Dopp Juice Archive

I heard a blind woman talking about the weather today. She said, “It was so beautiful!”Beauty is in much more than the eye of the beholder. It’s also a feeling, an intuition, a sensation, and an experience. We can know beauty with our eyes closed, just as we know when a forced smile isn’t real.I’m intrigued by how the blind experience life. There’s a blind man in my neighborhood whom I’ve observed walking around on several occasions. He’s always smiling. He’s always cheerful. He strikes up conversations with the people sitting next to him on buses. He knows what he needs and asks for it from others, rather than trying to quietly slide through life on his senses. In China, there’s a significant market for blind massage therapists, because their hands know so much more than the hands of someone who relies on sight. I sometimes see a truck around town that says “Mobile Blind Cleaners” on its side… The first time I saw it, I thought, “Wow, that’s great. Employment specifically for the blind.” The second time I saw it, I thought, “Wait, but how do they drive the truck?” And then finally, I realized it was a company that cleans window blinds, and they were suddenly a lot less interesting.

After much grief, I finally got insurance for my PDA cell phone (Treo650) from Sprint’s third-party insurance provider, lock/line. And I’ll have you know, it’s covers damage or loss from just about everything except for nuclear explosions and acts of war. They really felt the need to point that out to me in bold type.My first thought was of mild impending doom. “Even my phone company thinks we’re about to be obliterated!” My second thought was, “Now where is their patriotism? If they’re expecting acts of nuclear war to destroy my phone, why won’t they replace it for me afterwards in the name of Uncle Sam?”Here ends the story of my cell phone gripes. Go in peace.

If Sarah’s going to accomplish something at home, it’s mostly to succeed if it involves:

1. The Internet
2. Other People

Problem: How can we get Sarah to practice her Chinese at home on a regular basis?Proposed Solution:Make a new blog, in which she can journal in Chinese and network it with the language-learning community. There’s no guarantee it will work. She might spend more time tweaking the layout and customizing the settings than translating her thoughts into Chinese. But it’s better than trying to disguise a pill in peanut butter.