A moment of Blindness Tourism: Amy Coney Barrett's former student credits judge for success

This year's RantWoman #NDEAM posts are running heavily to vision impairment and blindness. This is certainly the disability RantWoman knows best. RantWoman promises to try to branch out for the rest of the month.

RantWoman sometimes refers to her blindness experience as "Planet RantWoman." On Planet RantWoman, "blindness tourism" is moments of extreme interest and vital importance to blind people, topics that sighted people are sometimes undyingly curious about. well, sometimes.

The rest of this post is blindness tourism, an unusual reflection on Laura Wolk, the blind woman mentored by Supreme Court Nominee Amy Coney Barrett. RantWoman means these comments to be respectful; RantWoman will also save tirades and frothing at the keyboard about other topics to other posts.

RantWoman's first preference when writing about a blind professional would usually prefer to write about the person's professional expertise. Here, though, RantWoman by no means wants to detract from the professional qualifications by talking about eye contact, eye behavior and things RantWoman herself both struggles with and can only detect when an image is close-up and magnified 4x. 

First, watch the video. Go through it once to pay attention to the content. Then rewind. Look at the different faces. Look at how often different people blink. Look at how often Laura Wolk blinks compared to how often other people blink.

RantWoman until recently has not even thought about a really personal reality for many blind people: artificial eyes. RantWoman has little experience beyond an exchange on an email listserve with people who have artificial eyes. That is not going to stop RantWoman from commenting. RantWoman could conduct actual research and see whether any other media sources comment on this point: RantWoman thinks Ms. Wolk has artificial eyes. Ms. Wolk never blinks. RantWoman can see what look like tears a couple times but RantWoman never sees any blinking. 

This also means RantWoman does not see any of the pupil dilate and contract that some researchers report is part of how status is established in conversation. RantWoman, being naturally self-absorbed, has come to wonder whether RantWoman's own inability to achieve this level of visual interaction is driving others around her crazy and / or leading to even more misunderstandings than RantWoman can achieve just using words. RantWoman can be pretty intense to be around sometimes, but RantWoman's inability to interact with many visual cues has been extremely frustrating. Truth to tell, to make the topic even more piquant, RantWoman also also finds it frustrating to interact with other blind people's inability to interact with visual cues.

Again, Ms. Wolk's eye behavior is not something RantWoman would even notice in person unless there were no COVID and RantWoman were very close to someone's face. RantWoman wonders whether people with more normal vision even notice. In fact, if RantWoman had the opportunity to ask Ms. Wolk anything, maybe RantWoman would ask about her experience of lack of visual cues and how does she cope. RantWoman is also wondering whether she experiences less of a problem because of being blind for a long time and thus having developed better skills for coping.

Again, RantWoman is curious. RantWoman also knows everything to do with eyes is probably really personal. So RantWoman will continue to scratch her head.

Meanwhile, we can all also resume regular programming. ...