On Tuesday, we drive to Tulsa to see Tom Waits on Wednesday, and then on across to visit the fambly. And then we come back here and don’t go out of our apartment for a couple of months because we really, really miss home and we feel a little off-kilter.

I’ve never seen Waits live, despite my years of fandom. I always meant to get around to listening to him, and then right after I starting seeing Mister Husband he played ... what? Heartattack and Vine, maybe — yes, definitely —for me one Sunday and that was it. I spent the rest of that cold January afternoon sitting in the light from the patio windows and playing every Tom Waits CD I had time for (he has them all, every one, plus boots) and then running off with a handful of the rest, and it’s pretty much been like that ever since. His music is a constant in our house. (I also teach vocal ethos with it, which both annoys and enthralls my students.)

Johndan linked to recent Q&A from the Anti blog and the borrowed beats Waits edition. Of course I love it all, but there are two things I wanted to pull out and post here:

Q: What’s heaven for you?
A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.

This makes me feel less like a freak, obviously, because if you substitute ‘cheap-or-not-so-cheap cameras’ and ‘a decent, free Internet connection;8217; for the cheap guitar and the pawnshop tape recorder, that’s pretty much my favorite thing in the world.

And then there’s this one, which I’m filing next to my question for all of you about your sounds:

Q: What are some sounds you like?

A:
1. An asymmetrical airline carousel created a high pitched haunted voice brought on by the friction of rubbing and it sounded like a big wet finger circling the rim of a gigantic wine glass.

2. Street corner evangelists

3. Pile drivers in Manhattan

4. My wife’s singing voice

5. Horses coming/trains coming

6. Children when school’s out

7. Hungry crows

8. Orchestra tuning up

9. Saloon pianos in old westerns

10. Rollercoaster

11. Headlights hit by a shotgun

12. Ice melting

13. Printing presses

14. Ball game on a transistor radio

15. Piano lessons coming from an apartment window

16. Old cash registers/Ca Ching

17. Muscle cars

18. Tap dancers

19. Soccer crowds in Argentina

20. Beatboxing

21. Fog horns

22. A busy restaurant kitchen

23. Newsrooms in old movies

24. Elephants stampeding

25. Bacon frying

26. Marching bands

27. Clarinet lessons

28. Victrola

29. A fight bell

30. Chinese arguments

31. Pinball machines

32. Children’s orchestras

33. Trolley bell

34. Firecrackers

35. A Zippo lighter

36. Calliopes

37. Bass steel drums

38. Tractors

39. Stroh Violin

40. Muted trumpet

41. Tobacco Auctioneers

42. Musical Saw

43. Theremin

44. Pigeons

45. Seagulls

46. Owls

47. Mockingbirds

48. Doves

The world’s making music all the time.

Posted at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you haven’t read the responses to my question about what sound you’ll never forget, you might enjoy them. They’re so disparate, and that’s without even including the Tasmanian Devil growl that lovely Sally delivered to my inbox one morning.

And you know what’s reassuring? I’ve heard almost all the sounds that were mentioned. Nobody put down things like hummingbird wings and snow falling.

(If you haven’t left one yet, humor me, please?)

Posted at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What sound will you never forget?

Posted at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Scott reminded me of a wonderful post he wrote a few years ago on the peculiar mentality of being so functional that you can often — but not always — ignore your disability:

But I’m reminded, nonetheless, that despite how I sometimes grow furious while trying to accomplish a simple task like driving a screw or installing a windshield wiper, what stuns me from time to time is not that. It’s not the physical inability.

It’s the way the imagination itself becomes disabled.

When I was in my teens, my step-mother struggled with carpal-tunnel syndrome (she’s an RN), and so went through a period where her dominant hand was immobilized for several weeks after surgery. While eating dinner one evening at a Red Lobster in Memphis, she was forced to eat with her left hand. She looked at me and said “Wow, this is weird. This is so strange.”

I just looked at her and said “I honestly cannot even begin to imagine that. Seriously.”

This is what gets me. The rest is all simply frustrating.

What often gets me is the fact that I simply don’t know that certain things make sounds, and people have had to tell me. Snow falling, for instance. Or water boiling. Or hummingbird wings. As a writer who relies on description, this bothers me for the same reason Scott wrote his piece: it impacts my imagination. I wrote an essay a few years back on aspects of this, and it was published in a departmental collection. I’ll see if I can’t dig it up and post it here.

(I have a feeling that this is going to be Deafness Contemplation weekend here at Thinkery. There are several things I’ve been meaning to write on the topic for a long time. The trouble is that this makes me feel as if I’m gazing deeply into my own ... not navel, but ear canal, perhaps.)

Posted at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, some suckage lately. The newish, rather-expensive hearing aid that I bought a year ago has been dying a slow death all semester. I took it in back in August and got into an argument with a fresh-out-of-school audiologist about whether or not there was anything wrong with it. I caved on that one, mostly because school was starting the next week and I didn’t want to ship it off to Chicago for a few weeks.

Don’t I have a backup, you ask? Yes, I do. But it’s had some issues with feedback that would cost some money to fix, and I’ve been feeling cheap lately. This is not something to feel cheap about — and usually I don’t — but I let myself slip into it this time.

My theory has been that I would send the backup off to be fixed this week or next, get it back in and running, and then send the primary one off over the break while I’m not in the classroom. Which would have worked just fine, had it not pretty much conked out on Thursday. Everything sounds like it’s underwater and about 1/4 of the volume it should be. Not so good for teaching.

So now I have an appointment for Monday morning and I’m using the backup, which has intermittent feedback that runs from squeaky to squalling so loud that anyone around me can hear it. It makes me crazy cranky. Poor Mister Husband. Obviously, I’m not willing or able to live with 16 hours a day of feedback, so this means I’ll probably end up leaving the aid out most of the weekend. This will make me functionally deaf.

In 29 years of deafness, I have never done this. I may be a severely/profoundly deaf person with only some of her hearing in one ear, but since I got my first hearing aid at 2? or 3?, I have never been without sound. The sound has had varying quality over the years, but it’s been enough to allow me to communicate and never bother to learn to sign.

I do not know how to be locked in my own little world of silence. I am very self-conscious about being able to hear, and almost never let myself be ‘seen deaf’ in public. (Compatriot G is the only colleague who’s ever seen me deaf, since we swim at the same pool. And even then, he persists in trying to talk to me. It’s rather funny, actually.) So I probably won’t go out of the house much unless the backup decides it’s in a better mood.

The next two days are probably not going to be much fun. But maybe I’ll get a chunk of writing done.

Posted at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Posted at 9:36 PM | Permalink

This hearing-aid is a little more than four years old now, which is more or less as long as it’s supposed to last. When the phone setting went out a week ago, I got Mister Husband to call the audiologist and make an appointment for me. It turned out I needed a hearing test, because all this time that I’ve been taking it to them for repairs they’ve apparently had no data on my actual hearing. (I coulda sworn I gave them my file two years ago, but that makes no nevermind now.)

So in I went today. There was a new audiologist, E., training, and I said sure, I’d help break her in. When she came to get me from the waiting room she said, “So, you think you might be losing a bit of your hearing?” “Um, no. I’ve been deaf since I was two. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my hearing.”

So we ran through the usual tests and she did well. Then we proceeded back to my usual audiologist, J. She stared at the results sheet. She dragged E. out in the hall and there was much murmuring. Then they came back.

J: Does this look right to you, Krista?
Me: Well, I haven’t memorized my chart, but yes.
J: This says you have practically no hearing in your right ear.
Me: Yes.
J: Has it always been that way?
Me: For oh, um, lessee, (counts frantically) 28 years now.
J: And you don’t hear much on the other side, either.
Me: No. It’s been that way for 28 years too. I had spinal meningitis.
J: Oh.

She lets E. leave and we start to talk about options. But she keeps looking at my chart, and she’s oddly flustered.

J: Are you sure this chart looks right to you?
Me: Yes. Do you not see people this deaf in here often, or what’s up?
J: Oh, we see people like this all the time. But, um, you’re very functional.
Me: I’ve been told that before. Audiologists generally say that I don’t hear as well as I function. I had very determined parents.
J: It’s true. You teach?
Me: Yes. (Wondering how much longer we must discuss this.) And I have student comments about what a non-issue it is.
J: Well. We should get you a new hearing-aid.
Me: Please. (Sigh of relief.)
J: And you give presentations?
Me: Yes. Hey, I didn’t know they make hearing-aids in translucent purple now.

On the one hand, these sorts of conversations are validating. But on the other hand, they undershot me by $800 on the estimate several months ago because they selected the model based on the amount of deafness they thought I had from observing my functionality. Not anyone’s fault, really, but it eats up more of my student loan than I had planned. I don’t need the weakest model, I need the strongest model. And it’ll be here next Tuesday.

Posted at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I’ve been contemplating the logistics of being a deaf panelist. Specifically, the question-and-answer sessions. Last night, the moderator and I agreed beforehand that she would repeat the questions after they were asked. The arrangement (but not the reason for it) was announced to the audience and the panel before we began.

It worked moderately well. The problem is that the repetition broke the flow of the conversation. People forgot, or conversation broke out that didn't really allow for repetition. Fellow panelists were understandably eager to answer, and sometimes jumped in ahead of the moderator, who gave me sympathetic glances. As a result, I missed about half of what was going on, including several questions about my research area, intellectual property and networked rhetorics.

So, dear readers, help me out. This is hardly the last panel I’ll be on in the course of my career. Actually, another one is coming up in March. In classroom lectures and presentations, I usually remind people that I’m rather deaf, since they tend to forget, and folks are always very good about speaking up. I’m thinking that if the reason for repeating questions in Q&A’s is explained, people will be more accommodating about it. Any other ideas?

*If you don’t know already, this post will give you an idea of the nature and extent of my deafness.

Posted at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Mister Boyfriend and I got to talking about cymbal monkeys last night. I‛ve always thought them quite horrifying and nightmarish. Until this morning, I had forgotten the reason why.

Between the ages of three and five, I went to near-daily speech therapy sessions to relearn to talk after my episode of spinal meningitis. My audiologist, Fred, tested my hearing quite regularly. This meant that I sat in one soundproof room while he sat in the adjoining one. There was a window between us, and microphones to talk with. The room was quite dark, and very large to my small self. Once the heavy door swung shut, it wasn‛t unlike a prison cell. I would sit in my small chair while Fred played the recorded test and I answered.

Say the word ... ice cream.
"Eye cream."
Say the word ... baseball.
"Bayball."
Say the word ... stop light.
"Top light."

And we would determine that I still had problems making the ‚s‛ sound. Esss. Essssss. At least I was no longer getting y‛s and l‛s confused. Yight. No, light.

Say the word ... supercalifragilisticespialidocious.

Up high on the wall, in a corner, was a cymbal monkey. Its bloodshot, beady eyes peered into the dim room as it perched there in great anticipation. When I did something right, Fred would hit the switch and the monkey would bounce up and down and bang its cymbals. It was a truly horrifying experience for a small child in the midst of being judged. Being Southern and thus already subject to intense politeness training, I didn‛t want to be rude about something that was obviously supposed to make me happy. So for God knows how long, I went into the little dark room and got monkey-cymballed as a reward. Finally, I did tell Fred that the monkey scared me � probably in one of my infamous and very impolite speech therapy temper tantrums. He never played it again during our sessions, but it always lurked up there in the corner, awaiting reanimation like a squat, fake-furred Golem.

And that is why there will be no cymbal monkeys in my house today.

Posted at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What does a deaf rave sound like?

How do these events differ from a regular club night? Volume, says organiser James Hoggarth.

"The volume may be pushed a little further and the bass turned up to 11 so the purpose of the night can be truly be shared with the deaf and hard of hearing crowd."
...
"So I've asked the DJs to pick music with big chunky bass lines and heavy rhythmic tracks. Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, which has a big panther of a bass line, is bound to get an airing; and one of my must-plays is LFO, a techno track from the early 90s famous for shattering club sound systems."

This makes a certain amount of sense to me, since one of the reasons I love Mr. Boyfriend's stereo is because I can feel the music as well as hear it.

(via little. yellow. different.)

Posted at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You know what? I'm tired of being jealous of all you hearing people with your convenient earbuds. Earbuds for cell phones, earbuds for ipods. Earbuds aren't compatible with hearing aids, at least not in my experience. And when I go to the store in search of headphones now, I'm confronted with about three headphone styles in the midst of 100 earbud choices, and the cool headphones won't accomodate my over-the-ear hearing aid design. I'm stuck with completely clunky-looking ones that look like they were designed in 1992.

(This isn't just a complaining rant, I promise. I'm headed somewhere constructive with this one.)

I love my digital hearing aid, which has three settings: regular, telephone, and a filter for crowded rooms. (That last feature totally saved my ass at all the noisy restaurants and parties I've been in this past week during the Feasibility Study Road Show. More on that later.) What I want is a Bluetooth digital hearing aid with a fourth setting that would kick in the Bluetooth as a built-in earbud for the cell phone that I do have and the ipod that I don't have. That would rock. And it would be justification for buying an ipod.

Posted at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"The air in the ears is lodged deep, so as to be unmoved, in order that it may accurately perceive all difference in motion. …The air in the ear always moves with a special movement of its own; but sound is from an outside source, and not a property of the ear. … Sound is the movement of what can be moved."

- Aristotle, On the Soul

Posted at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)