Bruce Toews

Blind people really need to take a shot at informing themselves about the Unified English Braille Code. There is so much misinformation floating around. I'm hearing things like, "Oh, as long as we don't lose any of our contractions", or "as long as it doesn't make braille bulkier". I've got news for you, people, with the UEB, we *do* lose contractions, it *does* make braille bulkier. If you do any mathematics at all, say goodbye to Nemeth code and any numbers in the lower part of the cell; if you do any stuff in computer braille code, say goodbye to those lower-part-of-the-cell numbers and so on as well. Say goodbye to the way you're used to doing blocks of capitalized or italicized words. If this is what blind people really want, fine, I was wrong, and I'll accept the wishes of the majority. But at the moment we have a bunch of egos in high places, many sighted, equating apathy among blind people with acceptance of UEB. If it gets rammed down our throats due to apathy, I suppose we have only ourselves to blame. But I've been fighting this for close to fifteen years now. I've been insulted, called uninformed, threatened, labeled as anti-braille, and more. And out of any ten people I ask about UEBC, I mean ten braille readers, eight will tell me they've never heard of UEBC, the ninth has heard of it but never looked at it, and of the remaining ten percent who have looked at it, those in favor tend to belong to the organizations that are pushing UEB. I'm willing to accept UEBC if that's what the people want. But I'm not willing to accept it simply because they didn't care and let it be shoved down our throats. I care.

There is a gentleman in the so-called blindness community who is a self-proclaimed accessibility evangelist. I'm not particularly fond of the term, but that's what he calls himself. And I like the guy, not to mention the fact that he has done a lot by way of improving accessibility in many areas.

One area, though, where I have a great deal of difficulty with this person is his analogies. One of this person's huge concerns is accessible captcha, those words, letters and numbers that you have to type on some Web pages to gain access to a particular product or service. This gentleman is a very strong advocate for what I call partially-accessible captcha. I say partially because he feels a battle is won if an audio captcha is provided, a solution which is no solution at all if you are a deafblind person.

But his analogy with the inaccessible captcha has been comparing our situation to that faced by African-Americans during the civil rights fight. It's a horrid comparison: yes, we need sighted assistance to gain access to these sites, but once in, we face neither death, bodily injuries, threats, nor even persecution. I sincerely doubt that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have approved of the analogy. Further, this accessibility evengelist says, inaccessible captcha is the same as putting up a "no blind people allowed" sign. This is simply not true. While I agree that captcha or its equivalent should be accessible TO THE BLIND AND TO THE DEAFBLIND, nobody will kick you out if you get sighted assistance to sign you up.

I bring up this dreary subject again because, in my insomniac state, I got to wondering if this gentleman has ever experienced a real "no blind people allowed" sign. A dear friend of mine was in China recently. She told me that, in front of some public facilities, were signs that proclaimed that any disabled person caught trying to use the facilities would be arrested. It really made me stop and think how good we ahve it here. It's not perfect, to be sure. There are lots of things that could be improved. But as a disabled person, there are many more discriminatory places I could be living in than Canada or the United States.

It just seems very, very wrong to me, and I'm not saying this to pick a fight, to use analogies to represent the problems of something like inaccessible captcha and compare them to true oppression, to true, intentional discrimination. It seems insulting to those who suffered and even died in the causes sited by that analogy to compare them to something as, let's face it, minor in the grand scheme of things as captcha.

I dunno, today's just starting off as one of those blah kind of days. I
just hope people at work more or less leave me alone unless there's
something specific they need or want from me. Handi-transit driver this
morning asked me not to talk on my cellphone on my way to work. That's
fine, he was nice about it and it's certainly his right to do so, but it
made for a boring trip.

Today's just the sort of day I'd rather just lie in bed all day and read
stuff I actually want to read. It's a Star Trek Voyager book that I
started yesterday and I'm really getting into it. It's nice enjoying
reading again. Or it was. Now it's back to this textbook.

I was at my mom's yesterday, we celebrated Easter a week early. Mom's
getting older, that's getting obvious, and it hurts to see it. So many
things about my parents I didn't appreciate enough as a kid. Now one's
gone, and who knows how long the other one'll be around. I've got to
show Mom how much I appreciate her while I still can, while there's
still time. I don't want regrets later.

The new hearing aids were a rousing success. They made my mom so happy
yesterday. But I'm getting sick of talking about them. I'm getting sick
of everyone telling me how difficult it was before I got them, as if I
hadn't been painfully aware of that; I'm sick of everyone whispering
around me to see if I'll understand them or not. Yes, it took me a long
time to get them, but we're talking about a lot of money, and I paid for
these things entirely, 100% out of my own pocket, nobody helped me with
it. I'd sacrificed a lot of the things I wanted to make this happen, and
yes it took a while, but I still did it. So pardon me while I treat
myself to a few things for a little while that I've been denying myself
... Like a decent computer.

You've gotta love it. The government says to us, "Thank you for
contributing to our economy. Thank you for the job you do, which helps
to make our job easier by making this one of the better places in the
world to live. As our way of saying thanks, the more you contribute to
the economy, the more you do for us, the more you do to pull your fair
share of the burden in this country, the more we'll charge you for the
privilege. And hey, if you don't contribute, you don't get charged."

I've been in a mild state of depression for the past few weeks or so.
There is no one reason for this, certainly no one is the cause of it, I
just have been feeling more down than usual lately. Going to work every
morning and staying there is exceedingly difficult for me. I like my
job, I like my co-workers, I'm treated fairly for the most part, but I'm
sick of working. Twelve years is a long time. Yes, I know, many better
people than I have worked for much longer, but I bet even the best of
them has just wanted to pack it all in from time to time, unless you're
one of that rare breed, someone doing what they absolutely love. I used
to love to read. All through school and beyond I loved to read. And,
indeed, if I'm on vacation and find myself with a good book, that love
of reading is temporarily rekindled. I love it when that happens. But
unfortunately, twelve years of reading crap have jaded me.

I'm grateful for what I have, really I am, but if a guy can't use his LJ
to just talk about his feelings, then what's the point?

I long for April, when I can again board a plane and visit Caroline in
Milwaukee. I think back to the magic that was my trip back in November.
Can that magic be rekindled? I honestly don't know. Maybe one must
create a new kind of magic, equally wonderful but different, each time.
Being in a loving relationship of equals is still a very new thing for
me: I certainly wasn't in it with Tammy, who felt the only way she could
get what she wanted was by threatening, taunting, and hitting me, or
withholding any signs of affection from me. What I have now is so
different from all that, and I find myself having to learn how to walk
in a relationship without my theoretical hand being in front of my
theoretical face in preemptive self-defense.

Bob, one of my co-workers, has gone over my passport with me to be sure
the information in it is correct. I've signed it, so that part of my
pre-trip requirements is completed. I expect to have my ticket at the
end of the week, all things being equal.

This is the latest commentary I wrote for my One Guy's Thoughts commentaries. While I don't for a second feel this spiel will win me a popularity contest, I'm saying what I feel needs to be said, something few others would have the guts to say:

Tomorrow, February 18, is Louis Riel Day here in Manitoba. It's a holiday whose name, we are told, was picked by Manitoba schoolchildren. I can't be sure, but I rather suspect that, if schoolchildren did in fact pick the name, they were heavily coached to do so.

Louis Riel was a man who was hung for treason. He was Métis, meaning he was of French and Native North American descent. He is hailed by many as being the father of Manitoba, a hero who was horribly mistreated by the government of the day. It is not the scope of this diatribe to go into the life of M. Riel, but there are many sources on the Net for that info.

So is he a hero or a murdering traitor? Depends who you ask, because it's very much a contentious issue, though most people daring to question his hero status will, of course, not speak up, because daring to so much as question the holiness and rightness of any Native of Métis cause these days immediately brands you as a bigoted racist. Also, and here I speak as someone who proofreads textbooks for a living, today's Social Studies (or as I call them Social Engineering) classes are extremely intent on portraying M. Riel as a hero, the father of Manitoba, and a helpless victim of an evil race, i.e. the race to which I belong. To vilify whites is, of course, never racist under any circumstances, says today's modern society, we're all guilty, whether we had a thing to do with it or not.

Did M. Riel get the short end of the stick? Was he treated wrongly? Probably, to some extent. To what extent, I could not say, since I doubt a truly unbiased account of the situation (either way) exists, and I wasn't there. Are we simply moving from one extreme to another my giving him a status closing in on sainthood? I rather expect so. I expect that, as is so often the case, the truth lies somewhere within the two extremes. Do I apologize humbly for the way M. Riel was treated? Absolutely not: while I do belong to the "race of pure evil", neither I nor my ancestors weren't even on the continent. We didn't do it, I didn't do it; I didn't condone it, sanction it, support it, encourage it, permit it, or wish for it. I have enough trouble keeping up with those things for which I do owe people an apology. I will not pass up the holiday we get tomorrow, but neither will I pass judgment one way or another on M. Riel. That task is up to Someone who was there, Someone who can offer an unbiased decision, someone not swayed by the government of the day, the will of the mobs, the mythmakers, nor the textbook writers.

Well, anyway, those are one guy's thoughts.

I've mentioned my hatred of UPS before. Said hatred grows and grows. I have had a package shipped to me. It's scheduled to arrive today. The package is in Winnipeg. It is now in Winnipeg. To deliver it, they need to go from the airport to the downtown, it's maybe a ten-minute truck ride if they stop for coffee along the way. Now I get told that the package has experienced an exception due to adverse weather conditions. Let's see what those adverse weather conditions are, shall we? Okay, it's a little chilly. Okay, it's cloudy. Even so, visibility is ten miles. We are not in the middle of a snowstorm, people. Heck, it's not even snowing? What, have they resorted to delivering by bicycle? Was their service getting too reliable? Must've been. I've already seen them hold packages that were waiting in the city for three extra days so they would be sure not to deliver before the scheduled date. I wish I had a job with UPS. You get to stay at home in your jammies because there's a flake of snow on the ground!

Holy crap is it ever cold! A short walk between my ride and the door to
the building here at work seemed like an eternity! It was another
morning where the temperature was -30 Celcius, and the wind chill was
-43. It's juts plain cold and I've had enough of it already!

We had a bit of a situation at work here. We were given the afternoon of Christmas Eve off, which is of course fine and good. Then about a month before Christmas, it may well have coincided with when I was in Milwaukee, we got this e-mail saying that our office will be closed for the morning, too, and we will be required to make up that time before the end of March. No choice in the matter, only a month's notice. Anyway, this lunch hour I finally made up the rest of the time, so I've got that monkey off my back.

So now I'm sitting here reading this Choice Theory book. Someone tried to tell me about twelve years ago that all arthritis was due to bitterness. Now I know where he and his wife got this idea from, because what this Choice Theory books says is much along the same lines. This doctor contends that autoimmune diseases are "our creativity responding destructively to difficulty in our lives". I try to examine this in the framework of my dad, who died of an abominably horible autoimmune disease called Wegener's Granulomatosis. It just doesn't compute with what this Dr. Glasser is contending. I doubt that Dad would have agreed either. I miss him.

I'm not going to say that everything went wrong, nobody can say
that, and some things did go right. But a lot of things did go wrong.

First of all I woke up just before two and couldn't fall back to sleep.
I finally got to bed just after four, and spent the rest of the night
dreaming that I couldn't fall asleep.

I woke up and, as per tradition, called Caroline and talked to her for a
few minutes. That was pleasant as always. Then I almost didn't find my
Coke money, but I did find it just in time. I got to work this morning,
got Coke from the pop machine upstairs, and proceeded to put it in my
little cooler. One of the cans fell out, and onto the floor, bursting.

So that's been my fun-filled morning. I could really do with something
very good happening today. I'm trying to ignore this monitor in front of
me and the dual slaps in the face it represents to me. I feel very
unloved at the moment. I know I'm not, I know that there are those worse
off than me, but this is how I'm feeling and that's all there is to it.