What It's Like to Be Blind (Sort of) Part II

After the nice doctor finished sewing up my eye-lid, everything was fine, until it wasn't.

Not long after the doctor left, and at this point it was after one in the morning, I dissolved into tears. The nurse said I could take my time, offered me juice and cookies, and I'm not sure she didn't offer me a part of her own sandwich. I drank the juice, ate a stale cookie, and waited to feel better. I had started crying because I was emotionally tired after a trauma. Then, as I sat on the end of the surgery bed gripping a pillow, I realized I was crying because of pain. I kept waiting for it to get better and go away so I could stand up, walk out and leave, but that was not happening. My sobbing turned into gasps of pain. After about fifteen minutes of this, me still thinking maybe this will just resolve itself, I hear a nurse (not mine) say, "Should we help her?"

The ER doctor (not the ophthalmologist) returned, asked me to open my eye, and told me the sutures were causing irritation against the eye itself. (Which is why I was continuing to cry and gasp and sob like a frightened child.) They, God bless them, numbed my eye completely so I could stand upright and function. Before long half my face and scalp were numb too. However, the night was not finished. I still had to go to the Pharmacist.

So. It was now after 2AM, I had my car with me, my roommates were away, and it was imperative I pick up the medication that night instead of the next day in order for me to be capable or productive in any way at all, instead of overcome with debilitating pain. I found an open Wal-Greens with a 24-hour pharmacy around 3:00. As luck would have it, she, the pharmacist, had just taken her half-hour lunch.  I sat, waiting in the Wal-Greens, exhausted and praying the numbing agent wouldn't wear off before I received the medicines and drove myself home where I could take the blessed codone. Three-thirty came, prescription filled, and I drove home reciting my name and home address at the top of my lungs so I wouldn't fall asleep.

Finally: What's it like to be temporarily blind.
The next morning, it wasn't that my vision was harmed, but using my eyes became next to impossible because of the discomfort of manipulating either eye-lid (even opening my un-injured eye caused a reaction). For four days I wandered around the house, reaching with my hands outstretched for the wall, the couch arm, the counter-top, the door-knob. Walking carefully, trying to memorize the layout of the floor, how when walking this straight line from the living room to the kitchen I should bump into the space heater here, or if I'm too far over, the desk here, so I know I'm facing the right direction. At one point I remember trying to reach for the wall in my bedroom, carefully stepping and stepping, but still not making contact, and beginning to feel scared and incapable: I could get lost inside a single, tiny room. My own room. Then I turned my shoulders 90 degrees and found the reason I couldn't locate the wall was because I was reaching arm to the side, while standing parallel. I was six-inches away. I felt foolish and as if there was a giant, dark and looming wave of utter helplessness about to crash on top of me.

The big excursion of the week was my roommate, Randal, taking me to the convenience store so I could buy milk and cereal, food I thought I could handle without seeing it. I stepped out the back door and dragged my feet along the ground like an old woman, trying to feel the concrete and stones and not trip.

"I would help you, but it's just so funny to watch."
Randal let me take his arm to walk inside the store. "It's okay, you can walk normally."
"Where's your credit card?" "Stand right here, don't move, I'm getting the milk."
He's a nice guy.

On the fifth day I was able to open my other eye for at least brief periods of time.
Yesterday was my check-up with the nice Yiddish-speaking ophthamologist. I am pleased to report my vision is again 20/20 with glasses, and you can barely see the scar. I will say it feels funny in the shower when the water runs down my face, because now the water follows a different path over my skin. And sometimes I'm there is an itch right at the scar tissue, but I it may be only  my imagination.

Also, for those who care to know, the Great State of California has the best Worker's Comp laws in the country, Thank-you-God.

What It's Like to Be Blind Part I: The Water-Rocket Incident (aka How It Happened)

Now, as I'm sure most of you are aware, I am not blind.

However, as most of you are not aware, I did experience an accident about a month ago, early December, wherein I lacerated my eye-lid, effectively blinding me for the better part of a week. 

I currently work teaching science lessons to children as a part of an after-school program here in L.A. On this particular day, I was teaching a special event, a Saturday party for a local soccer team and their parents. In addition to after-school lessons, we also provide entertaining science demos fun kids and parents alike. Wink. The event was held out-doors and it was a beautiful day in sunny Southern California. I had already finished our experiments involving dry-ice, "Say it with me now, Sub-li-mate!" I had wafted the cold fog (dry-ice + water)  over the children seated on the ground, made dry-ice soap bubbles you can catch with your hands, and shot some very cold water into children's faces (and my own). The kids were excited, all was well, and next up: Rockets!  

First, an electrical-circuit ignition rocket, which is exactly what it sounds like: you connect the wires from the bottom of the rocket to remote control, and when you press the button, "Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six...!" the circuit closes and the electrical current starts the ignition in the rocket. The children thought this was just incredible and ran across the field with a chorus of, "Yaaaay!" to catch the rocket as it came back down to Earth. 

"What should we do now, children? DO IT AGAIN!" 

"YAAAAYY!" So we did it again. 

Then, injury impending, I set up the water-bottle rockets. A water-bottle rocket is a pretty simple apparatus where you have a stand made of PVC pipe, and you take a 2-liter soda bottle, put some water  in it, plug it, and then pump it full of air until the pressure is so great the bottle flies off the stand, fifty feet into the air, spraying water everywhere. To put it simply, I was a thoughtless idiot in this particular moment. We pump the bottle full of air via a bicycle pump. You are supposed to have about fifteen to twenty feet between you and the rocket while you vigorously pump the bicycle hose. I was standing about two feet away. The children, who were counting the number of pumps it would take, reached Sixteen when the rocket lifted off, and I understood in a moment of dreadful realization and anguish-filled resignation, I was standing far too close, without goggles. My eye closed in fight/flight response while my brain made one conscious plea to God and the universe, "No!" 

Of course, it was too late. The plastic soda bottle, meant to shoot fifty-feet up, hit my face and bounced to the ground. I immediately turned around and grabbed a paper-towel to cover my eye so the kids wouldn't be able to see my face. 

In the aftermath that ensued, many very kind and caring parents helped me to hand out slime to the kids and load all of my equipment into the trunk of my car. A woman with medical expertise came up and looked at my eye, told me the eye-lid was cut, and "Go to a hospital, really. Go to a hospital." 

Beautiful photo of my face waiting in the ER. If you look closely, you can see the red line that was the laceration on the interior of the lid. Some nice bruising down the cheek bone as well. 

Before long I drove myself to the ER. My right eye-lid was lacerated, meaning cut, slit open so that the ER doctor called the on-call ophthalmologist so around midnight I was laying on a surgery bed with a very nice doctor with a Yiddish accent sewing my eye-lid back together. 

Angsty Existential Jumbled Thoughts

At times, often times, I feel my emotions are too large to contain, yet too nebulous to be productive because my thoughts and words are too small.

I have a desire to convey the truth, the reality about myself in the hope that by expressing a truth about myself I will achieve and commune with something universal. That I will, in even the most minuscule and fleeting of connections, align with Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Keats and reach something poetic and significant. Something that is true for forever, and so it is worth knowing and sharing because it will intrinsically speak to all of humanity, past and present, and meet and fulfill the entire ideal of canonization. I know, is there anything, really, that speaks to all of humanity? Really? Let's hope there is, and assume it's possible for someone alive today to connect with it.

Yet. Yet, I too often feel that my fear about making too little income, about living in the life I made for myself, trapped in a place of capitalization and bills and feelings of guilt for living beneath my potential,  for trying to reach and live for God, but in believing that in my own effort I defeat myself because the instruction is to release and let go, so that effort is self-defeating (?) but not? To surrender my own control in my life, and to trust, to have faith that a greater power will care for me, for my daily needs and for my greater destiny. The fear is stifling, but not?

But it is hard. It feels deeply antithetical to attempt to detach myself from my own ends. I feel the need to try, but feel sluggish and barred down by a laziness fueled by the worst parts of myself. How can I, could I, overcome these erupted-of-the-self negative qualities, like the tumor inside the frog in Pan's Labyrinth, without exuding extreme effort? How can I be the best I can be without controlling my behavior, without pushing myself? This is not letting go.

Why, one might ask, is it worth letting go at all then? The concept of surrender is mirrored in many philosophies. The mighty Om of Hinduism, right? Om, I have a twinkie. Om, I do not have a twinkie. Detachment, do your dharma (your duty) and nothing more or less, let go of desire either way, and through this you will find contentment. In the Bible, surrendering to God and the grace he provides through Jesus is the only way receive eternal life, accepting that it is the holy sacrifice that makes anything, including you, good, and it is a difficult concept to accept. How can I be good without doing anything? Especially when I'm told there's no way I'm intrinsically good, not all the way through. If I'm not good, they how am I worth anything? Thanks God, I appreciate the sentiment of grace, but I don't want to be a pity-case. Especially in contemporary America - your worth is determined primarily by what you accomplish, whether that's in the work force and how much money you make, or by how many random acts of kindness you get through. Not to suggest that any of this is not significant, it's just that we shouldn't, and it's difficult not to, place our identity there. Again, how to let go?

How to be happy in the face of the unknown, in the company of littling masses, to have faith without it acting as the opium for the masses meaning me? Because faith is only a tiny bit about you, if you believe it.

And in the meantime, Here I Am. Sitting, unwashed, literally far from home, trying to create my life, which is the culmination of daily experiences, behaviors and decisions. Hoping I will rise from the daily drum of the unintellectual, again feeling guilty for feeling so unsatisfied knowing full-well there are millions out there in far worse positions, who don't have even the luxury of existential strife because the difficulties of each day are preoccupying and overwhelming. Quit your complaining, girl.

I know I can't see the expanse while standing, being in it. Telling myself it is important to be here, present in order to go there and climb the alpine path. Depending on hope, but worrying if I lean too heavily on hope, I may cease working in my daily life where the energy required to achieve - is alive, in the only place it is available - Here And Now. Worrying I will be let down, by myself.

Wanting to think, and dream, and to be better, but afraid of fallowing and failing along the journey.

I suspect the answer, as the answer almost always is, in my opinion, is something like existing in the adage, "All things in moderation." Embracing a duality that does not fight, but combines together, each side reinforcing the other. But perhaps that is life? Or mine, at least. Determining, little by little, that process of balancing one's daily physical life, needs, and even slothful inclinations, one's sins, with what Western literature and philosophy called ... the pursuit of Truth, Beauty, and Love?
And I know, I have been taught and believe in the truth of a higher power, a being who will provide and on whom you can depend. But, always but, it is frightening, it is risky to trust. A wise person told me that this very struggle, to let go and depend, is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

___________________________________________________________________________
Reality check: I do pay my bills, I do need to shower, and all things considered, I'm fine.
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Rebecca Kean Moved. Again.

A while back I bought a ton of on-sale ground meat. I cooked it and froze the lot. My roommate at the time said that sounded smart and the meat smelled great. I replied somberly, "Hopefully it freezes okay." As if this were a major concern, and I didn't want to get my hopes up in case of disappointment. ... It's hamburger meat.

I realized, I was sort of doing this for everything. Adopting an attitude of, "It's okay if things don't turn out, because I was never really hoping for it in the first place. Feh. I don't care." Not realizing that in this general outlook on life, "things" meant how my life here in LA might turn out, whether I quit my job because I felt underemployed, whether I would move back to Missouri because I couldn't stand the loneliness, and I would worry about feeling like a big fat failure - later. All of which are things about which I do care and hope, as I should. Fear can falsely convince one to shrink inside his own life.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote nine books discussing the course of her young life. Between the 7th and 8th books, Laura omitted certain sad events including the birth of and death of her younger brother who died at nine months, and the course of the Scarlet Fever that caused her sister, Mary, to lose her sight and go blind. Not to compare my struggles to those of a pioneer woman, but well, sometimes we don't like to dwell on what is uncomfortable, do we.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85k12-MOkJA&feature=autoplay&list=PL8B7A6BD0FEEA8ABB&playnext=4

Anyway. I moved. My former roommate and I, the woman who's an accountant for Cancer research, well, we reached a mutual agreement that I should kindly vacate the premises. We like one another, but our living habits are different enough that sharing the same space, while doable, created stress for both of us. Of course, once we had that conversation, everything became far more relaxed around the house, and I was still moving out.

I had a month, according to the government, to find a new address. I met with several people. Highlights include the apartment with the guy who, while he kept the place very clean, decorated it with tattoo art. A busty, scantily clad woman with ink-shaded cleavage adorned the living-room wall. Then there was the woman who was very nice, owned two cats, an out-of-tune baby-grand piano, and a small cottage about fifteen minutes from my work. Sounds perfect. Then we met. When I commented on how I liked the white walls and the openness it created in the space, she said it helped combat depression. She explained how she was an unemployed artist, just out of a fifteen-year relationship, depressed, and a recovering compulsive-eater. But it would probably be okay for me to eat whatever I wanted. The last roommate had food and she, the landlord, would see the wrappers and it didn't really bother her, so it should be fine. She offered me hot tea in a mason jar. She let me hold it with oven-mitts so I wouldn't burn my fingers because she didn't have mugs or teacups.

Fortunately, I had previously met with a nice guy named Randy. We met for about an hour at the B&N at The Grove (a souped up and even prettier version of the Kansas City Plaza). I later went on to mis-judge his house because as I was exiting after I viewed it, I tripped down the front steps and sprained my ankle but-good. When I had to find a new place asap, I got over it. Now this is my new home, and I like it. I have two roommates, Randy and Rocki (a girl). They're both aspiring actors and friendly, caring people. And they don't care if the dishes sit in the sink overnight.

Little bit of Rebecca Kean's LA and Life Now

Update: I did indeed move out of the house of recovering addicts. And I did this less than a week after the previous post. Once they drank all my milk, I ski-daddled.

I am now living in room inside a woman's house. My housemate is a very clean, very nice person who works for cancer-research. I rent a room inside her house for $750 a month including utilities. This is pretty good for LA.

I am far more central to LA now than I was before, though I do miss the smell of flowers. Sometimes when I'm working I can smell the ocean, but it's more of a weak stench.

Things of the past week:

I saw a white SUV with a pocket of bullet holes in its side non-chalantly left turn in front of me while I was driving to work. ("It's the Fratelli's!!!!")

I met a man who genuinely, "Yes dear'd" his wife. "Honey, did you ----?" And he, in a monotone, slightly nasal, and attempting to be patient tone, responded, "Yes, dear." And then he made a face at me that clearly said, "She's nuts, but what can I do, I married her." And then the wife, once she's finished doting over her 30-year-old daughter, faces me and makes the face. The, smile and squinch your eyes closed for a moment as if to say, "I know you probably think I'm a little silly, and I am slightly embarrassed about it, but I do it out of love, and for the most part I'm oblivious," face. They were cute.

In other news, my work days have been sprinkled with flirtation. 

A woman told I have a, "Shapely body for a, what's your name?"

"Rebecca."

"A shapely-body for a Rebecca! Hoo-wee!" She wore all black and lots of sequins, and her voice had a natural gravel to it, and she knew how to shake it.

Her friend clarified, "For a white girl. I tell it like it is. You shapely for a white girl!"

Then, before they left, the first woman kind of patted me on the side of my hip, the top most part of my thigh and said, "You are solid!"

Later that night, a man told informed me, excuse the language,
"You have sexy-ass lips! I'm sorry, to just say it like that, but-"

And I laughed, of course, and turned to help his aunt finish her recording. He later told me his name was "DaMon" with the emphasis over the "mawn," and asked for my number. When I told him no, he asked, "Why you do me like that, girl?"

Rebecca Kean is Not an Addict

"Drug or substance of choice?"

"None."

"Are you sober?"

"Yes."

"How long have you been in recovery?"

"I'm not in recovery."

"But you're sober?"

"Yes."

"How long have you been sober?"

"Forever."

"Forever?"

"Yup."

This is an excerpt of my first face-to-face conversation with the House Manager of the half-way house where I am currently staying because it is (!) 500 bucks a month including utilities, which is pretty good anywhere outside the Midwest, as I understand it.

For those of you who don't know, I spent the last two and a half days driving to LA from Kansas City. My job moved and told me I could either move with it or find a new one. They offered me more money, and told me I could choose from Connecticut, New Jersey, Las Vegas, or LA. Adventuresome as I am, I decided to Go West, Young Man.

So far I've met (names changed for safety purposes) Pammy, the House Manager. I suspect she may have been a formerly non-sober tenant herself, but now her vices are only smoking and a kind but suspecting demeanor. I suppose that happens when you live with people who lie to you.

I also met Sandy. "Hi, I'm Sandy," she said with a sleepy smile. She told me it was cool here because it's chill. Two hours later she looks at me with the same smile and says, "Hi, I'm Sandy."

Except the bathrooms, none of the doors lock, and there is a curfew. No kidding. 11pm on weeknights, 1am on weekends. "But I'm a cool manager; you just call or text me and let me know, and you can stay out till 3 if you need to."

There are 23 people staying in the house right, now including me. Chores and kitchenware are communal. It's funny because while it sounds a lot like a college dorm, the reality is more like everyone pretends to live in apartments where everyone just happens to share a kitchen, bathroom, and the front door - no one carries individual keys. And if you happen to meet in the passageway (living room), fine, but that's no reason to bond.

For the most part, the people on the street seem nice enough, though a few gave me funny looks, probably because I'm a young, white, girl walking about around like it's normal. However, the neighborhood is full of families, mostly Hispanic. When I first arrived, a soccer practice was under-way across the street. Around the corner there is a laundromat, a couple clothing stores, a moneylender, and a fresh market plus bakery selling all kinds of Latin-originated sweet rolls. The lettuce was really well priced and so fresh I had to clean off the residual dirt. And as I walk down the sidewalk, averting my eyes from the boys, the LA air smells like flowers.

Also, I plan on moving in about two weeks.

Rebecca's First Blog So She Can Follow Other People. HA!

Growing up. I know, it keeps happening, and it's a popular topic for this time of year. Graduation is coming up so quickly, and with the ending of things come the beginning of others. Frightening, exciting, frustrating, worrisome, hopeful, thrilling, chocolate-chippy.

For me this semester was very much a growing period. This whole year was a growing period. First semester was very bad, second semester was all about moving on and being better. Inspiration struck from a surprising source: Stage Managing. I took the stage management seminar this semester, as is required by the Jewell Theatre curriculum. I may not always be the quietest person, but I am, in fact, very non-confrontational. Stage management thrust me into a position of authority and leadership. No questions of whether I deserved or was most qualified, or whether I wanted to do it: this was what had to happen. So, I stage managed. I helped lead the meetings, tried to help keep things focused as work got done. When the time came for me to stage manage an actual show full of actors, I did my best to do it all full-throttle. I sent out rehearsal reports and stayed late typing up task lists so that the show could be as good as we could get it. I worked hard and feel proud of my part in what we accomplished as a whole.
More later.