Marlee Matlin was named to the Gallaudet Board of Trustees!! *dies*

I’ve started buying clothes for the size-16 woman I am, not the size-8 woman I wish I was. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up, but it means I want to wear cute clothes now and not look like a dork while I’m waiting. Here’s some Torrid stuff I bought.

bought on eBay for $11.50

$16.49 + $34 + $28

I am stoked about my new toy, so I wanted to share it. I got the Ninja Remote from Thinkgeek, because it is absolutely essential at Gallaudet. There are multiple TVs in the Rathskellar Pub and the Marketplace dining area and they are always playing different things, frequently at very high volume. Now I have the power of mute! I’ve already used it on the TV in the Honors Lounge - this morning I wanted to do a little writing for one of my classes, and the TV was on loudly and nobody was watching it, so I just aimed my Ninja Remote and muted it! Gosh it feels good to do that.

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.

I decided to walk around campus looking for rat funeral slabs - okay, just around the mall area, really. I just got a new camera - Panasonic Lumix LS70 - and I wanted to take a few pictures with it. I took a couple of long shots of the tower on Chapel Hall, and then I wandered over between Peet and the visitor center, where I found…two frisky squirrels. I’m not sure if they were just playing around or having gay sex - they both kept trying to mount each other, though I didn’t see actual humping like I did many years ago in Franklin Park. I took a bunch of pictures of the squirrels and then stumbled upon the Class of 1977’s rat funeral slab. As I was taking pictures of it, two older women came up to me and asked if the bookstore was open. I said no, it’s closed on the weekends. They wondered what I was doing, and I said I was taking pictures of the slab. One of the women said her class, 1973, had done the rat funeral but she wasn’t sure if they had a slab. She said their rats had been buried along five trees behind the audiology building. (I don’t think she realized that the building was expanded some years ago; when I went to look behind the new part, sure enough there were no five trees there.)

I walked around the mall a little more and stumbled upon slabs from the Class of 2000 and the Class of 2007. So I’ve found, and taken pictures of, three rat funeral slabs around campus. But if the tradition has been going on so long - check out the class of 1957’s photo gallery for some actual funeral pictures - there surely must be other slabs around, right? I will have to find them.

Okay! I think I have resolved my computer problems and my classes. I wasn’t able to do much online the past couple of nights, because the whole SP2 mess really hosed things up. At one point my monitor decided to make itself “vertical” and I had to crane my head sideways to read anything! I got that fixed but then it refused to come out of VGA mode. All I wanted was to have things back the way they were before I tried to fiddle with SP2! Fortunately Dave Pietromonaco has written a wonderful solution for monitor problems that fixed me right up!

Today I attended the history class and I was kind of taken aback by how uninterested the students seemed. I was one of just a few that asked questions or contributed during the entire class. I happened to bump into ayala920 on my way out of class, and learned she was headed to the Honors section of the same class. She wasn’t surprised that I was unimpressed by the regular class, and told me what time the Honors section met - and it was at a time I could fit into my schedule! So this afternoon I spoke to the Honors program director and got permission to switch, and then sent my academic advisor an e-mail and she clicked the magic button. So now I’m in class with ayala920, to_be_in_snafu, and three other people - there’s just six of us in the class now! The books are nearly twice as expensive as the regular section, but I think I will enjoy it a lot more.

Goodbye deaf studies, hello history! No, not my major. But I’ve dropped DST 101 in lieu of HIS 111. The reason is that supposedly the GSR 103 class is going to replace the DST 101 class, so they might be considered equivalent, and I might not need it for the major. Time is money, and classes take time, so I spoke to my advisor today and switched into American History I. This is also required for the deaf studies major, so I have to take it eventually, and my advisor said that DST 101 is offered every semester, so I might as well take history now instead. When I went to the bookstore to check out the required books for the class, I was glad I hadn’t ended up in the Honors version - it requires four books compared to just one for the class I’m in! (Besides one honors class per semester is enough for now, and I already like my Honors English class.)

I am so frustrated with my computer, though. I managed to get SP2 installed, with the expectation that doing so would enable me to use the wifi at school, but now my computer is unbelievably slow. That’s probably why I rolled back the first time, heh. The power cord is also nearly dead, so I bought a replacement on eBay today. I really just want a new computer, but I can’t afford one. One with specs I like - XP Home, 1GB RAM, 80GB drive, and a DVD burner - is $584.50 using the discount program Gallaudet has with Dell. (I thought you couldn’t get XP with a Dell anymore; turns out you can - but you have to call them up to ask for it, you can’t get it online.) So it’s a lot, and I probably will keep fighting with my machine that is a few years old now.

Now I can finally talk about my past week of orientation. It’s been going pretty well - I can’t believe how much has happened! In the space of five days, I went from a normal member of honors to a grouch to a demoted “bridge to honors” student and back to being a full honors student. Whew!

I have also been mistaken for deaf almost constantly, and while it’s not a compliment anymore when somebody realizes I’m hearing, it’s still nice to realize that I don’t stick out like a sore thumb.

However I’ve also had an embarrassing moment that would only happen to a HUG student like me. I was in a makeup session of the ASL/Math assessment tests, and I was trying hard to concentrate. But an orientation session was also in there, and the leader was running late so the students were chatting and laughing…loudly. I got one of the test proctors to come over and asked if there was any way the other half of the room could be quieted down. I felt ridiculous asking such a thing in a deaf university, but I was trying to take a test, and I really couldn’t concentrate! They did quiet down and I was able to finish the test in peace…though I still completely bombed, hah! I didn’t even get what was going on, what the questions were, or
anything. Yikes!

I already have several of the books needed for my Deaf Studies and English classes, but there’s still a bunch more for my English class I have to buy.

I had a good experience relating to being a HUG student today. Yesterday I chatted with another HUG about whether it was culturally appropriate to participate in certain activities - I think somebody had been surprised that a hearing student could play sports for Gallaudet. Today we were sitting through class elections, and I turned to another HUG and said, “now this is the kind of thing I don’t think ’students like us’ can participate in.” Another girl behind her who knows us both said “no way! You guys can do anything, it doesn’t matter if you’re hearing.” Which is just way cool to hear, and I told her “thanks, that really makes me feel good!” I still am a little suspicious of whether it would REALLY be okay…it just feels like it would be taboo for a hearing person to be class president at a deaf college. But it’s great that at least somebody thinks it’s okay!

I am still kind of shell shocked when I browse Facebook and see all these people graduated high school in ‘07. I can’t believe I graduated high school ten years ago. I’ve been looking forward to my 10-year reunion for a while, but seeing all those ’07s just makes me feel kind of old instead!

I am officially scared about starting school. The trigger was hearing NPR’s summer segment, “You Must Read This.” I was amazed to realize that I used to listen to that piece when I was driving to work every day - part of the rat race, wearing button-down shirts, and working in a cube farm. Now I’m a student again, wearing t-shirts with funny things on them, and walking around campus. I can’t believe my life has changed so radically! Normally I would expect it to change on the order of the year-long Climate Connections series, not the months-long You Must Read This series.

Today was New Student Orientation. The drama surrounding Honors was carried a little further, but I did get caught up on most things - I got my ID, my parking sticker, and so forth. There was a bit of confusion regarding whether or not I’d taken a placement test, but it got straightened out when the right person was finally contacted.

Tomorrow, stuff starts at 9am. There’s a GLBT ice cream social in the evening so I’m planning on staying at least that late. I still have to visit the business office so I can promise to pay for stuff, but I think other than that I am mostly set. Hopefully I’ll get to speak with my academic advisor tomorrow too.

I left the honors retreat after a few hours this morning. No offense to anybody who was there, but it was honestly not appropriate for me. I was further offended by the head of the department, who was rather patronizing to me on the phone when she realized I had left. (I’d informed the coordinator, but not the head.) To be honest I don’t think she realizes that she’s dealing with a mature adult. She pays lip service to it, but she still treats me like somebody who’s just been released from Mommy and Daddy’s care and needs to be monitored at all times. But you know what? I’m a big girl. I’m not going to be treated like I’m fresh out of high school.

We agreed to meet tomorrow on campus before the rest of the activities begin at 3:00pm. I plan to let her know exactly how I feel, and that I expect to be treated like an independent person, not a teenager. If she doesn’t want to treat me differently from the 18-year-olds in the program, I’d rather be dropped from the program. It’s up to her - if she doesn’t like my request to be treated like an adult, she can drop me. Or she can treat me like an adult, that’s the choice. But I will not be patronized.

I’m not explaining the specifics because I don’t want to seem like I’m whining…but she definitely came across as patronizing. Yup.