“Hey Dave,” she typed. There are several people with intellectual disabilities that I know and keep in touch with through Facebook and Facebook messenger. Most of the time it’s just quick check ins but sometimes it’s more in depth than that. I recently had a discussion, for example, with a man who wanted to know […]
I went out shopping today to buy gifts for some people on my list. Joe was one of them, so Joe didn’t come with me. My first stop was the Bay store near me, I knew exactly what I wanted, exactly where everything was and hoped to get in and out without fuss. As it’s […]
It’s disconcerting. The casual cruelty that people are capable of, the easy way that some have with hate, the dismissal of the idea that the feelings of others matter, sometimes takes me aback. I know that the anonymity of the keyboard and screen allow people to say things that they may never say aloud. I […]
This will not be a pleasant post. I’m angry. I read, today, about a 13 year old boy who committed suicide because of years and years of homophobic bullying. Most of his life he was tortured by social violence. Bullying is social violence. Understand that. It’s an act of violence that happens, rarely, in private. […]
I was accused recently of being a snob. This surprised me as I’m used to thinking of myself as amongst the snubbed. a Snubbee not a snubbor. But I need to be open to feedback so I asked what I had done that made me appear snobbish. The answer, when I heard it, didn’t really […]
She greeted me with warmth when I got on the bus in the morning. I was a little surprised because I go to work fairly early and am picked up even earlier and when I ride with others at that time, they are, um, chatty. I’m a morning person so I returned her greeting and […]
A few days ago, I wrote a post about the natural assumption that people with disabilities live their lives alone. That disability equals isolation. I believe that part of the disphobia that people have is from a bone deep fear that if they became disabled they will not only deal with a new way of […]
She is standing right beside me looking me directly in the eye. I am 63 and in a wheelchair and she is 10 standing tall. All around us people are hugging each other and saying hellos. Now she and I are connected in a kind of abstract way and if family trees were drawn […]
“Please!?!?” she was pleading with me. I had come out of the exercise room and was heading up to our hotel room, while Joe was out getting the laundry done. I rode up, in silence, with a woman of about my age. We got off the elevator and I began pushing down to our room. […]
So, I went to the exercise room in a hotel for the first time. I found a machine where I could do two exercises, one was to take hold of a bar from on high and pull it down, this motion lifted a preset weight on the machine. The other, on the same machine, was […]
