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| Yes, OF COURSE, the only clip art deaf girl is fugly. Damn. I've seen plugged anal glands that are more attractive. |
When I started college, I realized that I couldn’t always understand conversations or what folks said to me in public. And then the first week of freshman year, this dummmmmmmmbassssss threw a couple of lit firecrackers over the transom into my dorm room, and they landed on my bed where I was reading. Right next to my left ear. Oh, yeah! HiLARious! What a totally FUNNY prank, you nutless wonder!
Wooo. I’m still laughing.
My ear did nothing but ring for days, so I had a hearing test. The really funny part of that story is that the How-in-the-World-Have-you-Gone-This-Long-Without-Hearing-Aids?!-verdict surprised me. I didn’t see it coming.
Too bad, so sad that since sixth grade I’d been a vocalist. Ran in the family. But so did progressive nerve-loss hearing impairment. Better think of a new career, I thought. It truly sucked big, nasty, geriatric balls that I had to stop performing. At my ten-year high school reunion, Lisa Jones, whom I’d known casually when we’d sung (See, J-Lo? You use “sung” when there’s a helping verb, dammit!) in shows together, asked me, with genuine excitement, if I planned to join the 80’s cover band on stage.
Sheeeeeeee-it, no. I’d have sooner stripped naked and turned clumsy cartwheels while peeing in front of everybody and God. No-ho-ho-ho. I’d given up the tangerine dreams of a permanent spotlight after embarrassing myself on a handful of occasions. It seems a career in music involves hearing oneself, Beethoven be damned. So I chose teaching.
Sheeeeeeee-it, no. I’d have sooner stripped naked and turned clumsy cartwheels while peeing in front of everybody and God. No-ho-ho-ho. I’d given up the tangerine dreams of a permanent spotlight after embarrassing myself on a handful of occasions. It seems a career in music involves hearing oneself, Beethoven be damned. So I chose teaching.
Fast-forward twenty vicious years, and spiteful reality has sucker-punched my ass, snatched out fistfuls of my thinning hair, deviated my septum, and left me unconscious on the hot sidewalk. There is almost NO career for an INTELLIGENT deaf girl. In fact, no activity that requires human interaction was designed for us posts.
Teaching is torment. Shopping is agony. Dinner at a restaurant is torture. And although my hearing loss is responsible for most of the distress, a large portion of the blame falls on the devolving diction of most people I encounter. Many store clerks, students, waiters, co-workers, and all of my daughter’s myriad doctors sound like they’re fighting to form words around a giant old chaw of fresh cow shit in their mouths. I can ask folks to repeat what they say a hundred-thousand-billion times, and it won’t make a bit of difference. Just fucking text me. Jesus. I know most of these folks can’t spell either, but damn. Let’s at least level the playing field! And, honestly, if what you have to say isn’t important enough for you to speak the fuck up and enunciate, then just keep it to yourself.
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ReplyDeleteOh, don't get me started on all the English language speakers who have summarily decided that consonants are extraneous members of the language team. Alright, you already got me started.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, for those who have forgotten memorizing the song with all 26 letters in our alphabet in order (in kindergarten?), all but a very few of those letters ARE consonants!). But MLA be damned (the Modern Language Association, for those not immersed in academia); today's young people seem to take pride in speaking as incomprehensibly as possible (i.e., without consonants in their speech, just a lot of slurred and indiscernible vowels). What's that about?
I call it LSS, which is an acronym I made up all by myself, so it's not in the American Heritage or anything yet, and it stands for Lazy Speakers Syndrome. Most of my college students speak the dialect fluently, and apparently understand each other just fine. I do not. Even when my two nephews converse with me, I don't have a clue what they're saying most of the time. And they're both college graduates (if that means anything anymore) and one is a "professional." A CPA who makes more money that I ever did (or will)!
"Whuhyawah-oo?" says one brother. (I know it's a question because of his expression.)
"Whah-air," comes the reply.
Seriously. Next thing you know we'll be back living in caves. 28,000 years of evolution lost to laziness.
"If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well," my mother used to harp at me when I was young. Much later, only a few years before she passed away at 87, she used to insist she wanted to "volunteer" in the public schools to "teach those kids how to speak correctly."
She never did that, fortunately; sort of ran out of time. Just as well, too, because they would only have laughed at her.