Allison Unfiltered

Did you say today was MONDAY?

Writing off deafies

I can never be totally happy when I see deaf people pop up in literature. 

(The closest I've come lately is Jennifer Weiner's Certain Girls -- protag's daughter, Joy, has a hearing loss, but isn't part of the signing community.  For once, it colored the narrative, but it wasn't an afterthought, nor was it a totally mangled stereotype the author used to serve her own purposes.)

I always have to ask why. 

Why'd you make those people deaf? 

What right do you have to speak on behalf of us deafies? 

Why use deaf people in your book like chess pieces? 

What are they to you, other than receptacles for pity or fetishization that you fuck over so that your protagonists seem more human? 

And why does it seem that deaf characters are, 9 times out of 10, female?!

I was reading Fear and Yoga in New Jersey, by Debra Galant this week, when out of nowhere, I got slapped in the face with more of this deaf fetishization.  The protag, Nina, is a harried, married working yogini mom -- she escapes to the mall in the middle of one of those days where nothing is going right and everybody's an idiot but you. 

God, I could relate.  Yeah, I related so hard I think I had an erection... until she decided she needed a cookie and got pissed because a blonde, Stepford-ish mother and daughter were in front of her in line and I read this:

When the child and her mother got up to the counter, Nina watched carefully, prepared to find whatever they did contemptible.  The mother would be haughty.  The little girl would vacillate between three different cookies, and the mother would let everyone in line behind her wait.  Nina was already irritated at the little girl's greed and the mother's obsequiousness, and neither had opened their mouth.  And then something strange happened.  The mother looked down at her daughter and rapidly moved her fingers.  The girl repeated finger motions, smiled, then stepped up on her tiptoes and ordered two chocolate chip cookies.  The mother got out her wallet and paid.

American Sign Language, Nina realized.  The mother was deaf.  Nina blushed with shame as if every person had heard the running monologue in Nina's head.  What kind of monster was she?  Thinking ungenerous thoughts about a deaf woman and her sweet little girl.

Oh.  OHHHH!

And the realization slapped me in the face: I was supposed to read this as an indication of just how much Nina had lost sight of her fortune. 

Or how some people, because they're deaf or have deaf mommies, are completely blameless and should be immune from the bitches of the world.

And the sucky thing: if I weren't deaf, it would've worked.  But I am.  So Debra Galant can go suck my left one, thank you very much.

By using a deaf and CODA character just this once (never appeared again throughout the rest of the book -- the Stepford deafies were, apparently, that inconsequential), the author took advantage of the tired but true "poor deafies" trope -- for no purpose other than cheap literary effect.

Way to ruin a brain candy book.  Now I'll never know if I didn't like the book because I genuinely didn't like it, or because she pissed me off so early.

By the way, if you've really got an itch for reading an endearing little beach read about a dysfunctional poor-white-girl yogini, I recommend THIS instead of Fear and Yoga, thank you veddy much (and thanks again for that, J).

D'oh.

This is what happens when you don't hire people like me to work for your company and dress up all your words -- it ends up looking like you really don't give a shit.

Botarded.

 So I went to the library to get one book -- ONE BOOK -- that a friend from work had suggested. 

That was dumb.  Came back with eight.

Especially dumber because I already have literally hundreds of new books here at home, spines not yet devirginized.

Maybe this was doable when I was unemployed, waiting for employers out there to realize what an amazing asset I would be to their company and how reedonkulous they would be not to hire me and throw wads of cash at me.

But, dude.  I'm a full-time droid now.  A droid that sits in front of a computer by day and lives on a couch by night and can barely track which days are mine with the kid now, never mind remember that I'm also a full-time grad student (wait, I'm a WHAT?!  Oh, crap). 

Reading books is a luxury I can nay afford.  And yet... EIGHT books.  Octo-idiot. 

What the hell am I thinking?  With this logic system my brain is currently using, I wouldn't be surprised to find myself cooking Thanksgiving dinner tonight for eight when I only need to feed one and a half people.  And a dog.  Or to find myself submitting photos for Playboy's next playmate search.

Okay, so that last paragraph didn't make much sense.  BUT THAT IS KIND OF THE POINT EXACTLY.  There, now you see where I'm coming from.

Take your jamba juice and shove it.

It's been a little over a week since I had my third mapping.  And thank YE GODS -- I finally hear something.

Which might seem kinda dumb considering I just had a $30K surgery to implant a little robot inside my head that is supposed to give me *angelic choir* the MIRACLE OF HEARING.  You'd think given all that risk, all that expense, all that effort, something, anything, would happen upon activation.

But no -- instead my brain gets electrocuted on a regular basis while I read lovely stories like those of my buddy Nabeel who gets to hear shit like "Jamba Juice" almost immediately after being activated.

Comparing yourself to others, whether it's boob size or cochlear implant results?  DOOMED.

But since my lovely little puppy chose last week to chew up my expensive Naida III hearing aid, I've no choice now but to wear the damn implant and make it work.

Anyway, I went in last week and had me a tune up.  And this time I looked my audiologist square in the eye and said, "Look, lady.  I don't hear anything. NOTHING.  And I am not leaving this office until I hear SOMETHING."

So she pushed a button on the computer and stared at me.  And I stared back.  She pushed a few more buttons and stared at me.  And... I stared back.

"I don't hear anything!"

"But I don't want to make you uncomfortable."

"Nothing. Is. Happening."

More staring.

"Ohhhhkay, but tell me if it gets too loud."

I waited.  And waited.  Aaaaand waited.

All of a sudden there was a little tickling sensation at the side of my brain, so faint I wasn't sure if I was feeling it, seeing it, hearing it, or just imagining it. 

"WHAT WAS THAT!?"

She smiled at me, bored.  "Too loud?"

"NO!  MORE!  GIMME MORE!"

And on we went for about 20 minutes until I was ready to shove the words "too loud?" up her left nostril and twist.  So now I finally hear ... stuff.  Voices? Not so much. 

But paper bags rustling knock me flat on my ass, and I think Jesus has come back to earth every time I set the timer on my oven. 

Who knew scratching your arm was so freaking loud?  And typing?  Well, who brought in the Howitzer, dude? 

But regular, normal noises like the TV or conversation?  Tiny little whispers.

So this map isn't perfect.  I'm gonna have to go back in a few weeks and tell that audiologist to TURN UP THE FUCKING JAMBA JUICE, WOMAN.  But, goddess, what a relief to know there isn't something wrong with that very expensive hardware in my head... or with my brain itself. 

Oh, wait... we already knew THAT was defective.  Um, never mind...

What I know about me

Okay, so my ovaries went into conniptions when I first read MoCo native Tori Amos' piece out of the UK, "What I Know About Men."  It's too easy when reading that thing to see the entire species of men as this ambiguous yet omnipotent force that shapes a woman's life. 

I decided long ago not to be a male-basher, and to be pretty overt about it -- masculinity is a societal pressure in and of itself, so holding a guy responsible for being... well, a guy?  Well, that logic lost its effectiveness pretty much the moment I hit puberty, no matter how many times people told me boys did this and wanted that.

The poor wankers, right?

But what keeps me coming back to Tori is this line: "I will never give myself over to anyone."

Well, fuck.  Add on "again" to the end of that sentence, and Tori pretty much just stole my mantra from the last seven months. 

It isn't quite that my ex-husband did anything wrong.  Rather, it's that I gave all of me to him, body and soul, quite literally, so that there was nothing left over for me.  It's a romantic idea, really, but quite miserable in the living. 

I am just now coming to fully realize, seeing now the changes in me (and, I hope he won't mind me saying, in him) what a huge burden that was for both of us.

More profound still, the realization that this is far from the first time I've done this to myself, laid my whole self in someone else's hands.  Like Tori, I've been assaulted, bullied, and abused.  And yes, the huge majority of the people who committed these violences against me happened to be men. 

But the worst criminal was a woman: me.  The men who laid their hands on me or told me lies about me only existed in my life for the briefest wink; I was the one that let those ghosts stare me in the face for years.

And, like Tori, I've found my daughter's presence in my life to not only be healing, but the incentive I needed to take ownership of myself.

So, yeah.  Sucks that Tori feels the need to author a piece that, at first glance, centers around the men in her life.  Or that I need to read it that way, anyway.

But in the end, we're all interdependent, aren't we?  And the only thing that's gonna keep me from losing myself totally to that web of humanity and the hegemonic spider that sucks our souls when we lose ourselves?

Yeah.  Duh. 

Me. 

Obvious as it may be, it's a lesson I gotta learn... over and over again.