Sandra Gail Lambert

Visit - ability

 

Twenty years ago I made the switch from braces and crutches to a wheelchair.  My life opened back up.  There was less pain, less exhaustion, and everywhere I went, all the places I could get to now, I smiled - which was quite a change.  However, everywhere I went no longer included people's homes.  There was this one night back then - I was feeling lonely - that I tried to remember the last time I'd been in someone's house.  I couldn't. 

Join the campaign for CONCRETE CHANGE - make every new home visitable. 

The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory

Last December I posted about Kenny Fries' memoir Body, Remember.  I've had another of his books at my beside since, but I put it off until now. 

Well.  At least The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory doesn't make me relive childhood loneliness and hospitalizations (except for the sawing off the cast part - I could smell the plaster dust).  No, this one just delves into the feeling I've always had that if things got tough in the world, I'd be an early choice for the ice flow. 

But instead of shutting his eyes to all that and carrying on, Fries looks right into the history, theory, and applications of "survival of the fittest."  He mixes it all up in with his own life, shakes, and pours out words that honor Darwin and himself (and me) and our place in the world.  Read this book. 

 

Mobi mats

The Ochlockonee River State Park camping trip was grand.  I have a first revision (except for this pesky little bit I need to write set in 1704) done.  It's actual fun to go through it all with a whole book perspective - with a wide, unobstructed view.  Which segues quite neatly into Mobi Mats.

I don't think I've ever blogged/ranted about my aversion to these boardwalks they're building at State Parks.  They get all this money, spend all this time, have good intentions, and then build "accessible" boardwalks with railings so high that I feel like a steer in a slaughter house chute or that I'm in some 1700's jail and should have a tin cup to bang against the wooden slats.  I don't think you get to call it "accessible" if I can't use my binoculars, take a photo, or lean my elbows (or at least my chin) on the top, stare into the vista, and ponder the meaning of life. 

Well, at Bald Point State Park, in addition to the mean jokes of boardwalks that other parks have, they have Mobi Mats.  I found it stretched out over the sand.  No one was around.  I thought "what the heck, my phone has bars, and took off.  I ended up at this lagoon.  I pondered the meaning of life.  

 

Here at home, online again, I looked up the Mobi Mat website.  This technology is brought to us by Deschamps the "world leader in tactical mobility since 1860."  Check out the promotional photos of tanks rolling over sand, helicopters landing in sand, troops disembarking in sand.  Yikes.  The park volunteer said that one strip of Mobi Mat cost $27,000.     

73.5495%

My wheelchair is in the shop.  There are parts to be ordered.  Who knows when I'll be getting out of the house again?  After the anxiety, claustrophobia, and bouts of bureaucracy-induced rage, there is the part where I get to write more.  

So, here's the revision update.  According to the calculator on my cell phone, this go through is 73.5495% done.  It's inescapable.  If I keep working, I'll get to the end.      

Dancing with a twist, hitch, and tremor.

I went dancing last night.  It wasn't like this.  I'd like it to be like this.  I'd like to watch this.   

The Trouble With Jerry Lewis

 

Talk about Oscar Buzz - the action has already begun at the Academy and the Kodak Theatre.  I've been following the protests on Twitter.  And on the Trouble With Jerry website.  My favorite post so far was when they crashed an Oscar Party and some of the glameratti helped pass out fliers and confided that Jerry was an "ass." 

 

Stairs, stairs, more stairs - and stares

I need more adventure in my life.

 

Now, in my manual chair days, I did this.  Not the stairs part, but the flip over backwards for no good reason as I was crossing the Big Five Points intersection in downtown Atlanta. 

 

And this one makes me hold my breath, cover my eyes, and sweat.  It must be that flashback to when I had a pile of gear on my lap and didn't see that (just) one step in front of me.  I blithely cruised over it at full power chair speed.   

Jerry Lewis - Humanitarian?

 

This year will be my SEVENTH ANNUAL JUNKFOOD OSCAR PAJAMA PARTY.  Women arrive at my house in satin robes, rocket ship footie pajamas,  sweat pants, caftans, long t-shirts, and I, of course, wear a lovely mu-mu.  The offerings change from year to year, but always include crunchy things dyed orange and M&Ms.  We huddle around my tiny, not a flat screen television and have a great, loud time. 

Jerry Lewis wants to ruin my party.  So what that he's spent years demeaning disabled people, relegating us to the status of children, pitiful children, that he personally thinks we are "half-people" that should stay in our houses. (Check out Laura Hershey's blog for more information.)  I've dealt with that, sort of.  I avoid TV during his annual pity marathon, I have a passionate but I don't think too long rant I throw out whenever his name is mentioned, and from time to time I write letters to our local paper.  

But now he's up for one of those "humanitarian" awards that Oscar gives out.  I'm trying to be positive.  Like, the protests against him will have a wider audience and more people will start thinking what it really means to put a hand on a disabled person's head and say "look how horrible this is, give us money."  That maybe, as a result, no one will ever pat me on the head again. 

But mainly, I'll throw things at the television.  It's going to be such a waste of M&Ms. 

If you want to throw some candy of your own, here's a link to a petition you can sign.  And Crip Commentary has a do-it-yourself guide to Jerry Lewis/Telethon protesting. 

Body, Remember by Kenny Fries

At this end of year time, everyone has their "best books of 2008" list.  I think what I want to do instead is talk about the "read in 2008" books that stirred the emotions underneath my writing.  

First, and in no particular order as they say on "Dancing With the Stars," is the memoir Body, Remember by Kenny Fries.  He writes about growing up disabled with enough effect that it sort of sent me into a week of PTSD. (But in a good way?)  I wrote out this quote from the book and have it posted by my writing bed.

"From the car my parents wave.  As they pull away, I feel as if I am once again their child in the hospital, and even though they left my bedside only moments before, I am already anxiously waiting for the next day when they will return.  And although I am standing with Kevin under the vast expanse of the New Mexico sky, when I can no longer see their car, somewhere I hear the hospital elevator close, the sound that begins to stir the distinct loneliness I still carry with me after all these years." 

I have his latest book, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, at my bedside, but I'm picking my moment to read it.  Just the title makes me remember the shoes that had a bar between them that I had to wear at night, the one style (but I could choose black or brown) of shoe available to fit on my braces, how, once I was financially responsible for my own self, I would get them resoled over and over and over because they cost so much, and how when I started using a wheelchair and could get any shoes I wanted, I vowed to (but never did) become the next Imelda Marcos.   

 

 

"Lame" rant

I'm tired of it.  I have been for a long time, but it's always worse after an election what with the thousands of "lame duck" references.  So I'll say it another time.

Stop using the word "lame" to mean pathetic, ugly, ignorant, ill-advised, dorky, boring, ineffectual, uninspired, or insipid.  Lame means that you have a hitch in your get-a-along.  That's it.  

 

ADAPT's "DUHcity"

DUH City- Affordable,Accessible, Integrated Housing - this is the rallying cry for the tent city that ADAPT has set up outside of HUD offices. (HUD backwards = DUH) They have a website, a daily newspaper that they deliver to lawmakers, a TV station, and a slew of bloggers covering the action. Check out Wheelchair Dancer, Cripchick, Roving Activist, and Gimp Parade (I love her heading quote about bodies!) just to get started.

ADAPT has a long history of disability activism that ranges from sledgehammering curbs without curb cuts to snatching people out of nursing homes.  These days, they also work on legislation that will release the nursing home lobby's grip on Medicare and Medicaid funds such as the Community Choice Act and Money Follows the Person Programs. 

Harriet McBryde Johnson has died

Oh, this just hurts. 

We never met.  I did write her a fan letter once.  I'd just read To Late to Die Young, her book of essays about disability.  I closed the book and felt part of a community of writers, like we had a style.  She never left the body out of the discussion.  She had that particular crip humor that combines earthy self-deprecation with verbally nailing assholes to the wall with their own bad logic.  Death wasn't so scary, and she was relentless about living well, about all of our rights to live well.

Her essay Unspeakable Conversations, is important.  In 2003, when it was published in the New York Times, I made everyone in my life read it.  She says the things I always want to, but without the impotant sputtering. Read it here.      

"Overcoming"

Overcoming inertia to begin this new chapter - this is how I almost started the post.  Me, who has a since-a-child long, nasty relationship with the word "overcoming."  I have a long rant about the how the word is nearly always insulting and disrespectful.  "Overcoming" your disability - please.  How rude.

But here I am, using the word about writing.  The weeks of research and agonizing and hours of playing Wordy on the computer and starting and stopping and writing in circles of cliches and unmoving plots and saying "I'll never write again" in a joking way to friends but really I'm stomach hurts worried - is this all something to be "overcome?"

My analysis of the word says it's wrong to throw any of yourself away, to say it isn't part of all of who you are.  So, if I plug writing into this theory then the skin creeping despair and surety that I'm a useless person that come before the writing is the writing.  Crap.

Overcoming sure would be easier - if only I believed in it.