blind insight

Tricks 'n treats.

I'm like a little kid when it comes to Halloween. There's something about costumes and candy and mass wackiness that just gets me, every year. When I was growing up in Boulder in the '70s and '80s, Halloween was a huge deal. The annual Mall Crawl hadn't yet disintegrated into a drunken, violent frenzy and was still a chance for everyone in town to come out and see one another, compare brilliant, creative, silly, political or downright disgusting costume concepts, and stroll (very, very slowly) along the Pearl Street Mall with 30,000 of their friends and neighbors.

My sophomore year in high school (also known as The Mohawk Era, or, if you're my parents, The Year We Gladly Would Have Sold Madeline To The Gypsies), a friend's mom allowed a small group of us to have a party in her store on The Mall. My punker friends and I spent the evening dancing in the window and writing notes on scrap paper to the people outside. We were protected from the crazed, ass-grabbing throngs (and the annual Halloween freeze), but had a front-row view of the fun and madness. I was a vampire that year, complete with a fabulous homemade black satin cape (even punkers can convince their mommies to make Halloween costumes) and a spider web painted on my shaved skull. If you doubt that I actually had a mohawk, I assure you that timeless proof exists on page 19 or so of the 1986 Boulder High School yearbook.

I always try to come up with a great costume idea. A few years ago, I was Tropical Storm Madeline, since my eponymous weather event had blown through Florida just a few days before. My costume consisted of a bikini, grass skirt, tropical straw hat, sunglasses, and Storm soda labels on my face and chest. And a squirt gun!

This year, I'm going as Betty Boop. As I hinted yesterday, there's a story behind this costume . . . .

Back when I was in private practice, I did pro bono work for the Jewish inmates in Colorado's prison system. One of them developed a rather alarming crush on me, and regularly sent me novel-length discussions of kabbalistic texts, vegetarian recipes, disturbing amorous declarations, and unusual gifts (such as a hand-made, purple knitted scarf and hat, which I donated to a local shelter). After I finally paid a visit to him and some of the other Jewish guys in prison, he decided that I looked like Betty Boop, and that I was a modern-day Betty Boop (his reasoning was that she brought hope and cheer to the soldiers during the war, while I brought hope and cheer to the Jewish inmates. Both the analogy and the resemblance are pretty weak). Then one day, a package arrived at my office with an etched mirror depicting Betty Boop (sort of) under my name. Trademark violations aside, this triggered mass hilarity among my colleagues, and my secretary began buying me Boop stuff whenever she found it. Somehow this evolved into a "thing," which has stuck with me to the present.

So this year, I'm going to be Betty Boop for the Halloween party I'm going to on Saturday night. I actually did this a few years ago, and have never received so much male attention in my life! But that's what Halloween is for, right? I get to dress sexy and get hit on enough to last me for the other 364 days of the year.

The party we're going to is a big benefit-type deal, and I have no idea whom I'll know there. Somehow I'm more excited about going to a party where I don't have to mingle with people and can just enjoy drinking, dancing, and taking in all the crazy outfits along with a few close friends. My blogging buddy Rebecca and her bike-guru husband Dan will be here and are transporting costume fixings all the way from Austin. Steve is going to be the Incredible Hulk, assuming we find the necessary makings during tonight's expedition to the costume shop. I think Betty Boop and the Incredible Hulk make a cute -- or at least colorful -- couple!

UPDATE: As of January 14, 2004, photos of our Halloween silliness can be found here.

Most of my day today

Most of my day today was spent driving (riding with an investigator, actually) to visit a client in prison. I don't often go to see my clients; the nature of habeas cases rarely demands a face-to-face meeting, and my non-driving status makes it impractical for me to schlep out to the hinterlands (where we put prisons so we can forget about them) on a regular basis. But this guy's case presents some really complicated factual and legal issues, and he's had pretty bad past experiences with lawyers. Throw in the lousy acoustics of the prison phone system (all those extra ears on the line . . . .) and it makes for some rather unproductive phone conversations. So I decided that the only way this guy was going to trust me -- and cooperate in my strategy in his case -- would be to pay him a visit. I think it was the right call; by the end of our meeting, he understood why I want to handle the case the way I do, and he seems to be on board.

Maybe it's because I don't go to prison all that often -- no more than 4 or 5 times a year, probably -- but it always depresses me.

At this facility, a minimum security institution, the inmates move pretty freely between their jobs, the sparse recreational offerings, and their "houses," so several inmates were milling around as my investigator and I signed in at the gate. I guess they don't see very many women who aren't built like battle axes, and even though I purposely dressed in pretty dowdy clothes for the trip (and my investigator is a tiny little Jewish grandmother in her early 60s), they leered at us openly. The guards yelled at them to keep moving, and they shuffled off, heads slightly drooped, eyes going blank.

Finally, the guards finished triple-checking our IDs (and checking us out) and led us to a private meeting room along with my client. He's an incredibly intelligent man, who did a damn good job of working up his own case until the court appointed us to represent him. What he lacks in legal sophistication, he more than makes up for in street smarts, verbal/linguistic skill, and sheer chutzpah. The more I talked to him about the crazy facts underlying his claims, the sadder I felt that such a smart, smart guy has done such a good job of screwing up his life. He's bounced in and out of jail for years, has four young kids who are living with their grandmother right now, and hasn't ever quite figured out how to use his intelligence in a positive and productive way. And there are thousands of men (and women) like him, sitting in prison and jail cells around the country. Some of them get vocational training and solid work experience in prison, but as prison budgets shrink and average sentences lengthen, there seems to be an ever-smaller chance that any of them will become productive members of society, or will be able to support their families and remain in the legitimate economy once they get out. Such a huge waste.

So that's my soapbox for today. Perhaps tomorrow I'll change gears again and talk about why I'm going to be Betty Boop for Halloween (although there's a prison story there, too).

Walls and windows.

I hadn't intended my last post to be any great revelation, but I've received a number of responses from folks that have me looking inward even deeper. One dear friend commented that at times (dating back to our Vassar days together), she's been frustrated by my relentlessly positive attitude, and suggested that this sunny outlook may, in fact, be a shield I use to keep people from getting too close to me. I need to think about this some more, but it may be one of the sharpest insights anyone's ever offered into my psyche.

I don't really intend for this blog to be all -- or even mostly -- about my disabilities. I'd sort of conceived it as a place for me to write about all of my interests and observations, and a springboard for further discussion. But I expect I'll have more to say on this very personal subject, and hope that by blogging about it, I'll learn to open up about it in a different way than I'm used to.

Collision course.

Turning back to the "blind" part of my blog title, I had one of those frustratingly typical "Madeline moments" on the way home last night. Hopped off the bus at my usual spot, only to find myself smack in front of an unfamiliar sign/structure of indeterminate proportions. I was confused, tired, and struggling to get my bearings in the dark. I turned right, and found my way blocked by the bus stop bench, then turned back left and figured I could step between the poles of the sign. Alas, this graceful move brought my head smack into a solid mass that I'd failed to notice was attached to the poles at precisely the level of my forehead (and thus just out of my field of vision, particularly in the dark).

The little crash was painful, but as I swore and rubbed my forehead the whole way home (having found my way safely onto the sidewalk at last), I wondered whether I was most upset about the incident itself, because a cute guy who gets off at my stop sometimes witnessed my klutziness, or because I was having trouble navigating in such familiar territory. Finally I decided that I was mostly just embarrassed, and pissed at the bus driver for not opening the doors in a safer spot.

But this stupid accident also dredged up some intense feelings of frustration and sadness about losing my sight that I tend to keep pretty far from my emotional surface, but have been experiencing more than usual of late. Last week, in my women's group, we discussed challenges each of us is facing in our lives and what we like about the way we're handling those challenges. When it was my turn, I meant to start out by saying that I wasn't going to talk about the omnipresent challenge of living with Usher Syndrome, but suddenly found myself choked up and unable to continue. A few tissues later, I managed to collect myself, and did end up talking about the vision loss a bit, particularly how it seems to have become more of a factor in many different aspects of my life. I talked a little, too, about how surprised I was at the swell of emotion that bubbled up simply at a joking mention of my disabilities. Perhaps, as I said to the group, this is because I've learned to live my life with a positive attitude by suppressing much of the stronger, more painful feelings about slowly going blind. I guess it doesn't take much to bring those emotions surging to the surface. Certain triggers I'm well aware of -- near-misses with bike messengers and small children have a tendency to bring me to the verge of tears -- but I crack wise about my "blind chick" ways so easily that I hadn't expected the act of joking that I wasn't going to talk about the issue to set me off.

Last night's incident also got me thinking about how I identify myself. While my self description would include a long list of adjectives beyond those related to my disabilities, I've realized that I identify myself more as a person with a hearing impairment than as a visually impaired person. My hearing loss is something I've lived with in a tangible way since I was a little girl; perhaps because my loss has been stable for so long, it has become simply a fact of my daily life and an integral part of who I am. Though the vision loss is much scarier and more frustrating, I've never felt much kinship with the blind community. Obviously, I'm not really blind (yet?), but I've been legally blind (due to a field of vision of less than 15 degrees) since I was in law school and can't really see all that much any more, relatively speaking. I wonder sometimes if my emotional response when allowing myself to focus on my vision loss stems in part from my inability to relate to blind people, whereas I'm quite comfortable identifying myself as hard-of-hearing and have a wonderful circle of deaf and hard-of-hearing friends.

Maybe all of this means I should allow myself to feel the sadness, fear, frustration, and uncertainty of my vision loss more often, or more completely. Perhaps I need to grieve now for my eyes, even though I am lucky enough to have a fair amount of central vision left, and while exciting research allows me to hope for treatments and cures in the foreseeable (pun intended) future. I've always avoided this type of "dwelling" on my disabilities, and try to move through life with a happy outlook and to make the most of every day (and the vision I still have). But if my tears are so quick to flow at so little provocation, I think I need to look a little deeper inside, and make sure I'm not hiding some important stuff from myself.

High-altitude attitude.

I sat on a plane for a few hours last night, heading home from a trip to DC. Finished Jeffrey Eugenides' masterful Middlesex early in the flight, and was sitting too close to the little TV screen to focus on the lousy movie. For a little while, I amused myself with a magazine, then played with the rubbery mozzarella cheese/red pepper sludge that was my veggie snack-in-a-box. Once I'd accomplished all of this, I still had two hours left in the flight but, like Kenny Rogers once said, I was too tired to sleep.

For a while, I stared out the window, watching the wing lights flash against the clouds and thinking about the kid in Bee Season who "sees G-d" in just such a situation. After thirty-plus years of pretty regular air travel, I feel far removed from the naivete that allowed the novel's character to experience a spiritual revelation from his airplane seat. I'm also not much of a G-d believer, though I clearly buy into Jewish superstition enough that I wrote The Name with the traditional hyphen without even realizing it at first. But sitting there in my uncomfortable seat, happy to have the luxury of Economy Plus legroom, I started wondering not so much why people believe in a higher being, but why they feel so compelled to find evidence of that being's existence and supremacy. It seems to me that if you buy into the concept of G-d (or Allah, or Yaweh, or Jehova, or Budda, or Jah Rastafari, or whatever), that your belief should be all the evidence you really need. Or rather, the evidence is in your own existence, and your ability to formulate the concept of G-d, and to identify particular phenomena as causally related to the doings of G-d.

Perhaps so much evil is perpetrated in the name of G-d, or religion, because people are truly so tentative in their belief in the higher being that they feel compelled to annihilate anyone whose own beliefs, conduct, or mere existence challenges that belief. If they truly accepted the existence of G-d, they would have no need to kill, discriminate against, or otherwise harm anyone who believed otherwise, safe in the knowledge of their own rightness.

I guess this isn't a particularly new or earthshattering insight. It's not too far from Michael Moore's theory about Americans' deep-seated fear leading to gun use. And I'm not trying to condemn all religion; I accept that religion can play a positive role in the world, and my own Judaism, while not terribly focused on the "praying" aspects of the religion, plays an integral role in my identity and day-to-day conduct.

Well, not too much --

Well, not too much -- waiting for Blogger to get some ugrades available again, so I can add links and abouts and assorted other nifty bells and whistles. Plus, if you're reading this, you probably already know that I'm an assistant federal public defender in Denver, and spend my extracurricular hours rock climbing, skiing, training for short-course triathlons, traveling to points near and far, reading cool books, enjoying good food and red wine, and trying to make my corner of the world a better place. You can contact me at madeline007@hotmail.com.