Once again, the idea of eating meat is on my mind. I’ve been a vegetarian since November 1993, nearly 15 years. For the past five years or so, I’ve thought about eating meat again. I originally became a vegetarian for ethical reasons, I used to do the “I won’t eat anything with a face” thing, but I now feel like it’s just become a habit. I know about being vegetarian is better for the environment and all that, and I like doing things that are good for the environment, but I am just so curious about eating meat again. Today we went to Chutzpah for lunch, and A ordered the matzoh ball soup. Here’s the conversation we had:

Me: So…what does the chicken broth taste like?
Her: Uh…chicken? (pause while I keep peering at her bowl) Do you want some?
Me: Well…I’m thinking about it.
Her: (gets a spoonful of broth ready)
Me: (stares at broth)
Her: It would be the first time you’ve intentionally eaten meat in 15 years.
Her: No! I can’t do it! (resumes eating egg salad sandwich)

I just don’t know. I’d like to open up my diet meal options, there are only so many different foods available from Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice, etc. I just don’t know. I think about it a lot, actually. I like saving animals, I like saving the planet, but it just feels like a habit I can’t break. I’ve been doing it for 15 years, after all…more than half my life. Is it awful to just try eating a chicken dish from Lean Cuisine? What does it mean if I do? Will I have given up vegetarianism? If I decide I don’t like it, can I really call myself a vegetarian again, if I ate meat deliberately that one time? Will I still love chicken with cashew nuts like I did when I was a little kid? Will it taste good? Will I feel immoral, breaking my long-held beliefs? I just don’t know what to do.

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.

As much fun as I’m having in school, as many friends as I have right now, I’m still afraid. It’s not self-esteem this time. My good grades have done wonders for my self-esteem. It’s plain old insecurity.

Maybe part of this stems from not living on campus, but I’m afraid of losing my friends. What’s going to happen next semester? Next year? Will I find myself back in the land of having books as my only friends? Will I study hard and get good grades but find myself alone?

It almost makes me want to run away from school so I forget about the friends before they forget about me. But really, did I come to school for a social life, or for a degree? Shouldn’t I be happy getting A’s even without the friends? Is it just that I have something now that I’ve never had before (ie, friends) and I’m afraid of losing them?

School is my job now. I haven’t had a lot of friends in my previous jobs. Can’t I get by without them? Secretly eating my lunch in the Deaf Stacks of the library, hoping nobody catches me with the food? Or will I just work a lot more hours so I forget about it all?

Why am I so scared, dammit? Maybe I am worth keeping as a friend. I’m smart and I can give advice sometimes and I try to be nice to everybody. So why do I worry like this?

I wrote this on April 5, 2007. Just wanted to look back on it now.

I am so fucking scared. Today I got notification of my raise for passing the CI, which is retroactive to the date I took the test (they didn’t do that for my CT, which was 9 months before I got the results). I am making $51,500/yr. And I’m leaving it to go back to school full time.

Am I fucking insane? I must be crazy. There can be no other explanation.

I’ve agonized over this, I’ve cried over this. I’ve bawled over this. There have been honest-to-goodness real GOVERNMENT jobs for interpreters coming up on USAjobs.gov, and what am I doing? I’m going back to school. I am making $51,500/yr and I am 26 years old. And what am I doing? I’m going back to school.

In-fucking-sane. God DAMN.

And yet this is still the best decision I’ve made in my life. I am so happy now. I am elated to be in school and have friends and learn things. I’m thrilled that I might actually get my degree this time. Seeing how much I was making is still a little shocking, but all that money still couldn’t have bought me happiness. And now I am happy.

A man and a woman meet online. They enjoy each other so much that they agree to meet, and when they do it is love at first sight. They are so alike it is uncanny and they instantly feel a deep bond, so much so that it is unbearable to separate. They decide to move in together, and shortly afterward they become engaged. All of their friends say the relationship is moving too fast, but they know they were meant to be together.

The state they are in still requires a blood test to check for diseases. They know they are clean, but its’ required anyway. The results come back, and to their shock they are told they cannot marry. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know why, but it seems like 2007 is going to be the Year of the Positive for me. I have been feeling happier than I can remember in a long time. I think it probably started with seeing a therapist in January - something I hadn’t done for several years. I love my therapist, because I genuinely have revelations with her. She has taught me to realize things about myself that I hadn’t known before, which means the $100 I pay her weekly is money well-spent. I have learned positive things about my relationships, things that take away a lot of the hurt that I was feeling, things that make my heart light. And I have even taught myself about weight loss, loving my body, and being joyful. It feels like all of these positive things are so fresh and new, like they’ve all just happened…but they’ve been happening since the beginning of the year, and it’s already March, and things are still going well. I have some problems with anxiety still, but the negative self-talk has decreased. My therapist had me start reading Taming Your Gremlin, and I haven’t gotten more than a few pages into it but I’m still learning. I’ve barely even cracked the “anxiety workbook” she had me buy, but I find myself eager to start on it.

It’s amazing how positive I’m feeling. I am in charge of myself, and the way I react to the world around me is up to me. I worry less about myself! I used to think “you’re never going to get out of depression, no matter what tricks you try, it’s a horrible secret that nobody knows what a bad person you are,” but I told my therapist those exact things in one of our early sessions and…they’re gone. I hope this upward trend continues; I am waiting on a couple of results (CI test and Gallaudet admission) and I actually find myself thinking positively about them rather than expecting to fail. This is so good.

Am I advertising too much? I feel like I might be spending too much time at PayPerPost. At first I thought I would only make a few paid posts per week, but I’ve been doing it much more than that. I’ve made quite a bit of cash from it, but I don’t know how I’m feeling integrity-wise. I’ve been checking my stats and I see that I’m giving the advertisers their money’s worth - people are coming to my site by searching for things I’ve written paid posts about.

I don’t worry about it with my LiveJournal friends, because I created a filter to share posts with them. So the advertising is opt-in there (I’m not getting paid for it, I’m just mirroring posts from my site), and I do get a few comments on those posts.

But I don’t know how my regular readers feel about it. Do you care? Is it turning you off from my site? Would you prefer I did it less frequently, or not at all? I only know a very few people who read my site regularly - probably less than 10 keep up with me on a regular basis, with a few more who are occasional readers.

I know it’s my blog and I can do what I want, but I’ve been been blogging for five years, it’s my favorite hobby, and I don’t want to drive away all my readers. Please chime in - how do you feel about the advertising I’ve been doing on my blog?

Today at the conference I chatted for a long time with people I don’t know very well. We were working the booth for our employer, but we never see each other so we’re not familiar with each other. And the whole time I wasn’t sure if I was being socially appropriate. I felt like I was putting on a veneer of normality…pretending I was social when I’d really have been fine on my own. I often assume that the other person is laughing at me in their head, that I must look silly and be making a fool of myself. But I don’t know, because I think they thought I was fine. It’s very strange, and I think I do it a lot in social situations.

Sometimes I wonder what the 9/11 terrorists were hoping to do. Disrupt peace, cause terror and pandemonium, all that is easy. But were they expecting the towers to fall, or was that an unexpected surprise? Did they mean to choose the newly-renovated area of the Pentagon, or was that coincidence? Where was the fourth plane going? Those are the kind of things I wonder about sometimes…but not very often. I’m just pondering.