Every day I rise and wash my face because the sighted people do it. Among the sighted it’s bad form to walk about with a fried egg stuck to your face. Of course these days there’s likely a fetish society devoted to facial egg but that’s not my concern. I’m wholly preoccupied with living among my visual colleagues.
Now the problem of course (you knew there was a problem, our title contains “only” and only is the fruit of a bitter tree) is that sighted people don’t wash up for me. In this case “wash” is a metaphor but only just so, for the aim of hygiene is to be agreeable. Agreeable is a fine word. It means pleasurable; it portends enjoyment. As a predicate it means coming to terms—arriving at a compromise.
There are many sighted people who don’t wash up for me—who’ve never washed up—and there are some who have no intention of doing so. I’ve gotten pretty used to it. Getting used to it means, among other things, that I don’t have a constituency among faculty and staff—I’m the “only” blind professor. This is a fact the way a coconut in Iowa is a fact. You should never forget “only” is a taxonomic situation. With no “like” kind a blind professor is kind of “neat” because, after all, as he walks the quadrangle with his seeing-eye dog he suggests diversity—more than suggests it—he’s real diverse; “wicked” diverse as they say in Boston. And his dog is cute. Occasionally he breaks the service dog rules and lets students pet her.
But with no like kind he’s also easily cut off. When he goes to meetings with sighted people he’s never given accessible materials in advance so he’ll know what’s going on. When he complains the sighted roll their eyes. Some snarl. He always finds it interesting that when he asks for simple accommodations and then asks for them again and again—well, you guessed it—he becomes the “problem”.
He’s denied all sorts of things. This is because his needs don’t fit into known categories. He has a deaf friend on the faculty who also experiences this. His deaf friend needed an interpreter while teaching abroad. Ye Olde University didn’t like that. They dragged their feet. Eventually they got an interpreter but not without baleful whinging. Agreeable is a fine word but the predicate seldom applies to the transactional experiences of disabled faculty. The blind professor asked for a sighted guide when he was preparing to teach in a foreign country where they don’t allow guide dogs. He was going to be in a very crowded city with heavy traffic. You can guess what happened: there was more whinging. There was no money for such a thing. They asked the blind professor if he might find the money. Around and around it goes. So the blind professor, favoring his health and safety, withdrew from teaching abroad.
Although the sighted don’t wash up for him the blind professor abides, like “the Dude” and he even has a sense of humor. He likes his sighted colleagues but feels sorry for them. He feels sorry for them the way he feels sorry for embalmers. The sighted have to overlook so much to be so narrowly focused. He reckons its hard for them.
Planet of the Blind 