Aaron Scheidies: Blind or Faker?

Recently Aaron Scheidies, my visually impaired friend / training partner, wrote about my daily routine, and what he “sees” me doing everyday. Today, I’m retaliating with insight as to what Aaron sees on a daily basis. If you’re short on time I can give away the ending: Aaron may be a little weird, but he is not disabled.

Aaron graduated from PT school at U of Washington last year, and now he’s spending his time studying and training. In a normal week I can expect a call from Aaron on Tuesday morning. It goes like this:

Aaron: “Hey dude, I was thinking of coming up for dinner tonight.”

Ben: “alright, I’ll let my mom and dad know.”

Aaron: “No it’s okay, I already talked to your mom.”

Now, when I call my parents to let them know I’ll be home for dinner it rarely elicits a change in their behavior. Aaron, on the other hand, is able to decide when and what we’ll be eating. So when I get home at 5:30 starving there’s nothing to eat, but when Aaron walks in at 7pm my parents have prepared a steak and salad because “that’s what Aaron requested.”

Also, Aaron may show up a little late for dinner, but since he can’t get home, he’ll just stay the night…  And the next night too… Actually, in my experience, asking to come over for dinner on Tuesday means he’ll be there until the Michigan State football game on Saturday.

How does he get away with that? Simple – my parents like my guest better than me. It’s jacked up – but I’m getting off topic. Back to Aaron’s typical day.

When you spend time with Aaron, you’ll notice that he volunteers for roles that are visually dependent. For example:

A few weeks back when the lane lines were messed up I couldn’t see the clock from the end of the pool. No problem, Aaron had a watch, so he was able to keep us on sendoff. [insert long pause to give the reader enough time to see the irony in that I have a blind kid watching the clock for me because I can’t see it.]

The limit to Aaron’s visual abilities seems to end when he discovers an attractive girl to help him out. Actually, I think he spends his day finding women to sympathize with his “disability” and help him to accomplish tasks that would be hard for somebody that was actually blind. Some examples of this:

1. When his phone rings he turns to the most attractive girl in the room, holds his phone out to her and says, “can you tell me who this is?” Usually he ignores it if he’s with a group of people, which further reinforces my theory that he is only doing it for the female attention.
2. Aaron spends at least an hour or two in Carrie’s office (she’s the fitness coordinator and the boss to both of us) asking for help with anything from burning a CD, to reading contracts to doing homework, to asking for advice in how to untangle his scattered life.
3. When I have gone to parties with Aaron it goes something like this: We arrive to the party, we get a drink, I see somebody I know, he sees a bunch of people he knows, and ten minutes later he has a semi-circle of attractive women surrounding him, enthralled in his lengthy stories about nothing. I guess we can call it “charm”. I’m not sure how this relates to his disability other than I can’t seem to have that effect on women.
4. Most afternoons Aaron heads to the Delta Gamma sorority house and has one of several women help him with studying for the Physical Therapy Boards. I think this is the highlight of Aaron’s day. Never once have I heard him complain about having to study with the DG girls. Instead, he spends his morning planning whether to bring them homemade cookies (which I made) or a muffin from Great Harvest Bread Company. I’ve asked him why he doesn’t ask out his tutor if he likes her so much, but his response seemed almost offended, “She’s doing community service to help me out! I’m not going to ask her out! That would make things awkward!” 

Poor guy, surrounded by beautiful women that love him, but completely lacking in guts.

I have a lot more. Enough to fill a novel, so instead I’m taking some video of how Aaron manages to be better at life than me, and I’ll continue this as a series of posts explaining why I’m so freakin’ jealous of Aaron (I mean, besides the washboard abs).