(Bleep) Competence--part 1

RantWoman's quest to be a better-adjusted version of a visually-impaired person has taken several zigs and zags. Today RantWoman is thinking with gratitude about one highly competent person she met in the course of trying to network her way to sanity and how he won RantWoman's everlasting gratitude for giving her permission to screw up without penalty.

This person is bright and very functional with major publications and an endowed academic chair, although he makes clear that he does some pillars of academia fine and does not even try anymore about others. He eschews tools RantWoman cannot live without and works miracles with tools RantWoman is considerably less than functional with. This would be partly because he has been using them his whole life and RantWoman has been using them a much smaller percentage of hers.

Someone RantWoman knows is always telling her about some blind superguy who rides a bicycle along mountain roads with steep dropoffs and does it all with echo-location. RantWoman has also read of three insane blind brothers in Tel Aviv who never use canes and get around every inch of the city well enough to have manic careers in phone phreaking without any kind of mobility aid.

Even the object of RantWoman's inspiration does his own fieldwork--at times without even a white cane and has to negotiate all sorts of weird liability issues from the institutions he partners with for his research.
But how did he win RantWoman's undying gratitude. First, in the course of a question and answer session with people at very different stages of their careers, he conceded that he thought changing courses midstream, midlife about really basic tools like one's path to literacy would be very difficult. Second, somewhere at the same gathering he admitted he still has days when he gets lost on the way to his office! RantWoman is VERY humbly grateful so far not to have that problem, but she cannot begin to explain what it means to know that someone like this inspiration does have that problem from time to time!