A Confession

Oh Blog World, a confession. I do not generally have an issue with social anxiety. I like making friends, hanging out with people and such. But I am horrible at socializing in groups. I attribute it to many things. I'm short, so that doesn't help with those times when you're mingling, and you get shut out of the circle, and you try to work your way into the circle, but you're at elbow level, so you're also trying not to get hit in the face and....

Yeah.

Also, I'm kind of a strong personality. You'd think that'd work well in a group, but.... well. I take some getting used to. And that's fine in, like, groups you see all the time. People from my program, my sorority sisters, old high school friends. It's fine. But new people tend to give me sidelong looks, shuffle to the left and shut me out of the circle.

Before accidentally elbowing me in the face.*

So, yesterday I had agreed to go to a Nerdfighters meet-up at the Prudential Center. But I woke up and REALLY didn't want to take the bus+T, or walk+T or really anything at all to get there, because it is maddeningly inconvenient for a place that is a mile away, especially to spend two hours being awkward (and I know, Nerdfighters, but trust me MY AWKWARD KNOWS NO BOUNDS).

Plus, from the excuse factory, I was ill all week, so even though I was useless, I didn't actually do productive things. Yesterday, I edited half of a manuscript, snuggled with my large stuffed frog, watched a massive amount of Vlogbrothers videos and read a book.

I regret nothing. I was a productive, writerly person, and it was awesome.

*This hasn't actually happened, except in my nightmares

Friday Five!

1. This is way late. Sorry! I was poorly all morning, so I stayed in bed, then had to meet a friend at Panera, so I just got caught up with The Internet. Also, because I've been doing little for the past few days, I don't have much to blog about, but I'll figure it out. I have to be somewhat productive, because tomorrow I have my mentorship presentation, which is kind of like my first book reading. Eeks!

2. Am I the only one who is cursed by certain objects? I seem to have lost my one working umbrella and I only have one spoon. I have four knives, four forks and one spoon. Where do they go? Do The Borrowers really like spoons? And why do all my umbrellas break? Where did the one unbroken one go? THESE ARE THE THINGS I PONDER.

3. While bedridden this morning, I had all kinds of crazy dreams. One took place at Downton Abbey, but the other one involved me climbing out of an exploded Tube station. Maureen Johnson, I blame you.

4. Even though I have an epic amount of books on my to-read list, this year I am giving myself permission to re-read. Last year I was so focused on speeding through the to-be-read, I didn't get to go back to books I wanted to experience again. As a kid I was a chronic rereader, so I'm hoping to get back to that. I've already reread Lola and the Boy Next Door. And I read TFiOS twice in one day. Not sure that counts.

5. CUTEST BABY EVAR

Checking Out

Fun fact: You can order contact lens fluid on Peapod. I love the future.

I flew back to Boston on Monday, and the airport-bouncing made me realize how much having a disability ups the necessity of interacting with and relying on other human beings.

A typical person can go to an airport without really having to interact with anyone except gate agents and TSA. But when you require a Skycap to push you around the airport in a chair that ups the people by at least two. In my case on Monday it was five. I got a chair going through security at home, there were three involved in Atlanta, because I left the airport to have lunch with a friend, then one in Boston.

It's really easy to dehumanize helpers like this in our world. They often have little English, and you can only say "Boston. I go to school there. Yes, it snows" so many times before you want to scream. But then I got into my cab in Boston, and the guy was so nice that it reminded me that everyone involved in my day has their own lives.

But there IS a lot more small talk involved than there would be usually. And by the time I got back to the dorm I didn't want to talk to another human being for like a week. Unfortunately I had a doctor's appointment the next morning, which is even more banal small talk, no matter how nice the people are.

And, not to get into detail, but I also started thinking about how having a ton of doctors messing with your body all the time can desensitize you to having people do things to you. I got my first pat-down yesterday (at the Pensacola airport, because they don't have anything better to do), and I wondered why it didn't bother me much. Because I checked out. I'm so used to having people do things to me. For me. It's easy to check out on both ends.

So I'm going to work on staying mindful about not doing that, with people or occurrences.

But it does make pat-downs more bearable.

Profile: Justin Dart

I need a better title for these. Any ideas?

I love that hat. Can you tell he's Texan?

Justin Dart is a man whose name should be known, especially by people with disabilities, but every year we bring kids to the Florida Youth Leadership Forum who have no idea who he is.

In 1948, at the age of eighteen, Dart contracted polio. Like many other people, including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he used a wheelchair after his recovery from the disease. Dart didn't let his disability get in the way of attending the University of Houston in 1951, but--and this is what gets me--the university refused to give him a teaching certificate due to his disability. This is one of the ultimate markers of the change that's been made in the past sixty years. Although it isn't always easy for people with disabilities to attend college, a discriminatory act like this would raise hackles all over the place.

Mostly thanks to Mr. Dart.

He wasn't just a disability rights activist--he was a successful businessman--but he used his success in other areas to fight for his beliefs. After he saw the horrible conditions children with disabilities were often faced with in Japan, he withdrew his business from the country. Although he was friends with President Reagan, he spoke out against insufficient reform in legislature for people with disabilities. He had a major hand in getting the ADA passed, calling it the "civil rights law of the future." But becoming known as the Father of the ADA didn't convince Dart to stpo campaigning to rest on his laurels. At his death in 2002, he was fighting for universal health care.

This, combined with the fact that his first civil rights activism in the 1950s had to do with racial discrimination, reminds me of the fact that it's not just disability rights I fight for. It's human rights. And while I speak out about disability issues, because I know a lot about being a person with a disability, I know even more about being a human.

Friday Five!

1. I read The Fault in Our Stars twice yesterday. If you have not purchased this book, do not pass go. Purchase it now. (Not you, Kendra. It's your January book). Review forthcoming.

2. This is a late night Friday five because I was out getting dinner with a friend at a down-home Southern restaurant. She's applying to colleges right now. A part of me misses being in that place where your future is totally undefined. The other part of me wouldn't want it for the world.

3. I love physical books, but there is something absolutely awesome about being able to decide you don't like a book on your kindle and immediately being able to start a new one.

4. I'm heading back to Boston on Monday, to the land of snow and school and independent bookstores. I am excite, but I will miss my family. Still, I can't wait to see what the semester has in store.

5. SOPA and PIPA got shut down! Not tweeting on Wednesday paid off. Or something!

Thoughts from Booksignings

Last night, Mom and I drove to New Orleans to be a part of the Tour de Nerdfighteria. I hadn't been to New Orleans since before Hurricane Katrina, and probably since a middle school field trip Mom insists happens, but I do not remember. I can't comment on how the city has or hasn't bounced back from the storm.. All I can know is that the fact that humans try to find humor in tragedy:  we picked up a parody newspaper called "The New Orleans Levee: We Don't Hold Anything Back."

Actually, I saw a lot of humor there. Like these signs on the bathrooms at the Temple Sinai where John and Hank were. I understand the idea--don't put your shoes where people might put their hands--but still.






New Orleans also makes me think of Neil Gaiman's short story set in the French Corner, featuring voodoo and hole-in-the-wall watering holes. We ate lunch with one of my friends from high school at a place called Daisy Duke's, and their menu brought to mind the party-nature of the city:

But this wasn't the kind of party I would be attending. There were already Nerdfighters outside the venue at five when we got there, but we ended up close to the front of the line. Mom worried that she'd be the oldest person there, but she wasn't.

We saw the TFiOS van.

Mom read Paper Towns









 In line, a boy was doing a project recording people's reactions to a question about love, people were quoting John's books and humming Hank's songs. Inside, I heard teenage girls gushing over To the Lighthouse, and I thought of myself at fifteen, designing an entire unit on the book as an extra credit project, and wished there were Nerdfighters.

But while John talked about the joy of writing for young adults, about their desire to figure out who they are and how their experiences are new.

And I thought about how I didn't necessarily want to be seventeen again, but I could still live with that kind of wonder about the world, and stop focusing on the uncertainties. I love the random, exciting experiences of things like booksignings and meeting people I admire, but I'm generally nervous around strangers, for fear that they'll judge me. So I plan to try to treat each new person like they're someone I admire. It won't be easy, but it's a goal.

They signed ALL MY THINGS and were incredibly nice. I finally got TFIOS (my thoughts about which will be posted later).




They say you're not supposed to meet your heros, because they might not live up to your expectations of them, but I have to say that meeting the Greens makes me admire them even more.

DFTBA

*Let's add to the pictures of me getting things signed with frizzy braids in my hair!
**It was very hard to get pictures of them. They move around like hamsters on speed.

Profile: Martin Henderson

Today's scheduled profile has been thrown off the rails a bit by the amount of disability in the news this week. Like Peter Dinklage at the Golden Globes, i wish to draw attention to an event that demonstrates just how hard it can be for an ambitious person with a disability to make their way unheeded in the world.

Martin Henderson, an aspiring actor and a Little Person, played a goblin in two of the eight Harry Potter movies. But if you google his name with search parameters that limit your query to all items posted before January 13th 2012, you don't find much of anything. Henderson's Google results will always hone back to three days before Peter Dinklage gave him a shout out on Sunday night, to an inciden reported in the Telegraph on the 13th.

Last October, a month after English Rugby player Mike Tindall was shamed for allegedly participating in a "dwarf-tossing" contest in a bar in New Zealand, Henderson was injured by what he believes to be a copycat attack. He wasn't a willing participant, however. This is not the time to talk about why some Little People are forced by circumstance or society to participate in being thrown around for others' enjoyment. This is about why a man having a cigarette outside of a pub can be subjected to such treatment, without safety gear, or even his consent.

Many wonder why, if Henderson's injury is now showing to be so life-altering, he didn't bring attention to it earlier. I point to my Google search. I point to the fact that Henderson probably did not want to be associated with the occurrences of dwarf-tossing that still happen all over the world. He more than likely didn't want this to be all the information available about him, any more than I wanted to have my first profile piece focus so hugely on such a horrible setback for a person with a disability.

But now that he's found himself having difficulty finding acting jobs due to partial paralysis, he and Peter Dinklage are speaking out to make sure this injustice doesn't happen to anyone else. And so am I.