Operation Eyes Closed- Margaret Grover

This assignment was much more difficult than I anticipated. At first not being able to read or write for 12 hours sounded like a nice excuse to procrastinate on my other assignments. Throughout the first couple of hours I found myself unconsciously reading information without even thinking about it. Reading has become so automatic for me that glancing at pretty much anything written made it impossible not to read it. I also didn’t consider the fact that not reading meant I was cut off from pretty much every other type of communication. Facebook, email, looking at text messages, surfing the Internet, even using the tv guide all required reading. One of the biggest problems I ran into was taking medicine for a headache. I recognized the bottles based on the labels and their colors and then confirmed I got the right pill by looking at its size and shape, but I could imagine that taking medicine would be extremely difficult and dangerous without this prior knowledge.

For the second part of the assignment I chose to have dinner at the Berkeley Thai House. I found the restaurant because I remembered where it was located on the street and I tried to avoid looking at the signs to confirm that I was at the right place. At the restaurant half of the menu is written in English but the other half is written in Thai. I covered the English portion of the menu and was immediately lost. I assumed that the menu was divided into categories like appetizers, entrées, drinks and desserts so I just randomly selected a dish that was located somewhere in the middle and hoped for the best. Luckily, the menu did have little chili pepper pictures next to some of the spicier dishes, so I was able to determine that I wasn’t going to get something extremely spicy. When the server came to take our order I just pointed at the random dish I had selected and said, “I’ll have this.” She seemed a little confused that I hadn’t said the name of the dish but she wrote it down anyway.

Despite the fact that this project was extremely difficult, I was able to go almost the full 12 hours without reading anything. I found that spending time with people was particularly helpful because I could communicate without having to read or write anything. It was also nice to be with other people because I could just follow their lead when walking somewhere or buying something without having to read anything. However, if I wasn’t able to rely on other people I think the 12 hours would have been much more complicated. This experience has definitely made me conscious of how much I really do depend on reading and writing in my daily life; a fact that I had never really considered before.