I’m legally blind, so when I began this article, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say about blindness since conveying a true sense of the condition to the seeing is virtually impossible. I then began to think of ways to describe what legally blind people see, and what totally blind people do not. Even with good illustrations though, it would be difficult for seeing people to understand the permanence and unyielding challenges conquered by people like me on a regular basis. That being said, I concluded that I can only hope to spread understanding to the seeing by documenting experiences which are all too familiar to people such as I. Maybe after reading this, you’ll feel a little more respect, and a little more patient when encountering us out in the world.

First of all, I’m not totally blind. I say this because I know I have some advantages that totally blind people do not. For instance, even though I can’t see the characters faces on the TV, I can watch programs if I sit very close to the screen. Totally blind people, however, can’t see it at all. My being able to watch TV this way does present its own unique set of challenges though, one of which is not being able to find the remote control.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, I decided to sit down and watch TV, so I began looking for the remote. I began by looking on the breakfast bar; didn’t see it. Then I looked on the kitchen counters, then the couch and love seat. Unfortunately, ten minutes later, I was still looking when my teenaged daughter entered the room. Unbelievably, she walked directly to the breakfast bar, and retrieved the remote which was sitting there in plain sight. This whole frustrating scenario was topped off when she turned on the TV, and started watching Sponge Bob!

Another issue is that I have two cats I can’t see very well living in my home who are always on high alert as to where I am walking. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flattened fluffy, or side swiped Snow Flake while rushing to the bathroom, or while sneaking to the fridge for a midnight snack. It’s no wonder that after watching their nine lives dwindle down to two or three, they make a wide arc around me when I’m up and about.

Interesting observations can be made if you watch a visually impaired person trying to find a particular food item in a large grocery store. Let me tell you, after asking a person for help one day, I’ve learned there are allot of helpful people out there for us to contend with. You see, after explaining to a fellow shopper that I am legally blind, I asked her if she could tell me where the clam sauce was located. Well, I didn’t notice that there was someone else nearby who heard everything I said so you can understand why I was completely surprised when another shopper quickly grabbed me by the arm saying, “Don’t worry baby, I’ll show you.” Guess what happened next. The lady I actually asked suddenly became disgruntled, and grabbed my other arm saying through clenched teeth, “He asked me first!” Painfully, for about two minutes the two women yanked me this way and that, until the manager observed me being nearly pulled limb from limb, and saved my life.

The next challenge people like me have that seeing people should know about is the difficulty we have buying gifts for our spouses without them finding out what they are. The main reason for this is that it’s usually because it’s our spouses who have to take us to the store. Today, I went to a large department store with my wife. I told her to, “Go away!” So I could shop for her gift. After asking at least a dozen strangers throughout my ordeal what various price tags read, and what kinds of things were in various bath sets, I finally found her something.

What I found her though, is so big, I was worried she’d see it as I was carrying it to the register, or out the door. Once outside, it took 25 minutes of walking up and down rows of parked cars to find our own. After depositing the gift in the trunk, I returned to the store because I wanted to get her a Christmas card.

Let me tell you, if you are visually impaired and looking for a card for your husband or wife, you better get someone to read them to you before you choose the one you want. Last June, I was too self conscious to ask somebody to read the cards I was looking through for my wife’s 35th birthday. So I was looking at the pictures as best I could, and thought I bought a card that said, “I love you, and always will.” But, in all actuality, what the card really said was, I love you even though you’re over the hill
Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased when she finally got around to reading it.

Another problem, or challenge, comes from having adaptive devices that talk, but do not have volume controls. In other words, everyone in the house now knows when I am ‘seeing’ what time it is, and when I am weighing myself. Why does this bother me? Well think about it, if you are a married man, and your wife is taking forever getting ready to go out to dinner, each time you glance down at the time on your watch, loudly blurt out what time it is. If you do this, it won’t take long for you to find out how wives react to feeling rushed.

It’s too bad I can’t turn down the clock’s volume. If I could, I’d be more like seeing husbands who quietly and discretely check the time without reproach.

The other device I’d like a volume control on is my talking scale. As it stands right now, it is both a marvel of modern technology, and a thorn in my side. The problem I have with it is every time I stand on it I hear my wife yell from the kitchen, “You aint losing any weight yet.” Annoyed, I respond with, “Thanks for the info honey, but I’m blind, not deaf.”

To sum this all up, the visually impaired have many challenges they face on a regular basis. From awkward and benign situations at home, to more serious predicaments like having to cross busy streets or navigate large hospitals, most visually impaired people handle them with grit and determination. That being said, you may come across a visually impaired person one day who is in your way, or causes you grief in some other way, If you do, remember this article and remember how pervasive the effects of vision loss is in the life of the impaired, and maybe you will indeed feel a little more understanding, patients and respect.

I’ve decided here to point out some differences I’ve noticed between people in the northern and southern United States. Maybe after reading this, the culture gap that exists might shrink a little; But then again, maybe not.

One of the most obvious differences, thus the least worth mentioning is the differing accents. However, aside from accents, the way each talks, or the differing expressions each uses, is foreign enough to each other to be well worth discussing. As interesting as some of these expressions, or figures of speech are, the origins of most of them remain a mystery. Let’s discuss northern expressions first.

Balls, for instance, get a bad wrap in the north. People who aren’t liked are, “Goof balls, grease balls, dirt balls, screw balls, odd balls, and some are said to have brass balls, indicating a great measure of boldness.

Northerners have their own expressions for being intoxicated, like hammered, loaded, tanked up. In the north, stupid people are, "thick, imbeciles, idiots, hard headed, jack asses, goof balls, and dumb asses". In New York, if you aint careful, somebody will, "take you for a ride!" If, that someone is a member of the mafia, that aint good.

I heard my mother say this one many times growing up. She'd say to, "Use some elbow grease!" The first time I heard her say it, I said, "Huh? My elbow doesn’t have any grease! Can I borrow some of yours?"

There are expressions in the North as well as the south that mean, I'm going to "give you a spanking". I thought I'd mention a few here. In the north, kids can, get their hide Tanned, get a lickin', get a beatin', or get their asses waxed (I still haven't figured this last one out.

There are other expressions which mean getting into a confrontation with someone, one of which is "I had a wall to wall conversation with him." Often when someone is about to have that conversation, he/she might also say, "Your ass is mine." This is an expression because rarely does the person actually want the other person’s ass, which is incidentally attached to the other person making ownership of it by a second party impossible.

There are universal expressions for beating the crap out of someone, one of which is, beating the "crap" out of someone. Then there is the overly used expression by just about everyone, "I'm going to kick your ass". Rarely is that the actual goal of fighting with someone. If that were the case, then many hard fought fights would have ended much more quickly than they had. In addition, in the north, I’ve heard "I'm gonna mop the floor with your face." Why would anyone want to do that, the floors wouldn't get clean that way.

I remembered one I heard allot from my dad when I was a kid. He'd say something like, "you're gonna mind me 'come hell or high water'. I'm still trying to figure that one out. As children, my siblings and I weren’t allowed to repeat it because we weren’t allowed to say hell. So, an expression we used in place of 'hell', was heck. You should have heard us trying to sound cool on the school yard saying things like, “Get the heck out of here!”, “To heck with you!”, and “heck no!”

As I’ve noted at the beginning of this article, people in the south, or at least their expressions/family interactions are quite different. For instance, you’ll never hear any northerner say, "Dag-gum it, I forgot about my beans on the stove and they scorched. Nor will you hear a northerner calling out, “Hey Boo! How you doing, Bee?” I was called both terms of endearment down in southern Louisiana back in the late '80's.

Slicker than owl ‘stuff’ to describe a walk way covered with gumbo mud, or the kitchen floor after a 'knock-down-drag-out' with a sibling and there's blood everywhere.

In contrast to terms mentioned above indicating a level of intoxication, people in the south can get "Drunk as a skunk". This degree of intoxication is commonly used in southern courts of law to convict people of DWI.

At the risk of sounding vulgar, some expressions really need to be exposed because of their visual imagery which is very important to people in the south. Two such expressions can be used like these, “This rain storm 'is a real turd floater'! And, “This supper might not taste good, but at least it'll make a turd.

Also, just as the north has figures of speech indicating a desire to beat up someone, people in the south have a few of their own. “I was so mad at him I wanted to snatch a knot in his neck:!

In the south, there are all kinds of southern folk: Those with class, then there is the rest of us living in mobile homes. For those of us living in trailer parks, a southern expression might be, "Evelyn O’lean, did you see that UFO?!” Something I’ve said that I can’t imagine a northerner saying is, "Patricia, put that rooster back where you found it!" Additionally, people in the south don't say, "Turn out the lights", instead they say, "Cut out the lights".

In the south, I have found that young men often have a grading system to describe the relative looks of women. Depending on how many consumed beers were required to make a woman look good enough to 'have relations' with determined the label they used. For example, Bob might say, "Ew! Would you look at that homely thing, she's a twelve pack!"

Also, people in the south will eat anything! Until I moved to the south, I never saw, much less ate okra. So the first time I tried it 'snot' was the first thing that came to mind; I thought, "I'm eating snot!" And I blew chunks all over the place. Even worse, the first time someone put a craw-fish in front of me, I thought, "What the hell is this? It looks a little crunchy!" Then they told me to suck the head, and I, again, blew chunks all over. I never had banana pudding until I came to the south...now, that's something I learned to love really quick.

No where else in this great nation do families say they love each other quite like they do in the south. In the south, a father and a son can be putting knots on each others heads (at a bar) one day, then be fishing the next. Additionally, brothers can be shooting bottle rockets at each other, chase each other with axes and baseball bats, and even stab each other in the feet while playing 'chicken' but when it comes down to it they will defend each other to the bitter end.

For the most part, women in the south are tough, and won’t hesitate to knock a man on his rear end! As a matter of fact, I’ve witnessed my mother-in-law do this to her man on a number of occasions.

The south is the only place you can get a case of the red ass. Southern doctors are at a loss, and can’t figure out what causes it, or even why the condition is named "red ass" since people with this affliction rarely actually have a red ass!

In the south, you’ll hear an awful lot about people showing their asses. What's with that . When someone gets angry and throws a fit, he is showing his ass. When a child is misbehaving , he/she is also showing ass. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how these behaviors can be labeled as showing ones ass since one has nothing to do with the other.

In the south, as well as the north, pants are often referred to as britches. A dresser in the south is called, "a chest of drawers". The first time I heard this I thought the old lady was saying, “Sir, Check your drawers.”

It was only in the south that I learned about cow tipping. This past time probably occurs in the north as well, but I never heard of it up there. What people do is get drunk, then they go out to a cow pasture where cows are sleeping standing up and they proceed to push them over. From what I’ve heard, this activity supplies southern teens with hours of good, almost clean fun.

Finally, as you can see, differences do exist between northerners and southerners. Thankfully, though, we live in a nation where awareness that differences should be celebrated is becoming more and more popular. Maybe one day we will live in a society where we are all appreciated for our uniqueness.