That's because the average person thinks you're either blind or you're not -- the moment your blind friend compliments your haircut, your first reaction is, "What, is that sarcasm? You're blind." The reality is a lot more complicated. Like cheap liquor, blindness comes in a huge variety of flavors and varieties -- and while all those flavors are vaguely reminiscent of butt, they do all have their unique takes on it. "Legally blind," for example, doesn't mean your eyes don't work, it just means they're one-tenth as powerful as they should be, which effectively means that you can't see below the big E on an eye-doctor's chart. So even a lot of legally blind people can read books, provided they use a computer screen or anything with a massive enough font.
You can, in fact, gather 50 blind people and not have any two of them see the same way. That's because there are several dozen conditions that can cause blindness, all in different ways. Even my uncles, who suffer from the same rare genetic disorder, lost their sight very differently: One lost his peripheral vision in his teens, while another lost his central vision in his 20s. Only 18 percent of visually impaired people are classified as totally blind.
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And having people toss you stuff to see if you catch it gets old real fast.
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