, unlocked hatchback a good choice for plundering) is that just last night I thought to myself how long it had been since my car had got 'broken into' last, and I also thought about thinking about moving some of the shoes back into the house into their little shoe homes. But my arms were full of Diet Coke and dim sum at the time, so I decided to do the thinking later.

What is also goofy about this is that there were some perfectly good single-serving maple syrups and hot sauces in the glove box they showed no interest in. Not to mention the almost-entirely-full box of Red Vines, black licorice style.

'Humility Is Attentive Patience.'

-Simone Weil

I am entirely aware that sometimes on here when I go off on a tirade about compassion, my diction can get a bit too soaring or florid. Sometimes both, frankly, and when I get to the inestimable consequences of compassion my tone is apt to run from hortatory to incantatory through beatific and on to splenetic long before righting itself and sticking nicely to the pragmatic.

However.

My excuse is that what I am talking about is every bit as powerful as I make it seem. It is like a drug: its effects are that shocking, marked, and fast acting. And yet, most of us do not avail ourselves of it, except perhaps with those closest to us. And that stands to reason. Family members are on the one hand easier to understand than those we know less well; on the other, our hobby and pool of defendants would quickly evaporate were we to spend all our time divorcing and disinheriting our relatives. Given that fact, it makes sense at some point simply to accept that Aunt Jane always talks to much about Shih-tzus and Cousin David will probably never fully surmount his persecution complex.

Fine.

But leaving aside altruism (which we already were, anyway; admit it), it benefits every individual's own psyche to stop seeing others as failed versions of ourselves. Even if we share some similar goals - getting ahead in the company, working on our marriages, shopping less, not drinking anymore, being more involved in the community, cooking at home more often, working out again, whatever they might be - we are going at them with radically differing histories, distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, and perhaps for vastly different reasons in the first place.

It was probably Thérèse of Lisieux who had this additional insight into handling difficult interactions with irritating interlocutors, particularly those whose failings seem most obvious to us, those whom we know enough about to wish instinctively to judge in their failure: Yes, maybe he did do it again -- but what about all the times he succeeded, and we weren't there, and he was too modest to gloat, or even tell us quietly of his unnoticed, private success?

I think looking at the evident weaknesses of others from that perspective is profound. We don't even need to do any uncomfortable self-inquiry to come up with something we ourselves recently struggled with, which is an equally useful but more obvious and labor-intensive strategy. We just have to acknowledge that we can't possibly know everything about another, and that that other might well be doing some rather good stuff while we're not around. And, that he might additionally have the virtue of humility, and thus even be worth emulating in that respect!

I say it is like a drug because whatever method we use to get there once we feel a sympathy with our brother and his situation, the anger dissolves just as surely as morphine kills pain. If you can imagine that someone is driving aggressively (I use driving so much because it does truly render people insane when they are trapped in their little boxes and feel so powerless about many factors and any little thing can seem a tremendous injustice) because his wife just had a baby or because he needs to throw up, you immediately lose the anger. If someone's stereo is playing crappy music too loud, it's not much of a stretch to recall that most of us were young at one time, too, and wanted to be cool and to display our coolness when possible so that it could be validated by others, as coolness, just like wit, style, or 'success,' is a cultural commodity which can only be conferred on an aspirant by the recognition of its presence by a consensus of the relevant audience. He's young, the music's bad, I'm not his target audience: so, so what? After the next light I can go back to listening to the riveting story about heirloom orchids in Florida.

I like the Thérèse suggestion because even if we were never young ourselves, and even if we can come up with absolutely no failings of our own to gain us conditional entry into some grandiose vision of the Mystical Brotherhood of Common Human Frailty, we can easily imagine that the individual tiresomely prattling on to us about the after-market package he bought for his Lexus could just have donated to the Red Cross, and is thus as short of sense as he is glucose and the blood to carry it to his brain.

A Rose by Any Other Name

Well, somehow I made a floral that I actually like. I don't know how, I don't understand it, and I've never succeeded before. And it's not just incompetence on my part; I don't like florals anyone makes. Other than Joy, and that makes no more sense than it should, unless you believe that the exception proves the rule.

At any rate, it still has some curing to go, but at this stage it is already quite nice and balanced. The ingredients, in no particular order are:

benzoin
clary sage
geranium
vetiver
patchouli
coriander
cajeput
sandalwood
neroli
frankincense
and a small amount of Moroccan rose

Most of the rose is coming from the geranium, and not much of the piney aspects of the geranium are present still, even with the other complements. Anyway, even with the tiny amount of patchouli and the not tiny amount of frankincense, it's not headed at all in the ecclesiastical-Oriental zone of most of what I wear. I don't feel any great excitement at succeeding with those scents, even when they are particularly complex, but this feels like a genuine coup! mean, I would actually wear this stuff!

Don't Ask Me; Ask Google

What the?! I'm no. 2 on Google if you enter 'Lorca Thamar Amnon.' I mean, not that a great many people would enter 'Lorca Thamar Amnon' besides me, practically no one, really, and fewer still in English, in which nearly all the very, very few people wanting something with those three names would enter 'Lorca Tamar Amnon,' but I wanted to get back to that other site so I did, but with English as my default language. And found myself as well as the other guy. My entry also has 'sexuality' as a tag on Google somehow; maybe that's how you get to the heady heights of Number Two-ness.

Don't worry: despite my newfound fame, prestige, and power, I'm still the same simple country girl you've always known. And I will not let my smoldering search-engine sexuality overcome my good sense, either.

But what shoes, what shoes to wear to class tonight? They need to reflect such grand status, clearly, yet at the same time bespeak my unbesmirchable humility in the face of such worldly accolades. Perhaps the pointy pink slingbacks with the diminutive kitten heels? With a light taupe hose?

I hear, yet say not much, but think the more.

Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. 3, IV, 1

I was going to get my nails done today, but problematically I took a nap that lasted until 22:30. That also precluded following through on any evening plans. Not that I'm saying I had any. Also not to mention sabotaging any hope of a regular bedtime or waking. Not that I'm divulging what those normally are, or even that I am so rigid as to adhere to a pattern.

I was going to steam the rugs, too. Not that I wish to indicate that I have access to water.

Although I feel a tremendous sense of liberation as to what I can or cannot say now, and while I still hope the point of writing a Personal Weblog in the first place is not having to worry about whether or not one sounds snarky, the fact remains that there will always now be a chill in the air as I imagine someone scrutinizing every post for Signs.

Which of course there aren't. And I sometimes start things and finish them later, and only then try to decide whether they should be dated as 'then' or 'now.' Although I admit that the Blackwater entry was something I encountered that same day I posted it.

No, this won't do. I really don't want this to become a blog concerned solely with the antics of the neighbor's cat and Internet snippets I find amusing or tragic. Or an extended apologia for my belief that there truly is something in between, that I do believe in a middle -- in fact a big, hearty one like the Average American Middle, and that, further, it is in that middle that I imagine most things to reside.

It's just that the middle isn't that entertaining.

For example, today I did not get stuck in any particularly egregious traffic. I missed it, in other words, both coming and going. I was moderately pleased by McCain's moderate success and what it might or might not portend, and likewise mildly bemused by Clinton's lack of the foregone-conclusion landslide. I had the intent to steam some clothes, but was slightly saddened that I had left the water in the steamer too long and came to the mildly disheartening realization that, while agitation with white vinegar inside the chamber helped a bit, a proper cleaning would require the purchase and application of a baby-bottle-sort-of brush, the undertaking of which I with the vaguest sense of resignation felt better left to another day.

I likewise awoke from my tranquil yet perhaps excessive nap with a middling discomfort surrounding the realization that tomorrow I will possibly have a marginally puffy face. This minor regret as regards the conjectured effects of my temporary intemperance in matters of adhering to strict diurnality was offset by the realization that I could simply hold bags of frozen spinach up to one eye with my arm-thigh while using the other eye to assist the fingers of one hand in painting those of the other. If the need to atone for my indolence should arise (understanding that the odds of such an arising are nearly nil), I could strap, if I wished, the bag of spinach over alternating eyes with an aromatherapeuticized silk scarf while steaming the carpets, thus rendering any discussion or internal dialogue as to the effects of my negligible profligacy on either the productivity or cosmetic arenas nil.

In addition, I was suffused by low-grade joy when the neighbor's cat came to call, as well as by his choosing to lay on my stomach. He has not, as of this writing, yet done anything to cause either consternation or ecstatic exuberance, nor has he engaged in any overtly comical 'antics.' He was a bit miffed about the weather, but did not tremble, jump on things, or make unsettling sounds, so pathos, too, is out.

I ate a mostly nutritious dinner but did not go overboard. That is to say, it was at the same time high-fat as well as accompanied by yogurt and the vegetable-seaweed condiment/nutritional powder. It was tasty, but not excessively so. And I ate a shellfish-shaped Belgian chocolate after. I did feel the merest tinge of regret that I neither had on hand a bottle of the sort of wine one would not regret popping open for just one and leaving largely undrunk, nor had sufficient motivation to go to a store and procure just such a mediocre and moderately-priced selection. I then effaced that tinge when I realized that even one glass would likely enhance rather than diminish the sleep-disturbing effects of the long nap, which realization conduced to a subtle relief commingled with a vague joy. When, later, the appropriate dose for my weight of melatonin succeeded in creating the appropriate measure of somnolence at a reasonable hour, I was pleased, but not to an extent that would have adversely affected my newfound sleepiness.

In addition, somewhere in there I bathed, and styled my hair. I did not take an extravagant Bubble Bath, or fill the tub with milk or rose petals, but I did change the blade on my razor, resulting in a closer shave than my last. As I did not use a lot of Products in the styling of the hair, it felt and looked silkier than at other times, but not, it not being four feet long, frighteningly glossy, just moderately, somewhat attractively so. And I chose a black sweater set for the day's sweater set, not out of melancholia, mind you, but because it is a bit thicker, softer, and cozier than some of the others.

See? That won't do. Who cares? I certainly don't; I can't imagine you do, either. But that is the reality of most people's days; most are fairly good, which means fairly prosaic, which means fairly unwritable. I you want something to write about daily life, you must either realistically portray, or exaggerate, or invent some kind of Challenge or Crisis for the hero to encounter and struggle against and sometimes surmount. And Proust, were he here, would no doubt be able elegantly to make my lily-of-the-valley soap evocative of much, much more than cleanliness and nice packaging, and tie it in handily and subtlely with the tiny cheap lily-of-the-valley perfume sets I used to insist, as a child, that I be given when we encountered them in 'gift shops' on family 'road trips' -- but I'm no Proust, and it genuinely felt and smelled simply like a bar of soap to me. There was very little Evocation going on in the bath, very little recherche, very little thought of any sort, frankly, other than 'which leg shall I start with this time?' A question, by the way, which I answered the same way I always do, with 'the same one I always do.'

Hardly worth the paper it's written on.

(Update 06.12.08: Still not, dear.)