Coworker is talking to me. Coworker does not seem to notice that I am not listening. Coworker does not seem to care that I am totally ignoring him. Shut up, dummy.



Life has actually been treating me fairly well this week, except for my usual moodiness and finely honed ability to fuck up minor things and then overreact. The hives are behaving really well, they’re barely there…just a few tiny ones and they’re not itchy.



Last night I went to the alumni forum my college hosted in Tyson’s Corner to discuss the name change, and it was actually quite enjoyable. I was the youngest person there by far - there were a couple of people from the class of ‘48, two couples who were class of ‘61, a woman who was class of ‘78, and the alumni director was class of ‘86 - and me, class of 2001, who didn’t even graduate but dropped out after spring 1998. I did get to talk to the alumni director afterward; I mentioned I wasn’t getting any alumni mailings and was about to ask if I could be put on the list even though I didn’t graduate when she said “oh! you should be, anybody who completes one semester is considered an alum, some of our most active volunteers didn’t graduate from WMC.” So I wrote down my address, phone number, and e-mail address, and she’s going to check the files and add me if I’m not there. Hooray! She also had a really awesome PowerPoint presentation with some gorgeous photos of the campus, I asked if there was any way I could get a copy of it and she said she’d never thought anybody would want it but she’d see what she could do.

I can’t believe they want to change the name of my college. The official statement about it does give good reasoning (people do think we’re in the Appalachian region, and even I thought it was a public university at first) but I’m just against the idea. I’m not even sure why - I didn’t go there for very long, and a new name might make the school more prominent, etc. - but I just feel like they shouldn’t change it. I’ve gotten several e-mails (most from strangers, one from a friend) about the name change, including one urging me to sign a petition asking that the name remain Western Maryland College (I did sign it). I understand why they want to do it, but I don’t like the idea.

It seems Western Maryland College has an ASL immersion dorm now. Damn! They didn’t have that when I went there, or I would have begged and pleaded and done whatever was necessary to get to live there. I do have to run by the Gallaudet library tonight and return a couple of books; neither is more than a week overdue. When I get home I have to finish making the Xmas present for one of my friends up in New York, and then pack a bag and shower so I can leave from work tomorrow.

Good grief, I’ve already fulfilled most of the requirements for the ASL Paraprofessional Certificate at CUNY-Hunter, which happens to be where my mother went to college. I’ve already finished ASL I and II - I’ll have finished ASL III next week, in fact - and I already took a Deaf Culture class at Western Maryland and I definitely already have the basic computing skills (and the high school diploma and the advanced command of the English language). I could test out of all those, complete the 30 hours of internship work, and that would be that.

As I not-so-rapidly approach Level 6, I find myself wondering what image to use on my homenode.



I got my midterm grade back on Monday. The 88% wasn’t as high as I would have liked, but it was higher than I’d honestly expected. It was the best grade in the class, anyway, so I suppose the teacher is just a tough grader or something. Also I’ve finally decided what topic to use for my research paper - I settled on the deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. I’m reading Nora Ellen Groce’s book on the subject and taking notes from it, but it’s thinner than I expected so I may end up having to come up with additional material.



I keep feeling so lost. I forget what I was going to say, I forget what I was going to do, I feel like there’s nothing in my head. Unfortunately this seems to be a permanent condition with me. Really I just want to relax and play all the time and not have any expectations or anything. I’m not even doing things I thought I wanted to do. I’m not sure what’s wrong, but something just doesn’t feel right and it hasn’t for a long time.

It bugs me that the blind woman in class keeps voicing, but what just happened really pissed me off. The teacher was explaining the situations in which you would fingerspell the word “own” rather then signing it, the sign being basically the same as the one for “accept.” Suddently _T_ said “_P_, I forgot that one, you gotta tell me” and then several seconds later _P_ hissed “accept.” Excuse me?! It’s bad enough that anybody is voicing in class, but helping each other is really unbelievable.

News article for the day - Muslims Victimized in Hundreds of Attacks - For some stupid reason, uptight short-sighted narrow-minded hypocrites are killing Muslims in the United States. Idiots.



Today was my second class at Gallaudet; it went very well. As I was coming up the escalators at Union Station I spotted the blind woman (I’ll call her T) that’s in my class, so I called out to her and when I got over to her mentioned who I was. We waited for the shuttle together, and just as it pulled up B came running up and boarded with us. I was lost for a few seconds at the beginning of class again - I think it just takes time for me to get used to the teacher’s voice again. He handed out the syllabus (which I almost spelled sillybus, because that’s basically the sign for it - the sign for “silly” followed by a fingerspelled b-u-s) and then today’s lesson was on spatial relationships so we played with blocks a lot. After a while he paired us up, and I felt bad for the girl I was paired with…her skills are pretty awful. On the way home B complimented me on my fingerspelling ability (receptive and expressive), whee. Oh, one thing I noticed that I wanted to comment on was the placement of a lightswitch at the front of the classroom. I’ve known for years that teachers will flick the lights on and off to get the attention of deaf students, but I always pictured them going over to near the door or something. It would make sense, though, that in a building designed for deaf students, there would be a lightswitch at the front of the room near where the teacher would lecture. And it seemed that the switch didn’t even control all of the lights, maybe just a quarter of them - just enough to get your attention without throwing your pupils into confusion. (Pun not intended, but a bit amusing just the same.)

Okay, Mom, here it is!



So Wednesday evening I left work a couple of minutes early so I could catch the 5:50 shuttle to Gallaudet. The bus area at Union Station is kind of confusing and I had no idea where to wait, but while I was standing there a girl came up to me and asked if I knew where the Gallaudet shuttle would be - I said no, but I was waiting for it too, so we waited together. It turned out that we would be in the same class, so we were chatting a bit until the shuttle came. (I am going to try to stick to the word shuttle even though I want to use more vocabulary because at Gallaudet the word “bus” means Metrobus and “shuttle” refers to the GU-operated transportation.) A hearing boy got on the shuttle immediately before me and turned out to be a consortium student from American University; after the girl and I had been chatting for a while he came over and sat behind us and it turned out he was in our class as well. One of the very first things I noticed was his necklace of rainbow beads. (I’ll call her _B_ and call him _D_.)



Fortunately _B_ knew where class was, and so we finally made our way there. I was surprised to see a blind woman in the class; she had already brailled out the workbook but I’m not sure how she’s going to do the videotape! She had two interpreters for the class, and sometimes we had to have one of them tell us what she was saying because the way she sat to use the working interpreter meant that when she was speaking we couldn’t see her so the resting interpreter had to tell us what she was saying. Those interpreters are mostly just repeaters for us; they do seem to use a modified ASL when speaking to her but for us it’s just repeating so we can see better. (They have to do the same thing for each other when some students are talking, because the blind woman’s position blocked the working interpreter’s view of us.)



I was totally lost and quite nervous for the first few minutes of class - I had no idea what the teacher was saying! I gathered something about a bird, but I thought I must not be understand the sign because what would a bird be doing in conversation! It finally turned out that’s his name sign - I couldn’t pick up on his last name but it must be something like Byrd or whatever. Anyway, once we got into going around the room and telling about ourselves I was much more comfortable. Most people gave their first and last names - “first name s-a-l-l-y, last name s-a-m-p-l-e” but I really didn’t see the need to do that. I just gave my name and said where I’d grown up, where I went to school, where I live now and where I work now. The next question was “who taught you ASL 1 and 2?” (this being level 3). When it was my turn I said that I’d actually learned fingerspelling as a kid and so when I got to college I skipped ASL 1 because it would have been really boring - I demonstrated falling asleep while reciting the alphabet - and everybody seemed to get a kick out of that. When the question “how well do you know the area around Gallaudet” came up, we ran into a real problem with one girl who just couldn’t figure out what was being asked…it took a good ten or fifteen minutes before she got it. Her signing bothered me too; after class _D_ and I agreed she was very choppy. I thought she looked scared the whole time, as if somebody were forcing her to do this at gunpoint, and she got very indignant when she didn’t understand - “well why don’t you do it like this so I can understand you?!” The last question was about hobbies, so I just rattled off something about computers and then mentioned I’d learned kayaking the previous weekend, which gave me the opportunity to learn the sign for kayaking.



The teacher then said he’d give out the syllabus on Monday, but meanwhile we really should make sure we’re in the right class because he doesn’t want us fumbling through ASL 3 when we should be in ASL 2. He’s right, too: he won’t fingerspell for us (though he is patient enough to use different ways of explaining a sign we don’t understand), and he signs at what I assume is his normal conversational speed - that’s why I was lost early on, before I got used to him. Once I had, I understood pretty much everything easily for the rest of the class, but I don’t think I’m ready for ASL 4 yet.



After class I walked with _B_ and _D_ back to the shuttle stop and we went to the Metro together. It turned out that _B_ even works very close to me and is staying with a friend out near where I live, but she’s looking for an apartment downtown. Meanwhile we got to ride all the way back to Vienna together (we got off at Metro Center to change to the orange line; _D_ stayed on the red line to Tenleytown-AU) and we mostly talked about the terrorist attacks but also talked about class some.



I had a really good experience with getting to class, during class, and coming back…now all I have to do is find my books! I have looked everywhere and they are just not turning up.