d/Deaf Symbols and their Meanings

Someone made a comment that my header art was appropriate since lips are a symbol for all d/Deaf people.    It’s hard to find a body part more glorified by both hearing and deaf than lips.   If you spent as much time studying lips as I have, you could develop a love/hate thing with lips.  [...]

CI, Deafness and God — Is it ‘a test’?

Recently this blog post called ‘CI, Deafness and God’ upset me. Basically this guy, Jim, thinks deafness and all disabilities are a ‘test’ from God and I guess if you ‘pass’ the test by accepting your challenges, then he feels you will be rewarded in heaven or something. I will only post his concluding words [...]

Philly Day Two at the Zoo!

Day Two in Philadelphia there was nothing planned until the Welcome Party at 7pm. Lorne would be flying in around 4-ish and Robyn wanted to see the zoo. She had never seen American animals in real life, she said. Which ones, I asked? She wanted to see a raccoon, which made me smile. I’ve got [...]

Communication Barriers

Last Wednesday marked my fourth day in ASL class and I was pleased with my test score of 99 out of 100. This wasn’t a huge surprise because much of the vocabulary was a review since I’ve already taken courses at the Hearing Speech and Deafness Cntr. and have spent lots of time conversing with [...]

Say What??

So today I showed up for my djembe lesson, and my instructor greeted me with, “Hi! You can go ahead and use the bathroom first before we start– if you don’t mind.”
I didn’t need to go to the bathroom. I am fifty years old. I think I know when I need to use the bathroom! [...]

Did You Know. . . ???

Thomas Edison was nearly deaf? Some sources say he inherited a progressive hearing loss from his father, while others say it was possibly caused by scarlet fever when he was 14. He himself often claimed he had been “boxed” in the ears while riding a train. He heard a pop and lost his hearing after [...]

Deaf Hero Day — Cal Rodgers

Cal Rodgers was born Jan. 12, 1879 and died on Apr. 3, 1912. He became sick with Scarlet Fever when he was six years old and lost his hearing. His achievements were never listed in “deaf” records because he had very little connection to the deaf. However, a biographer Eileen [...]

Deaf Hero Robert Weitbrecht

This past week my belly dancing instructor made the comment, “There’s a fine line between erotic and exotic.” In dancing, the difference is in how many inches apart you hold your feet while shimmying. Just a few inches can create a completely different look– alluring and graceful or flaunting and brash.
The debate we’ve been [...]

You Talk So Well

A few weeks ago I finally got around to reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. I couldn’t help noticing the parallelism of the situation in Oz with the Animals and animals to the deaf/Deaf here in America. The similarity wasn’t even subtle.
Consider–
The Animals in Oz were oral, and therefore enjoyed a higher status. They held professional [...]

Second Class Citizen

This happened awhile ago, but I still laugh whenever I think about it. One time Meg and I went to a Thai place for lunch. (The picture above has nothing to do with this story, except that it’s of a Thai waitress I got off the net.)

Meg had been mentoring me in ASL and our [...]