blind insight

A hunting we will go!

Thirty-two years ago today, in a Wisconsin hospital, the love of my life entered the world. One year ago today, he was subjected to his first Birthday Treasure Hunt. Despite a thirty-one-year disadvantage, Steve quickly mastered the Cohen family's art of present-finding, and three days later produced a grade-A set of clues for his charming fiancée’s hunt.

In a couple of hours, hopefully before the Green Bay Packers kick off against the Minnesota Vikings (and dammit, they owe him a birthday win!), Steve will receive the first of his clues. Can you figure out where his presents will be hiding? Unless you’ve been to my house, it’ll be tough to identify all the hiding places,* but it should be entertaining to see what you come up with!

Clue #1: If you can’t find this present, my parents are going to demand an extra couple of goats.

Clue #2: According to Homer, a woman is a lot like this.

Clue #3: No need to inhale, Clinton style. [this one is a stretch, but I really really really wanted to put a present in this location]

Clue #4: Aha! Eureka! I’ve got it! (The cartoon version)

Clue #5: Arachnophobic’s wet nightmare.

*If any of you gets them all, I’ll come up with some sort of prize. Unless the winner is my mother, in which case I need to start writing harder clues.

And isn't it amazing that you can ride the stairmaster with your foot stuck so far down your throat?

Ridiculously early this morning, I dragged myself to the gym for a quick workout. I had planned to run, but decided instead to use the elliptical machine. Unusual for this early hour, all of the ellipticals with arm-movement upper-body-working thingies were in use.

In my early morning brain fog, I wandered over to a non-arm-moving machine and examined its features. The middle-aged man on the next machine struck up chit-chat with me, and since I vaguely recalled chit-chatting with him before, I smiled and responded. Unlike my beloved former gym in Denver, I haven't gotten to know a soul at this new place, because I go sporadically and unpredictably, my schedule doesn't allow me to attend many group classes, and I'm typically there before 5:30 in the morning when anyone else crazy enough to be working out is still three-quarters asleep.

Anyhoo (there's a story in here, I promise, but first I have to change tenses), Middle Aged Gym Dude ("MAGD") starts chatting, so I chat back. I say something about liking the arm-movement-thingie machines better, and he says the really hard ones are the stairclimbers with no arm rests, on which you have to work hard to balance. I toss off a comment to the effect that with my lousy eyes and balance, I'd probably be on the floor within 5 minutes of trying such an apparatus. He laughs, I start my workout, end of chit-chat.

Thirty or so minutes later, there's a tap on my sweaty arm. I peel my eyes off the morning news and try to locate the source of the intrusion. It's MAGD. He says to me, in a low and conspiratorial tone, "I just wanted to tell you that I think it's great that with your . . . limitations . . . that you're in here doing this." I am dumbstruck, unsure at first that I've heard him correctly, and then I mumble something about "thanks" and "flattered" and he mercifully leaves.

And I am left absolutely shaking in annoyance and confusion and simmering almost-anger. I wrack my brains, trying to remember if I've ever mentioned my "limitations" to him at any prior early-morning moment, or whether his delightful comment was based purely on my just-uttered mention of poor vision and my ponytail-revealed hearing aids. Meanwhile, I pound away at the machine, increasing speed and resistance to try to sweat out my irritation.

WTF?! And what is so freaking special about riding the elliptical machine? I recognize that he was trying to say something nice, but to my (flawed) ears, it sounded like "oh, you're such a special little disabled girl! Look at how you get up all early and stuff and then stand on the little machine and move your feet up and down over and over and over again, despite your terrible limitations."

I mean, a f*cking hamster can do that!

Cool.

At the end of our dinner party this weekend, Steve and I both felt a bit deflated. The food turned out beautifully (my pie crust, normally one of my secret baking weapons, was oddly stretchy in the making but turned out fine, and Ina Garten's recipes worked their usual magic). The wine flowed freely, and for the most part, so did the conversation. We were playing host to dear, close, longtime friends. Yet somehow, when it was over, we each acknowledged that we hadn't really enjoyed ourselves.

As Steve put it, he didn't feel cool enough to be at the table. I had felt the same way, but hadn't been able to label the disconcerting sensation until he did it for me. When we tried to process the feeling, we both found it difficult to describe and to identify specific moments during the evening that had engendered it. But it was there, and we both felt it, and it made us sad.

I don't think either of us was upset about not being cool. We like each other and ourselves, and "cool" seems to take more time, effort, money, and cool detachment  than we can muster. Rather, for me, at least, the sadness was twofold. First, I was sad that my dinner party never quite filled our little dining room with the warm glow of full bellies and easy conversation. And second, I was sad that both Steve and I felt so much distance and (I want to say disdain, but that's not quite right) from such beloved friends. 

I'm still mulling over the experience. I hesitated to write about it, because I've talked to all these friends since (not about our feelings of marginalization, but simply in the normal course of things) and our relationships seem fine, normal, and unaffected. I love all of these friends and would hate for them to read this and think that they'd hurt or offended us somehow. Yet I'm still carrying around some unresolved angst about the evening, and I need to plod through it in print to truly process it.

The feeling of being not-cool was not rooted in cars or clothes or jobs or any such trappings of young professional status. No, it was far more subtle, a heightened and mostly intangible awareness of being of "out of it" that I associate with the awkward insecurity of my younger years. At times during the evening, I felt that I was ridiculously uncool to want or care about something or other, and at other moments, I felt like a huge dork for not caring or knowing about whatever it was we were discussing.

Mostly, I continue to wonder, what does it mean, at this age and life-stage, to be "cool"? Do you know? Are you cool? Why (or why not)?

Update

I've been meaning to update you about the dark street/stupid island situation. A few days after I posted about the problem, I was returning home from a run and noticed a streetlight on the corner by the offending island. I couldn't figure out why I'd never seen it before, so that night Steve and I walked down the block to investigate. The pole was there, but it shed no light.

The following evening, my parents came over for dinner and cards. They, too, had noticed the non-functioning light on the corner. My mom called the city's 24-hour burned-out-streetlight hotline, and reported both that the problem existed and that it was creating a safety hazard for her poor blind daughter. They told her to call the power company, whose responsibility such matters apparently are. When my mother called Xcel the following Monday, the report-taker promised a response, but said she had no idea how soon the light would be repaired. So my mom called a friend on the city council.

By Wednesday, the light was on. The parking lot through which I like to cut also has reactivated its lights, which it must have turned off for the long summer days. I can now walk home safely and independently, just as I could pre-island.

It's a huge relief. Now, if I could only get rid of the damn speed bump.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

That there is the audible sigh of relief, emanating from every fiber of my lawyerly being, as I hand off to my secretary for formatting the last of the SEVEN appellate briefs I have drafted and filed in the past four weeks. I have another one to turn to now, a big and complicated and, I think, really interesting one, but I have a few weeks still to focus on it. So, WHEW, for the moment.

In addition to brief writing, time in blindinsightland has been occupied with the following:

• Cooking, cooking, and more cooking. Plus a wee bit of baking. I’ve always been a foodie, but now I’m a foodie armed with AllClad, KitchenAid, Cusinart, Wusthof, and oodles of other brand-name toys and tools that make it all the more delightful to play in the kitchen. I will be taking advantage of Friday’s federal holiday to whip up the very first "real" dinner party of our married life, and am eagerly looking forward to making Ina Garten’s chicken with 40 cloves of garlic (because how can a dish with 40 (!!) cloves of garlic be anything short of heavenly?), among other tasty bits.

• Trying to get over my crushing disappointment with our professional wedding pictures. I still can’t bring myself to communicate directly with the photographer, as I am too hurt and angry over her work product and general lack of professionalism in dealing with us. As I look at the photos, I do see that many of them are great, and we will end up with an album full of terrific photographic memories. But the number of shots we specifically asked her to take that she just . . . didn’t, and her utter failure to take pictures of the vast majority of our wedding guests who were not her friends or people she knew (like my family members, and Steve’s, and our wedding party, for example!), and the number of poor-quality or ruined shots (like the ONLY ONE she took of us exiting up the aisle, which is ruined by front-lighting), and the sheer incompetence of her assistant (who, among other gaffes, didn’t even bother to take pictures of Steve getting ready), have me seething and shaking. I need to move on, but I’m still grieving for the fabulous wedding photos of my dreams. (What? You want to see them? Fine.)

• Realizing that there is no way in hell we can afford to remodel our teeny tiny kitchen quite yet. Or, most likely, for the foreseeable future. This realization, however, has motivated us to impose an austerity budget and more aggressive savings measures, and I feel really, really good about our new not-spending habits. Foremost among our money-saving steps is to avoid eating out, and we both agree that almost everything we’ve been making at home is better (and far, far cheaper) than almost anything we’ve had in a restaurant recently. Steve has also become the Peanut Butter Baron, filling the freezer with sandwiches for us to take for lunch. Yummy!

• Preparing myself to turn 35 two weeks from tomorrow (yep, on Turkey Day). I am quite surprised at how hard 35 seems to be hitting me, as I had expected any "damn I’m old" worries to dissolve in the sweet salve of newlywed bliss. Alas, no. I feel old, tired, washed out, achy, old, and old. My adorable (and young!) husband is doing his part to countermand these silly sentiments, but something about 35 is really kicking my butt. I suppose it’s because the American media treats 35, for women anyway, as some mythical age after which our fertility vanishes, our bodies sag, and our health erodes. Feh. I’m looking forward to The Day After, when 35 will be my new reality, rather than a dark and scary place looming before me.

• Reading, a lot. It’s the best thing about my commute. I am almost finished with Rohinton Mistry’s beautiful, if depressing, A Fine Balance, and am just getting into Anthony Swofford’s gritty and compelling Jarhead. I highly recommend both (though I will be skipping the movie version of Jarhead, based on Salon.com’s negative review).