Last Updated on: 3rd October 2013, 03:57 pm
I had someone say the most moronic thing to me yesterday. I was standing at a corner. But something felt off. Because I didn’t feel like dying, I was going to wait through a few repetitions of traffic before I could either fix what was off or realize that I was just halucinating and everything was fine.
After a cycle of traffic had gone through, a man pranced over to me and yelled, not spoke, but yelled, “Did you realize that you waited through a whole light there?” I told him yeah I had a feeling, but I wanted to make sure everything was cool before I stepped out into the street and turned myself and my dog into a pile of road pizza. And this is what the man said before prancing off, probably feeling like he was the saviour of the poor helpless blind girl. “You should go down to the square. The lights beep there.”
Let’s follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion. This man thinks I’m just walking around for the sake of walking around. He thinks I have no specific destination. So, I can just sub one area of town for another one. I was not trying to get to the square. I was trying to buy a greyhound bus ticket.
I wouldn’t have minded him asking why I’d waited through a light. I was at a kind of creepy part of town, so he probably wondered why on earth I would stand there any longer than I had to. But at least listen to the answer! I wouldn’t have even minded him saying the thing about the beeping lights if he had stayed long enough to tell me if the light was green, or followed that up by asking why the lights don’t beep here. But he just basically made a special effort to ask me if I was a flaming retard and then assumed I had no particular place to go, and then went off on his merry way, feeling like he’d done his random act of kindness. Thanks for the help, or lack thereof.
Every time I write one of these posts, I’m afraid I’m making people afraid to approach blind people. Really, we’re approachable if you talk to us like you would talk to anyone else, at least most of us are. Would you walk up to a random person and tell them where they should walk, or yell at them for not going through the lights? No. You might ask them if they’re looking for something. Why not start there with us?
