IMDb says that if I enjoyed “Sweet Nothing in My Ear” I will enjoy “Sound and Fury” - well, that’s pretty accurate, because the former is basically a fictionalized version of the latter. Yup, the old CI debate again, this time starring Marlee Matlin and Jeff Daniels.
Thoughts:

• It showed that some deaf people are very opposed to implants but didn’t really do a good job of explaining why. The deaf grandfather was obviously a strong supporter of deaf culture but they didn’t really say why he was against implants at all.
• Jeff Daniels did a better job signing than I was expecting. Plenty of flaws, obviously, but he was more fluid than I had anticipated, less stilted than I feared.
• They got the same guy who plays the interpreter on the L Word to play an interpreter in the courtroom on this movie. Marlee’s doing? Hmmm.
• They used voiceover instead of subtitles to explain what the signing was saying. Yuck! Somebody on the IMDb message board said they preferred that because it conveyed the emotions better. That makes sense if you’re a blind person watching the movie, but otherwise, can’t you see the facial expressions? Do you really need to hear someone to know how they feel?!
• Deanne Bray was in it! That surprised me. Phyllis Frelich was smashing as always. Is Shoshannah Stern only playing CI/oral characters now? Who was the grandfather? I couldn’t recognize him.
• Good discussion about the movie at Cochlear Implant Online here.
• I missed most of the “you were born hearing” discussion because the station interrupted for a tornado warning…for somewhere that is at LEAST two hours away. Come on guys, your signal isn’t that strong that they’re watching you out there! They broke in again a little later but I forget what part that was.

I always like watching Marlee Matlin but this movie wasn’t very good.

Today was my first day back on campus. Sex & Gender class went fine in the morning, I am caught up with everything (I think). Tomorrow we’ll find out how much I fell behind in my other classes, and whether I can catch up quickly or what. I know I fell behind in my linguistics reading…I don’t think I even cracked that book while we were gone! I have to do some history reading tonight for sure.

Also today I had my brain scan at the audiology center. They found out that the hearing loss does not lie between the cochlea and the brain, so it’s somewhere between the eardrum and the cochlea. They don’t know why, though, and won’t speculate - they said I’d need to see an ENT doc for that. They explained why my mild hearing loss is a problem - apparently a high frequency loss takes away sounds like s, sh, and f. As we all know from Wheel of Fortune, s is a very common letter (RSTLNE anyone?) and so by missing certain sounds, I’m not able to fully understand. It’s not that I can’t hear when someone is speaking, I know they are speaking, but missing out on certain sounds means I don’t get the full information.

For home situations, I have to train my family to get my attention before they start talking to me, not call to me from another room, etc. This will allow me to use lipreading just a little bit so I can fill in the gaps, and also it makes sure my attention is focused on my ears. The reason I have trouble is because I often miss the first half of a sentence and then I miss some information from the rest of it and I end up clueless. So attention-getting is going to be important at home. For work, the audiology department is going to order a special in-line amplifier so I can try it for 30 days and see if that helps me. If it does, then I get to buy it for myself - they’ll tell me how much it costs. If it doesn’t help, uh…I dunno!

The audiologist is going to send my audiogram and the certification letter to the admissions department so I can get converted over to regular student status.

Tonight I had a 30+ minute post-practice chat with the College Bowl coach. He wanted me to know that if I become a “regular” student, I WILL be on the team going to New Orleans in July for the competition. He immediately asked if A would come too, so apparently I would get my own room, though he did say only my trip would be paid for.

He said that after seeing me in the past two practices, he can tell I definitely belong on the team. It takes both knowledge and enthusiasm, and I guess I have both. He’s already communicated with the National Association for the Deaf to ask about a hypothetical situation wherein a hearing student becomes a regular status student, and they said it would be okay for me to be on the team as long as I was regular status at Gallaudet. All I need for that is the audiogram and the audiologist’s letter certifying that the hearing loss is permanent.

We chatted about other things too, it was a really nice conversation and he treated me as an equal rather than “just a student” which was cool.

Dr. Mom, my favorite teacher, sent me an email today. She said she had been thinking about the discussion in yesterday’s Sex & Gender class, and she worried that I felt excluded or marginalized by the discussion because we focused only on straight couples. She saw me before I had a chance to reply, so she asked me about it again! I said we were talking about the differences between men and women, so of course it was natural that we would talk about straight couples, and I was fine with it! I made sure she knew I thought she was an absolute sweetheart for sending me that note.

I’ve been thinking more about identity and stuff, with regard to the hearing loss. One person asked me if I was sad or excited, a hearing friend said they would be excited, and another person was surprised I wasn’t excited.

I guess the reason I am on the fence about my feelings is because of my “other life.” I’m pretty sure I’ve talked before about feeling a separation between the person I am at school and the one I am at home and at work. It’s really hard to put into words, but I know it has to do with going home every night…that period of “sorry, I have to leave” is what makes things weird for me.

Anyway, I’m totally fine with having a mild hearing loss, I’m not super-worried about it. But I do want to have it corrected, mostly because it does affect my job. There are plenty of hard of hearing interpreters, so it’s not that strange, but it would be bad if I didn’t get it corrected and still tried to work. It would also make things easier with my family if I didn’t have to keep asking them to repeat themselves. Especially my wife, because she speaks softly as it is, and when she speaks more loudly it sounds like she’s mad. She says that’s just the way she yells, it just comes out that way, but I can’t help feeling worried that she’s annoyed by having to repeat herself multiple times…it DOES sound like she’s annoyed, I’m not imagining that part, but the intent behind it is what’s hard to figure out. I don’t think she would be the type to get mad that I couldn’t hear her, but it’s hard to tell because it does sound like she’s yelling.

So I do have a hearing loss, and as long as it can be corrected for work and family situations, I’m not worried about it. If I had no
familiarity with deafness I might be freaked out, but I know what can be done and I know how to handle it. Come to think of it, I’m not so different from classmates and friends who are perfectly happy being deaf but still wear hearing aids or cochlear implants for visiting their families or going to work. People say “aren’t you excited to have a hearing loss?” Well, yes I am, but I still want to be able to hear adequately in some situations. I think that’s what it is. Yay, I have a hearing loss, great! But can it please be correctable? That’s what I want the answer to.

I have to admit that I felt a little different today in my Deaf Studies class, where the teacher doesn’t know I’m “hearing” - I felt like, if she asked, what would I call myself? Am I still hearing? Am I hard of hearing? Am I late-deafened? (A catch-all term that doesn’t necessarily relate to the amount of hearing loss.) Am I just “losing my hearing?” I don’t feel like I can just say “I’m hearing” anymore, because I am having the experiences of a person with mild hearing loss, I have been told I have a mild hearing loss, etc. So does taking away the phrase “I’m hearing” lend street cred in a similar way that using the phrase “I’m a CODA” does? I’m talking about identity within the Deaf community, not just self-identity or medical identification. I mean, I haven’t felt like a fully hearing person for months now.

A friend of mine compared it to being gay…trying to find one’s identity that way. I guess I can see that as a valid comparison. I
wish I didn’t have to wait so long for my next appointment…it’s only three weeks away, but I want answers now. One thing I know for sure, is that if I get a hearing aid, I am totally getting a hot pink earmold for it. Maybe even with glitter.

Today I finally had my audiogram. It’s really been bothering me that I’m not hearing as well as I used to, so I was very excited about the test. The answer was “hey, you do have a mild hearing loss, but we don’t know why - come back in a few weeks, we’ll stick electrodes on your head, and then figure out where to go from there.”

They’re not sure how much it had to do with the scuba accident. Apparently my eardrums are still flaccid (they used the word “hypermobile”), but oddly enough my middle ear muscle refuses to respond to even very loud sounds. Nearly all my levels are now below normal, and my hearing has dropped a fair bit at 4000Hz. So apparently there is a mild loss, but they don’t know why, it could be several things. In three weeks I will have an Auditory Brainstem Response test. I hope they can help me somehow.

They did suggest that the reason I’m so sensitive to a mild loss is because of my profession. I have no idea…if I weren’t an interpreter, would it still bother me that I can’t hear the TV or my wife? It does bother me that I don’t hear as well as I used to. I want help for that. I don’t care how well I do or don’t hear right now, and I don’t care how they help me. I want to hear like I used to.

I’m still reading the “first 50 years” history of Gallaudet, and I find it interesting to note that the oral/manual debate has been going on there since 1868. When Edward Miner Gallaudet convened the first National Conference of Principals of Institutions for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, he didn’t send invitations to some of the schools that had recently been established, which were oral schools. Some saw this as a snub to the oral methods, but Gallaudet said it was simply because they didn’t have principals yet, they were still too new. He said that his school should “provide for the instruction of speech of all pupils until it plainly appears that success is unlikely to crown their efforts.” So even though it may have seemed that he was anti-oral, he was encouraging the use of oral/aural instruction until it was deemed a failure.

I have big dreams for the future. I am planning to major in Deaf Studies and minor in History, and I want to become a researcher of deaf history, with a possible focus on international deaf history. I already know what I want to do first. I am hoping to write an accessible book about the history of Gallaudet. Right now I am reading History of the College for the Deaf, 1857-1907, and when I picked that up in the library I spotted another book or two about the same subject - but nothing more recent than 1985, and it’s changed so much since then! The book I’m reading now is fascinating, but it’s also mostly text; the same goes for the other book I noticed about the college’s history. I want to write a book that everyone can enjoy. I want to include pictures, sidebars, quotations, anecdotes, stories, copies of documents, everything! I think the hardest part about writing this book will be deciding what to leave out, because I can already envision hundreds of pages and that wouldn’t be very accessible, now would it? It’s going to be great…can I skip ahead to DST 780, the Cultural Studies Research Project course in the Deaf Studies department? Please? Oh boy do I have plans!

Gallaudet’s new curriculum requires that all incoming freshmen take a general studies class called GSR 103: American Sign Language and Deaf Studies. In this class, they teach about deaf history and culture, but there is also a heavy emphasis on learning formal ASL. They have explained repeatedly that even though we use ASL every day, we don’t know formal ASL, and that’s why the class is required.

A friend of mine, who is in a separate section from me, just said that she got low marks on her first two performance videos because she used English word order. I’ve seen her sign, of course, and she uses perfectly good PSE like many people here do. But no, the class is about formal ASL, and even though she was raised with English, she has to use ASL for the class.

That got me thinking…what about oral deaf people who prefer to stay that way? They may have come to Gallaudet because teachers wouldn’t keep talking while they write on the board, or because they were curious but not VERY curious, or even just because it was a good financial choice. (Deaf students don’t typically pay full tuition; the government awards scholarships and VR pays for some of it.) Should these students be forced to learn formal ASL? Is it enough to learn enough to get by? Doesn’t the ASL class assume you already have some knowledge? (The New Signers Program is something like three weeks in the summer…maybe not enough.) Hearing students here are entitled to voice interpreters if they can’t understand a teacher, so surely oral students are entitled to an oral interpreter to keep up in class.

Why do non-signers HAVE to learn formal ASL when they come here? What if they’re happy with their oral deaf identity? These aren’t real questions, I’m just musing, but it did come to mind.

Edit: I am just trying to play devil’s advocate. This is not necessarily my opinion, it’s just some pondering I did. I do a lot of thinking about deaf culture and the place of hearing people within it, but I don’t know everything.