Notice: Festival of Gratitudes

Partly in an effort to fight the onset of post time-change winter gloom and muck, RantWoman has decided to observe a festival of gratitudes. There will be at least one posting a day for awhile. Some of the posts will not look like gratitudes. Nor will they necessarily be tagged as gratitudes. There are gratitudes there. Sometimes they have funny disguises. COPE!

Today RantWoman's peculiar moments of actual gratitudes:
RantWoman from time to time out of her various email streams receives pleas for RantWoman as a blind person to participate in some survey or another. RantWoman sometimes has tirades when these pleas involve free accessibility testing, but RantWoman finds other surveys interesting and a valuable antidote to tiresome repetition of things important to RantWoman but the importance of which is little recognized by others.

RantWoman is terribly grateful when SOMEONE is listening.

RantWoman is always grateful to find out she is not the only freak on the planet with some or another problem.

RantWoman is also grateful when other freaks who share RantWoman's concerns are willing to speak up and live out the line about alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.

RantWoman is also grateful when there is evidence of sound design early enough in a process to mean that doing something important to RantWoman, not only to RantWoman but also to others, can be easily built in instead of creating conniptions and obstructions further downstream.

A long while ago, RantWoman received a survey from a young blind student in TX. Blind college student had instructors who had no concept of blind people and employment so he was doing a survey of blind people about transportation, a subject near and dear to RantWoman's heart.

RantWoman did the survey and expressed willingness to read the final paper. RantWoman forwarded the survey to several smart blind people she knows. RantWoman in a phone interview encouraged young man absolutely to network with other blind people. In due time, RantWoman received a copy of the paper. It was sociology, descriptive data, a little boring. Sometimes one has to be grateful for boring. What really pleased RantWoman though: at some point later, RantWoman sent something to Young college Student. In return, RantWoman was thrilled to learn he was through school and had become an instructor in American Studies!

Awhile ago, while in the throes of some or another of RantWoman's MANY opportunities for vexation, RantWoman digressed to read her Twitter feed. RantWoman was THRILLED to see some FCNL Twitter ID's mixed in with the tweets tagged #CRPD about Senate consideration of the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.

More recently, RantWoman received a half-baked plea for blind people to participate in some survey about sexual assault. RantWoman sent the student involved and his advisor a very grumpy email about preferring surveys that reflect evidence of human subject review and do a better job of explaining their anonymity and confidentiality provisions than the offending email had done. RantWoman was VERY grateful to receive a reply admitting that the version of the plea RantWoman received had been mistakenly sent beyond its initial target audience. RantWoman really really appreciates it when people can say an honest OOPS!

Finally, this week, RantWoman gets to be peculiarly grateful that someone decided to grab an invitation RantWoman extended awhile ago. RantWoman has the book Sin Boldly A Field Guide to Grace on her mean to read list and suggested awhile ago that might be a good meme for certain lurching conflicts. RantWoman gets to be grateful that the title has been seized with so many alarming echoes that RantWoman has grist for several posts on favorite themes such as reasonable accommodations, children of all ages and sizes, and the close of worship. RantWoman truly would not mind having such a warm steaming pile of occasions for gratitude in this realm, but RantWoman gets to be glad for the opportunity to get into the spirit of the season! Stay tuned.