What is something that you refuse to spend money on?
My answer:
There are probably tons of things that I either consciously refuse, or just for whatever other reason don’t spend my money on that a lot of/most people do, but it feels so natural that I can’t even think of many such things at the moment. 😀
One such thing that does come to my mind though is films streaming services like Netflix or whatever else is out there. There are several reasons for that, but the major one is simply that I’m not all that much into movies. Or even regular, traditional TV, for that matter. Something has to really, really, really interest me for me to want to watch it and for my interest to keep going. Most people assume that this is normal, because duh, I’m blind. While I don’t care about how normal it is, it’s probably not the entire reason, because there’s quite a lot of content with audiodescription now on such streaming services and it’s growing. Plus, even without that, I know quite a bunch of blind people who enjoy watching TV or movies regardless, with someone being their personal audiodescriber or just things that are possible to follow more or less without audiodescription. Moreover, I’ve even came across a blind movie critic from Sweden. I guess I have something weird going on because, whether it’s with audiodescription or not, I find it quite difficult to follow movies, I get distracted or plain bored very easily. And this is very selective because I don’t have this problem with anything else really. Perhaps in some part it’s because when I was a small kid, Olek and me watched a fair bit of children’s television or cartoons, but no one really described everything for me in a very detailed way as is apparently the case with a lot of other blind folks and their families. And I didn’t really mind that, I didn’t think much of it and I’m not perfectly sure if I even understood it totally that other people take something else in other than the audio bit. 😀 And I think it just might not have crossed my parents’ minds that a blind child might need that. I usually don’t mind it these days either if someone isn’t up to describing, unless I’m really really really interested in something and totally can’t make sense of some scenes or a movie as a whole, then it absolutely can be frustrating. I suppose it’s difficult to do audiodescription while watching the movie yourself, especially for the first time, and describe things in a way that makes sense, and especially when a movie is fast-paced. In our family only Sofi can do this reasonably well, but will often get so engrossed in watching that she’ll forget to describe things when the plot gets more dense and it tends to be rather inconsistent. My Dad tries his best, but has no knack for describing, plus the same problem as with Sofi, and my Mum doesn’t do it nearly at all unless I explicitly ask her to. But like I said it’s not a big deal usually, it only helps me grow my deductive and analytical skills if I am interested in a movie, or if I’m not so much, then I don’t really care, I just zone out to my Brainworld which is always interesting, until Sofi’s back in multitasking mode. 😀
If I do watch things for some reason, it really has to engross me, or I watch for social reasons, that is as a way of spending time with my family, or for linguistic reasons, as a way to expose myself to a language or a particular accent in a language, which happens rarely these days because I can think of tons of more interesting ways of exposing myself usually but there was a time in my life where I’d be jumping out of my skin with euphoria at a possibility of watching a Swedish movie just to hear the language. 😀
So, as you can see, it’s not really worth it for me. Plus, Olek does have a subscription to Netflix, which Sofi also uses when she’s allowed and my parents use occasionally, so if I want to watch something specifically from Netflix I can watch it with Sofi. We watched Anne with an E, for example, which Sofi loved, and I had super mixed feelings about but mostly didn’t like it because I never like how movies based on the books change, simplify and cut out SO much of the original book plot line. 😀 We also watched Wonder, based on the R.J. Palacios book, which was amazing for Sofi who didn’t read the book, and pretty cool for me who did read the book. But, while I was kind of interested in how much both movies would differ or not from their book counterparts, there was a lot more of Sofi’s initiative in it, haha.
My Mum also subscribes HBO and a couple other things that I can’t remember now and sometimes we watch stuff from there, usually documentaries that we both find more or less interesting. Or one time we watched a whole Czech thriller or crime series or whatever that would be classified as in one night, that I originally only watched because there was a girl called Misha in there and I had nothing more constructive to do at the time, but it ended up being fairly interesting overall, even though I’m generally not a huge thriller person.
What’s such a thing(s) for you? 🙂
My Inner MishMash 