Blog Articles About Disability

A rant about the laziness of TV writers when portraying disability

A Very Special Victim: Why I Stopped Watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Updated April 19, 2021 I stopped watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit a long time ago, after a blogger names Twisty (who alas seems to not be publishing anymore) described it as Law & Order: Mutilated Women’s Unit and just couldn’t get that out of my head. Earlier this week, I happened to see…

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An Encounter with Inanity

I collect them. Moments of the inanity, stupidity and general idiocy exhibited by the able-bodied around a wheelchair. They happen quite frequently. Examples: the ubiquitous “do you have a license for that thing?” (oh, ha-ha – so very funny. And I’ve only heard it 500 times before so yes, still hilarious!) and then there’s an…

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Wonder Drugs for the Wonder Cat

About 10 days ago, Mojo the Wonder Cat had her first chemo treatment and it went remarkably well. We thought. Due to a miscommunication – because Mercury is retrograde after all and boy, has that ever packed a punch this time around – I didn’t fast her, which means she couldn’t get sedated for the…

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Would You be Blue?

Like so many others, I am fairly fresh from seeing Avatar and aside from wanting to see it again and preferably on a bigger screen and in 3-D, it made me think. Particularlythe part about Jake, the paralyzed protagonist who is given the chance to use his body again in a 10-foot tall blue-skinned avatar…

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Up Against That Wall Again

It’s no secret around these parts that I don’t deal well with being reminded that I have a disability. Well, obviously I know I have one – the no walking is a huge clue – but I’ve managed to create a life where there’s an acceptable ratio of the Cannot to the Can, the latter…

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International Day for People with Disabilities

I got up before the crack of dawn to a rainy, blustery day and had built in some time before I left to allow for crying because it’s just uncivilized to get up before the sun. I’m an Ahrtiste, dahlink and a night owl and it just wasn’t pretty. The day started of promising. I’d…

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Dear Buskerfest

It’s a small thing. It doesn’t make up for the rest of it, but it was very, very satisfying. Sincerely, Lene

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Good Cripple

Not too long after Beth and I first became friends, we had a conversation about a meeting she’d had with an agency that were supposed to help her get equipment (possibly Dragon?). Beth explained how she’d started the meeting by outlining the goal of the conversation, setting an agenda of sorts to be that she…

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New Archetypes

I’ve gone on before about the madonna/whore dichotomy of disability portrayal in miscellaneous forms of entertainment, such as TV series, movies, books, etc. And disability means either long-suffering saintliness or it’s an outward manifestation of inner evil, leaving realistic portrayal of disability as just another facet of a person’s life to… well, CSI. However, I’ve…

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The Slow Road

Remember this injury? That turned permanent? It even has a name now – thought of Priscilla, Celia or Brunhilde, but instead, it’s apparently a variant of Golfer’s Elbow and all without even playing that pointless game. It got aggravated. In fact, it got downright testy and has gotten progressively worse on a weekly basis for…

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Language Matters

On Monday, Colleen called me on using the term Nazi for something unrelated to the Third Reich and its horrors and rightly so. I should know better. People like me were the first to be gassed by the Nazis back when they were still doing it with exhaust fumes because it was easy to persuade…

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Weighty Thoughts

I’ve just returned a pair of size 8 pants because I couldn’t pull them up past my hips. This is a very new experience to me. In the past, I’ve hovered around size 4 or 6 (with temporary excursions into size 8 the two times I quit smoking) and aside from the myriad variations of…

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