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| Saturday, December 2, 2006 |
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Life in the vast lane 
| | What sort of technology makes the most difference to your life? |
| | I do everything with a mouthstick, which I designed. I started with a wooden dowel but now it is a perspex rod with plastic tubing at one end and rubber at the other. It needs to be light and flexible and yet strong. I also have another device, which is a piston from a car. I needed something that was heavy on the bottom that I could move into different positions to hold stuff. With the right positioning I can do almost anything with these two tools. |
| | David's attitude — I am committed to making life work and 'getting on with it' — I also encountered in another Australian guy whom I met on a plane flight from Boston to Los Angeles last month. He was tall, powerfully built (his shoulders were about a seat and a half wide), and blinded from a sawmill accident seventeen years earlier. A board flung by a six-foot spinning sawblade hit his face like a pile driver, smashing it almost back to his spine. His face had been reconstructed rather well, considering. "My skin held up, but everything under it was crushed" he said, cheerfully detailing his reconstructive surgery story. |
| | They rebuilt his nose and arranged his teeth in order, put plates around his braincase to hold his brain in place (though he lost a small bit of that, too). His nose was completely reconstructed, though with no sense of smell. One eye remained, sightless. The other eye was gone completely, so they closed his left eye permanently. Just a smooth expanse of skin remains, his sealed lid a curved line across it. |
| | This guy was not only happy to be alive, but was returning home from a sailing event in Connecticut. He works on a sailing crew. In the water. And totally knows his stuff. In fact, his knowledge of a great many subjects was more than impressive, and supplied by a boundless and joyful curiousity about the world. As we flew over the West, for once I didn't take pictures out the window. Instead I served as his eyes, reporting on the scenes below. After two decades of studious window-sitting, I was a ready reservoir of reporage about the geology, the history, the watersheds sliding by below... He soaked up everything I could report. |
| | I wish I could remember his name. I did my best to memorize it at the time, but it escaped me. He's not much of an Internet user, preferring life outdoors and on the road, so I doubt I could find him here. But I came away with a lesson: that our limitations can make life larger. |
| | He even made me visit my own. |
| | Many years ago, after I went through an all-day test for Attention Deficit and related disorders, the guy giving me the test asked if I thought I was good at multitasking. I said "Yes, sure." "You're in the bottom one percent," he replied. "But what's great is that you've compensated so well." Part of that compensation involved putting myself in a series of jobs and situations that required multitasking or context switching (which is what I really suck at, especially when one thing interrupts the next... I go into a kind of brain cramp without knowing or showing it, and in the process miss a lot of what's going on). Turns out I also suck at reading subjects with lots of short words in a row. In a test of reading Dick & Jane-level stories out loud, I was found to have the skill level of a first-grader, even though I could rapidly read complex text with lots of long words. "If I had only given you this one test", he told me, "I would say you are mentally retarded." This was after I had logged a record-high score on a another test — one involving puzzles and drawing complex line arrangements, from memory. Both tests revealed forms of compensation, he said. The former involved developing skills at masking a shortcoming. The latter involved a form of memory training. All done unconsciously, and over many years. |
| | We play the hands of cards life gives us. And the worst hands can make us the best players. |
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