If I can pick between two things, it's still a choice -- Garbo

 

 

 So, once again, I seem to be out of road. That ever happen to you? You know you have A Situation, but you think you have a little while longer to deal with it. And then you go over a little hill on The Road of Life and there is a barricade with reflector diskson it and a long wide narrow double arrow sign, bidding you to choose left or right. 

Don't worry, I'm not dying or getting divorced or joining the Trump 2024 team. But I am struggling to see while using modern technology. I was using a PC with Windows 7 on it, and that finally just became untenable as an option, so I have switched to a Windows 10 laptop, which has a large "monitor" made from a travel TV cabled to it. For everday use, like email, it works. But for creative work, I'm struggling. 

This little personal essay is my blog post today because I am switching to an audio version of my Tuesday contributions to the Consortium of Seven group daily blog. There will still be photos, and maybe a paragraph or two of text but the main part of the blog will be an audio file posted to YouTube with either one image or a slidesshow. I am working on my video-making and audio production skills and hope each video will be a bit better-made. 

This type of end-of-the-road moment came for me in about 1985 or 1986, when I realized I simply couldn't read printed books or magazines any more. The e-book was in the future, and people were just starting to get personal computers; I think I got one in 1987. The Talking Books program was better than when I was a teenager, when we got large wooden crates with buckled straps around them, and in the crates were slow-playing records which you had to play on a heavy old-fashioned box turnable which went at something like 16 rpm. At that time, your choices were The King James Bible, Reader's Digest, Max Brand and Barbara Cartland novels, maybe classics that weren't too long for the record format. By the time I re-enrolled, we were getting four-sided cassette tapes which came in plastic box mailers, and had to be played on a clunky four-sided tape player. You had to get on a waiting list if you wanted specific books, and it took a long time to get a turn with popular books.
Today, the Talking Books can be played from a USB thumb drive inserted into a special rechargeable player, half the size of the old ones. You can put 40 or 50 books on each thumb drive, and you don't have to take turns with other users, as you can download the books as specialized files from the website.  (To use the Talking Books program, you need to be legally or totally blind, be unable to hold up a book to read it, or have some other kinds of vision or cognitive issues which make reading difficult. You apply through your local library and you need a dcotor to sign off on it, or proof that you are already receiving other services for the blind and disabled.)

These tech upgrades were in the future when I realized I couldn't see to read, and it was an adjustment. I looked up the saying "What must be cured must be endured," and apparently it's been around since the 1500s. I don't know if "endured" is quite the right word, as I prefer to think that I am still making choices, even if I have very limited options. 

The option I'm rejecting is to alternately complain and search for non-existent easy answers. The option I'm choosing is to change technologies, and gratitude that I have such an option. And just like with the developments in Talking Books, who knows what breakthroughs will come along to make it easier to deal with the many, many screens I need to look at each day. In the meantime, a microphone and YouTube and the Tuesday blog post will go on.