Update on my life's new direction

Editor's note: Whoops! Forgot to set this to publish this at midnight. I was wondering why I wasn't getting my comments. ;)

Boy, talk about being caught off-guard...I got to a major event a bit early to help set up a booth so we could showcase the community center and how it can help the deaf community. The problem was I had not thought of trying out the display stand prior to that event, let alone know how to put one up.

The woman who brought it was stumped as well. She had not put one up before and had no experience. She shoved the manual into my hand so I knew I had to decipher it and have the display up in minutes. The manual did not use words, just pictures. No problem...except the layout of the pictures was confusing. LOL

I had to re-read the manual before I figured out the order of the layout and then I got it fully assembled in 5 seconds. What I didn't count on was the sheer size of the display. It was HUGE! It took up 90% of the booth table (you know, the standard plastic buffet-style table which is about 5 feet long). The display stand was 4.5' by 4.5' and there was no way we could sit behind the table - we would be completely obscured by the display. That meant we had to stand in front of the booth the whole time.

Grr.

Why? Because there were 6 hours of booth time scheduled and only three people volunteered for 3 shifts (1 shift = 1 hour) total. Others didn't bother to reply or had excuses. That meant I was responsible for minimum of 3 hours and that turned into 5 hours total because of the sheer number of people who wanted to know more about the center.

I was able to convince a whole bunch of people to sign up for the announcements of open-captioned theater movies. Let me explain about the OC movies...the movies are shown in a normal way with one exception - the words are either shown ON the screen (one theater does this) or on the special smoked glass on flexible necks to reflect the words (3 other theaters do this).

The special smoked glass style is called Rear Window Captioning and how the system uses those refractors (as they're called). There is a LED display case near the projector window that shows the words backwards and is shown in correct order on the refractors. The system looks like this...

(The words say "Welcome to Rear Window. Please adjust your reflectors.")

Yesterday, the board president sent an e-mail to the board and the center's management team congratulating those who were at the booth. He even said people had nothing but praise for me. They liked how visible I was at the booth and how willing I was to talk with everyone instead of handing them off to someone else at the booth. Hey, that's my job - I have to be there for everyone. :)

Q & A #17

Gillian from A Daft Scots Lass asked me this question in my Q & A #16 post - "Were you born deaf?"

No, I was not born deaf. I was a normal healthy boy with a massive shock of blonde hair on the head.

When I was 13 months old, I contracted a case of spinal meningitis and that put me in a coma for about two weeks. During that time, the high fevers destroyed some of the hair in the inner ears which made me deaf.

When I finally woke up, my mother was the first to notice that I wasn't responding to audio stimuli and the tests confirmed her suspicion. My deafness was measured at around 96 decibels. To give you an idea how loud something has to be for me to hear it, a lawnmower is around 110 decibels.

Funny thing is, I do not hear the lawnmowers...even when I operate one. My theory is my body picks up the vibrations first, negating the need for my ears to "ring" with the noises. The only effective way for my ears to pick anything up is if you do a high pitch scream into my ear or create a loud noise close to my ear - thus eliminating my body as the middleman.

Strange, huh? What's even stranger is how my ears work differently. My right ear picks up "sharp" noises like knocking or a barking dog while my left ear picks up "soft" noises like a ringing phone or a meowing cat. That's with the hearing aids...and no, I don't use the hearing aids anymore.

Why? For a long while, I kept getting confusing mix of sounds on my hearing aids...remember how my ears work independently in the last paragraph? That wasn't discovered until I was in my mid-20's. I had given up on the hearing aids when I was 12. I tried the hearing aids again with this new discovery and a better understanding of how my ears work...and that was still a failure, so I quit for good.

I think it has something to do with the atrophy factor in the part of my brain that processes sound. Just like the legs of a person who became paralyzed - they atrophy after a long period of no activity. Because of that, I am no longer a viable candidate for cochlear implants - I wouldn't be able to process sounds effectively at all. I do not want to be a candidate anyway - I love sports too much and I wouldn't be allowed to play softball or racquetball or football or anything with physical contact.

A new significant change in my life

Late last month, I was appointed as the director of a deaf community center. What that means is my visits to your blogs and my responses to your comments will be erratic at times. For that, I apologize. When I have the center up and running smoothly, I will be around more often.

I still have a boatload of posts waiting for me to: fill out, answer questions, polish, tweak, and/or schedule to publish. My last count was 16 new posts. Plenty of reading material for you. ;)

Formspring Q & A #16

Q: How is your speech? I mean, how well do you speak? I don't know if you do talk or not.

A: A legitimate question. Some deaf people do not speak and they do not for either one of the two reasons - they do not want to speak for whatever reason or they are unable to speak.

I do speak and I have interacted with other hearing people who have had zero experience with deaf people. I've discovered that there are three types of people when it comes to understanding my speech. Those who understand me with no difficulty, those who need to use imagination to understand me, and those who don't understand at all.

With that said, I've been told that my speech is "good" or "pretty good" for those with my level of deafness who do not rely on hearing aids to aid in communication.

Formspring Q & A #15

Q: Ever been pulled over by a cop? If so, how would you handle that? Would you be afraid?

A: Oh yeah, I have been pulled over several times by a cop. Yes, I get nervous every time no matter how many times I get pulled over. Why? I have no idea if the cop wants me out of the car with hands up or put my hands out the window or whatever. The cop could use the loudspeaker and it would not matter one bit. Can't hear!

Story series - Point A to B to A, not C, D, or E. Clear?

You've learned from last week's post that I had been driving for less than a year when I hit the Hulk. I have a better story for you and it's infinitely more entertaining. :)

I was staying at my father's for the weekend and I was in the mood to have my best friend over to hang around with. My father did not want to go get him (he lived 30 minutes away) and I told him that I would be more than happy to go. He tried to deter me by reminding me that I was low on gas and he was not paying for gas.

No matter. I was willing to go and get him and take him back home. My father sighed and said to me, "Okay. I will let you go, on one condition. You go there and get him and come back here in one hour. Got that?"

I nodded my head. In reality, I was going "Yeah, yeah, whatever." in my head. He said, as if he had sensed that, "That means no stopping for food, no getting off that road for anything, nothing. Not even to go to the bathroom. Point A to B to A, not C, D, or E. Clear?"

"Yes, I got it."

5 minutes later, I was on the road with every cent of $2.35 pumped into my tank. I got my friend 20 minutes (yep, I drove fast) after that. I told my friend about what my father said and we had better hurry back. We were back on the road and about halfway to home, he convinced me to take a quick detour to look at computer games. What's the harm as long as I got back home in one hour?

After taking a quick look-over at a store located on a road perpendicular to the road I was supposed to be on, we got in my car and got ready to exit...only to find that the road was jammed full of cars. This added to my anxiety considerably - waiting for the cross traffic to clear enough for me to get out of the parking lot meant that the safety margin would shrink exponentially.

After about two minutes of waiting, suddenly there was a clearing and I jumped for it. Made it! My friend and I celebrated and high-fived each other. (Sound of a car crashing into another) Oh, bleep. Our celebration was short-lived. I had hit a car, 100 yards from the road I was supposed to be on.

100 yards. A block. A football field.

The driver angrily motioned for me to pull into a restaurant's parking lot and I followed. All I could think about was how I was going to explain this to my fa...when the driver jumped out of the car with a rearview mirror in her hand and slammed the door on the Cadillac hard.

Funny how I noticed the rearview mirror in her hand right away. Not her face, not her build, not her age, not her fashion style...just the mirror. As she stomped her way up to me, I could see she was a young woman, about same age as me...pretty and a bit heavy on the makeup.

She started yelling at me, which made it impossible for me to understand so I calmly told her, "I'm deaf." She glared at me, turned around, and walked around my car...to yell at my friend. I calmly said to her, "he is deaf too." and she threw her arms up and yelled in frustration before walking away from us. She went in her car and I noticed that there were 2 other young women in there. She got out and went into the restaurant.

All in the span of one minute. I took stock of the damage. My bumper was now pushed in and I could see the Cadillac's bumper was hanging a bit. I realized that I need to call my father. That's when one of the passengers came out and asked me if I go to that high school. I was stunned by not only that, but how easily I could understand her. I nodded at her and I asked how she knew that. She told me that she knew a girl there who has a deaf brother and she wondered if I was the same guy. I nodded again.

If you'll recall from my bully posts, I was the only deaf student there. Not hard to figure out. I was going to be a smart-aleck about it, but the young woman was very nice and pleasant. I was attracted to that. She asked if there was anything she could do for us and I remembered about my father. I asked her to call for me.

We chatted for a while (the driver got back in her car and never came out) and then my father showed up. Oh yeah. That look on his face. Readers, you KNOW exactly what I mean by that. Forget the Hulk. He had nothing on my father - I had to live with this one. He didn't say much to me. He didn't have to. I could feel it.

The young woman, after my dad left to talk to the driver and overheard my father ask the driver about contacting her parents, said "Oh boy, I don't want to be here when my friend's mother finds out." That's when I discovered that the driver was in bigger trouble than I was. No wonder why she was so livid and how she reacted to us.

She borrowed her mother's car...without permission and got busted for it due to my negligence. And my father? He asked me over and over and over for the next 6 months how much it cost to fix the Cadillac's bumper...and my bumper.

Story series - Holy bleep, I hit the Hulk!

June 3, 1985. That was the day I survived my encounter with the Hulk.

How could I forget that when I thought for sure that I would not live to see my birthday in 2 weeks?

I was the only junior with a driver's licence only because my mother decided to start me in 7th grade instead of 8th grade after I graduated from a school for the deaf. That made me a hot commodity with my friends and I was more than happy to drive them around because naively, I thought this was a good way to score chicks.

I was driving my friend Jack* home and I did a coasting stop (where you don't touch the pedals at all) behind a car at a red light on an upward slope of a hill...and braked...or so I thought. I made the classic blunder of not realizing which pedal I was pressing on.

(foot presses down, engine revs, *thunk!*)

The driver looked back at me through the rearview mirror and motioned with his hand, pointing at a convenience store. I held up my hand and nodded.

We pulled into the parking lot and the Hulk emerged. Not the green-skinned, barely clad pissed-off type. No. He was HUGE - not obese...but MUSCLED. In my testosterone-fuled mind, he looked to be 6 feet 6 inches tall with 250 pounds of muscles packed on his frame.

He finally arrived at my window, leaned down to look at me better, paused, and cocked his head a little...as if I had stumped him...and he said, "Are you John*?"

I started thinking rapidly..."If I say yes, will he beat me up? If I say no, will he beat me up?"

Before I could answer the Hulk, my friend Jack* jumped in with an affirmation to my identity. I looked at Jack* in shock...how could he betray me?!? Before I could say something to my friend about getting his ride revoked permanently, I realized I still had the Hulk to deal with and I looked back at him.

Then...the Hulk inexplicably said, "Never mind. It's okay." and walked back to his car. Jack* and I looked at each other in disbelief. I looked at the Hulk's car uncomprehendingly, and then the car drove off. I looked back at Jack* and said, "What the bleep was that?!?" Jack* shrugged.

The mystery was solved 2 days later when I visited my dad. He casually asked me how my driving experience had been so far.

"Fine, still learning."
"Good. No problem with your car?"
"Other than the steering wheel shaking at 60 mph, no."
"Ah yeah. Any accident so far?"
I didn't want to tell him the truth - "Hm, no."
"You sure?"
That's when I got suspicious - "Come on, Dad. How did you know?"
He grinned and said, "You don't know who you hit two days ago?"

I told him that I didn't recognize the guy and my dad laughed.

"Dad, who was it? The driver was huge. Who?"
"You really didn't know who?"
"No! Tell me!"
"That was our neighbor's son, Larry*."

Now I know who the guy was but...how could I when I was THIS CLOSE to peeing in my pants at the sight of the Hulk?

*Names changed to protect the inoccent parties. ;p