So I spent last weekend officiating a slew of matches for the Academic Bowl at Gally, which was not only a trip down memory lane, potholes and all, but also a marathon event that humbled me because it reminded me how old I was.
Sixteen years ago I competed on a four-person team, which you'd never know, because it was apparently a dry run for the real thing and forever doomed to be left out of the record books. No matter, 'cause I competed again with a different school two years later, winning our regionals and making it to the Championship Match at Nationals before running into my mother's arms accepting the second place trophy while breaking down in tears on the stage (which I'm about to do again after realizing I just typed out the words "sixteen years ago." Ohh, Mommy!).
It felt like the end of the world for seventeen-year-old me when we fell short at the Championships. But dang, they've really ramped the competition up since then. This year 78 teams from all over the country came to Gally to compete in a four-day behemoth of an event. The final matches were broadcast live via webcast. I had friends in Canada watching. Holy molee.
And somewhere within that writhing mass of over 300 teenagers hopped up on dry erase marker fumes, bubble gum, and adrenaline and the nearly 150 coaches faithfully trailing their kids as they took over the campus was l'il ol' me, sitting in my assigned room for nine hours straight with my trusty green and red signs with "YES" and "NO" printed across them.
Basically my job was to look at the kids' answers and decide if they got points. Easy cheesy, except there's a whole freakin' manual of rules about capitalization, spelling, handwriting, punctuation, whether the answer sheet can be horizontal or vertical, how much time the kids get to answer, et cetera, et cetera, and et freakin' cetera. And then there was scorekeeping and making sure the other volunteers were in place and ready to go and room set up and there was listening to objections and then telling them to sit down and shut up carefully evaluating the merit of said objections.
Side note: I got home with severely sore trapezii and levator scapulae from lifing those damn YES and NO signs. If they ask me back next year I hope they tell me a month before so I can hire a personal trainer.
The hardest part of officiating was remembering that I was no longer eligible to compete. I had a sneaking suspicion that upending the table, hurling my laptop across the room and screaming, "BOISE! NO! The capital of Idaho is BOISE!!!!" wouldn't go over too well with these kids. Especially if it was quite obvious to everyone that I had yet to look at the official answer.
And also especially since, for many of these kids, it was their first time seeing so many deaf people in the same place. If it wasn't a deaf university, I'd swear you could hear a choir of angels singing overhead as these kids looked around and saw a sea of people just like them. And so different from them too.
There were teams of students who could barely sign their own names and needing voice/oral interpreters going head to head with teams of students who introduced themselves in the casual blitzkrieg fingerspelling style you see on residential schools' campuses. Not just different worlds, but different universes. And the look I saw in their eyes as they realized that this was a place where they nonetheless shared common experiential DNA with everyone else was just priceless, priceless.
While these kids were in the midst of their individual epiphanies, I was having a little bit of a surreal experience of my own. It was my first time seeing so many kids with cochlear implants in one place. They ran the gamut from having deaf parents and being fluent in ASL to having one of those terps following them around.
Confession: I couldn't stop staring at these CIs. When I was growing up it was rare to meet a kid with a CI who wasn't, umm... socially awkward, shall we say? And I am was very special in a special-ed sort of way, so for me to say that is pretty telling. That's the way I found myself looking at these kids' heads.
Then I started talking with the kids wearing these CIs after matches. Some of them were pretty dorky. Some of them were pretty cool. Most of them were a mixture of both, exactly what you should be at that age. After we said our goodbyes, I saw them melt back into that ocean of deaf teenagers and disappear.
"Weird," I thought to myself. Just way weird to see so many people with hardware hanging from their heads.
Then I tossed my hair over my shoulder and was slammed into sudden silence. The processor on my head had just detached from the magnet grafted into my skull.
Oh, right. I am one of them now. Every time I have one of those queasy thoughts staring at someone else's CI, I have to remember someone could be staring at my head too. Hmm, bonus mini-revelation.
One thing, though: If I'm going to continue re-examining and re-shaping my identity and how the deaf thing fits into it, I am so glad I'm doing it while standing on Gallaudet's campus. No other place, dude. No other place.
