At birth, I was rendered 90% blind in my right eye by a nasty cataract. This has lead to all sorts of minor irritations during my life, but never has been a point of major concern. In some ways, it complements my laziness: I only have to rub one lenses of my sunglasses to clean them for superior visibility.
However, if you’re akin to most people I choose to release this fact to, you’ll excitedly cover my right eye with your hand, eager to prove your visual superiority.
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ you cry, waving your middle finger around like a weapon.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘All I can see is a vague blur, much like the remaining live member of the Two Fat Ladies behind a frosted shower door. Why don’t you try the test,’ I suggest, and punch you in the eye.
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ I test. Suddenly, you understand how annoying my predicament is.
One eye-related noted moment of shame which stays with me to this day was during a library class in Grade 3. Our gangly librarian leered at us before passing around a set of photocopied sheets for us to colour in.
Nothing equals the excitement of earning your Pen License in primary school, but prior to this there is the joy of being permitted to use markers in leiu of coloured pencils to murder black and white illustrations which were quite adequate without some four year old’s bastardised interpretation of which skin colours exist in the world.
‘I presume you can all colour in between the lines by this stage,’ the librarian spat, holding the markers out in front of himself. Our eyes collectively widened at the forbidden fruit we were presented with, until one of the noted class bullies spoke up.
‘Jeb can’t,’ he loudly barked, pointing at me for emphasis. I shrunk down in my blue vinyl seat (this was the eighties, remember), taunted by the truth. I did try as hard as I could, mind you, I just had difficulty navigating the pencil where I wanted it to go. Besides, this was a piffling problem compared to the crushing hardship I endured when trying to use right-handed scissors on my frustrated left hand.
‘Well, no markers for the class just yet, then,’ the teacher decided, and whisked them away out of sight, to the holy untreadable ground: the office. The other children pouted and made comments about me under their breath. I slouched lower into my seat.
Still, the blind eye has its positive aspects, too. During Grade 4 I was seated next to a rather alarming young boy who was incredibly preoccupied with the Army. He even had a khaki pencil case. I wasn’t quite sure what the Army was all about, but I was very sure it involved being killed. Satisfied with my living status – blind eye or not – I decided that I didn’t want to join the Army at all.
I revealed this fact to him, whose eyes narrowed, detecting possible mental illness. Someone who didn’t like the idea of the Army?
‘You can’t not join the Army,’ he sneered knowingly.
‘Why?’ I asked, suddenly filled with fear. He know what he was on about, as he was most educated on the subject.
‘When you turn eighteen, the Army comes around to your house and they get you,’ he explained, using a small Army man figurine to visualise this process. ‘Then you go to war,’ he continued, grinding the plastic green man’s head into a pencil sharpener for emphasis.
Experiencing horror not felt since my days of fearing my evil undead twin (that, and witnessing The Bob Morrison Show for the first time, and only then beginning to understand how bad Australian sitcoms are), I began worriedly making plans to escape the house on my eighteenth birthday. I’d just run. I wasn’t sure where. That giant adventure park playground on the other side of the city was kinda cool – I’d been there once. After all, they had a giant tube-slide I could sleep in.
Initially unsure if I should share my plans with my parents or not – after all, they could be in on the conspiracy – I sat quiet on things for a while. This all was fine until my mum caught me practicing my sprinting in the backyard and I was forced to confess.
‘I’m practicing so I can run away from the Army,’ I explained. ‘The tanks are going to come and capture me when I turn eighteen and send me overseas to be shot.’
After intial shock, my mother was relieved when she found out what the story was. ‘You can’t join the Army,’ she assured me. ‘If you’re partially blind, they’ll refuse entry. You need good vision.’
My future suddenly brightened. I actually had a life ahead of me! I smirked all the way to school the following day, knowing fellow schoolmates had a terrible fate ahead of them, of which I had been freed in advance.
The first person I told of my news, naturally, was my schoolmate.
‘I don’t have to join the Army,’ I confidently spoke. ‘My mum says I don’t have to.’
‘You think your mum can get you out of it?’ he rolled his eyes. ‘That’s not how it works.’
But I was armed with the facts. ‘I can’t see out of this eye,’ I tapped my face. ‘So I don’t have to go to the Army.’
He shrugged. ‘They would have killed you really quickly anyway,’ he replied, and resumed his studious illustration of a remarkably bloodied scene from Predator.
The eye difficulties continued into high school, causing a remarkable lowering of my Physical Education grades; mostly due to an inability to engage heavy objects which were fast on their way to colliding with my head.
My P.E. teacher eventually grew tired of my ‘antics’, and screamed at me after a game of hockey that was far more physical than it should have been. She was most intimidating, and everyone fell silent when she screamed, causing her neck veins to pop up and down like a mysteriously raging river beneath her skin.
‘What are you, blind?’ she hollered down at me. I fought with my mind to come up with an explanation, and produced a beauty.
‘Well, yes,’ I simply replied. Much screaming and being-sent-to-the-corner-of-the-field ensued; hastily followed by an apology when the facts were discovered soon after.
As I grew older, I became aware of payments which could be made to people with disabilities. Apparently, if you had something wrong with you, the government paid you money for the privilege! This seemed like the solution to all my vocational worries – I could simply live life and have my way paid by the government!
This plan was soon deflated when an interview with the school’s career guidance counseller learnt of my plans, and advised me that I was unlikely to receive such a payment. I cursed myself as I was suddenly forced to make class choices with a career path in mind, and not merely selecting the classes which required the least maths or physical activity.
As I grew up, there were a few more things I discovered I was unable to take part in. Video cameras are a prime example, but this has lately been remedied by those handy little cameras with viewfinder screens that flip out. Struggling to mash the wrong side of my face against a small camera in a vain attempt to view a tiny preview of what I was recording usually proved fruitless (and also produced shaky camera effects reminiscent of early grunge video clips).
Normally I was able to escape participation in such things, but there wasn’t always an excuse. Trying to find a reason why I didn’t want to go and see an Imax 3D Movie with a group of people I barely knew from university merely puzzled them. At the time, I didn’t really like letting a whole lot of people know I was half blind.
‘What could be more entertaining than a collage of snowboarding stunts on the world’s biggest movie screen – in spectacular 3D?’ an arts student demanded.
‘It’s not the world’s biggest screen,’ I protested. ‘All the Imax movie screens are the same size.’
‘No they’re not,’ she insisted, stabbing at her newspaper. ‘Look here – it says ‘world’s biggest screen’.
‘But they’re all big!’ I fumed. ‘They’re all the same size! It’s stupid, pointless, costs more than a normal movie ticket yet lasts half as long, and it’s packed with tourists.’ I folded my arms. Eventually I convinced the group to see the only non-3D movie on show at the time – something about archeology – but there were many grumbles.
Perhaps the most frustrating moment during my education years was when the Magic Eye pictures became popular. You know, those pictures which look like an scrambled cable TV channel, and if you stare at them long enough, breasts and such pop out at you in 3D.
Friends would crowd around these idiotic books, oohing and ahhing as dolphins and rainbows apparently sprung out from the pages. Most frustrating for me was not being completely sure if I was physically able to see these magical pictures with one eye or not. Perhaps I was simply one of the mere inferiors who couldn’t make out the hidden pictures – but then again, I may not be able to see them in the first place. To this day I still don’t know, but the only people who still obsess over these books are also still wearing Hypercolour t-shirts.
The blind eye had it’s novelty value run out during my druggy university residence year. To the great amusement of a crowd of onlookers, my party trick was to show that anyone could poke my right eyeball and I wouldn’t flinch at all. The antics soon ended when I developed conjuncivitis as a result, but then again – this was the year I also managed to figure out I could fit my fist inside my mouth, and nearly my elbow too, if I tried hard enough.
Perhaps the greatest moment of frustration with my blind eye occurred on my daily bus commute to school in Year 9. Our school bus driver, willing to bend the school rules, would quite happily stop two blocks before the school to let kids visit the local corner store before school. One morning I elected to buy something from the shop before visiting school and jumped hastily off the bus.
The bus had stopped on a section of the road where it turned around a bend. I quickly walked around the front of the bus and headed over the road, in search of sugary goodness at the shop. There was one small obstacle to navigate before I got there, though. Namely the Volkswagen Beetle hurtling in my direction at high speed.
Of course, due to my spectacular vision, I didn’t notice the car until I heard a rather urgent beeping of its horn. I know exactly how animals feel when they stare at you stunned in the headlights, as I did the same. My brain quickly attempted to calculate the fastest way to escape the vehicle.
A normal mind would have quickly evaulated the situation, and advised its owner to quickly step back. Instead, my snap decision involved me jumping in the air and bouncing spectacularly off the bonnet – luckily, onto a patch of grass near the pavement.
As I lay there breathing quickly in shock, I had never felt so frustrated since Craig McLachlan and Check 1-2 had released their debut album on CD one week earlier than the cassette version, forcing me to wait longer than anticipated for my very own hard copy of ‘Mona’. This had all occured because of my cursed eye.
I gritted my teeth, blindly wishing (sorry) that I could take revenge on the world somehow.
So as the horrified elderly female driver scuttled towards me and a busload of bemused yet concerned schoolchildren gaped at me, I rolled myself over, scrunched up my left eye, and yelped.
‘I can’t see anything!’ I screamed.
It was true. I couldn’t – yet nobody could see why.