My mother's macular degeneration reached the point where she couldn't get her driver's license renewed and has continued to get worse. She can read, a little, with the help of a machine that enlarges everything, but it's a hassle.

God, if you're listening, I'd rather be deaf than blind. If I get a choice. Which I don't. I know which direction my cowardice runs.

Helen Keller was asked more than once whether she'd rather have her sight or her hearing back, if she were granted a magic wish or a one-sided medical miracle, and she always said she'd rather hear. What little she remembered of sight from her very early childhood was delicious, but what she yearned for more than anything else was music and the voices of the people she loved.

I'd much, much rather keep all my senses, but... yeah. When I try to imagine never seeing Hec's or Matilda's or Emmett's or my parents' faces again it hurts, but it's imagining never hearing their voices again (or never hearing "Feed The Birds" or "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" or "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" or even "My Baby Does The Hanky-Panky" again) that makes me really die inside.

Unlike Xander, I DO NOT like the quiet. Or, I only like the quiet when it's got something to be quiet against.

While I wouldn't be lining up for an utter lack of verbal communication, I'm pretty fond of silence in limited doses and could probably deal with it full-time. Blindness, however, would remove the lion's share of what I enjoy about life. I'd rather lose limbs, frankly.

My grandfather went completely blind from macular degeneration. He got books on tape from a federal program for the blind, but he found frustratingly little that was interesting to him - he was very intellectual, and so not interested in, like, Jackie Collins or Tom Clancy. My grandmother used to read him the New England Journal of Medicine cover to cover. He also had to give up playing the piano, because although he was pretty good, he didn't play by ear or feel at all - he had to read the music, and once he couldn't read the music, he couldn't play.

While I love listening to music and would hate to lose that, blindness would severely impede my ability to communicate online, which, when I stop to think about it, is probably my primary method of communication. I communicate with more people online in a typical day than I talk to people in real life. Not to mention the ability to just pick up something and read it. Reading, you guys. I mean, I know there are Braille books and audiobooks, but...comics! Maybe I am undervaluing my sense of hearing, but I think I'd pick deafness over blindness any day.

for me, it is an independence issue. I need to be able to drive. given that, there really isn't a choice.

Yeah, it probably makes some difference for me that I don't need to drive and I'm not crazy about it -- plus, holy crap, the audiobook selection out there is amazing nowadays. I'd miss comics, but nowhere near as much as I'd miss Vince Guaraldi and Mozart and Joni Mitchell, or Matilda whispering, "You're the best little mommy."

But it's kind of cool how differently everyone chooses, and how passionate they are about why, and about how the "why" is so different for everyone.

I found a comment from myself from 2001 in which I stated that The Emperor's New Groove was "not that spectacular of a movie."

punches college Sunil in the face

Apparently, by 2002 I had come around, having seen it four or five times, enough to recommend to friends after seeing Lilo and Stitch.

(Also from 2002: "$7.75 for a [movie] ticket? That's insane!")

There have been studies done with people blind or deaf from birth, and the consensus is that deafness is more isolating. That even if you see, you don't share conversations, you don't hear voice modulations to give emotion to communication. Deaf children do much better in a school that's geared to deafness, but even that isolates them as a group from the rest of society.

Blindness is less isolating because the emotional cues are present in voices, and the sounds of society are a background and an atmosphere through which most people move everyday. The blind are in the midst of that, too. So while they may not be able to describe a sunset, they can appreciate the wonder and joy in the voice of someone describing a sunset.

Which to me would mean a lot more than seeing it and being unable to share the emotion of it.