Teej's Secret Box

In Southwest Virginia, there is an organization called the Roanoke HANDS Group, also known as Hearing And Deaf Signers.  This group is part of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services Center organization, and meet frequently for a variety of reasons.  One of such gathering is the Christmas Dinner.  My parents and I have gone to this celebration almost religiously when I was much younger, but that have ceased since I went to college.

In fact, i was not able to participate until this year, more than a decade later.  It was a great bash, with plenty of old faces intermindling with new faces.  Stories were shared, and pictures were taken.  I had the good fortune to take a significant amount of pictures of this gathering, and would like to share them with you, my dear readers.  Let’s see if there are any faces you may have recognized…

(Click on picture to see the album)

Question:  What about rhymes? Do you think you would place a common bond on two words that rhyme if your hearing loss were total, or would you have to think back to previous experience where it was made clear by context that two words rhymed?

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My Answer: I am fortunate to be able to hear the rhymes myself, and I am very unfortunate that my hearing is not strong enough to distinct a difference between two words that sounds similar with each other. “Pool” and “Tool” are the same if I am not watching the person’s lips. “Cool” and “Tool” are much more similar with the lips, so I have to pay attention to the usage of the word.

With my hearing aids, I am still considered to have a moderate hearing loss (from my memory, sounds that are approximately 40db or lower are too silent for me to hear.

At least I do not need to learn to converse in Japanese. Phonetic syllables are easier to learn, but incredibly difficult for me to distinguish.

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Her Answer: I remember being taught about rhymes based on how closed it resembled in its spellings but do not remember much more than that. So I pretty much do not think about words that rhyme since it usually is based on sounds. Even I could not help my boys with their phonetics homework from school and would have their father help them.

Question: If you have always been deaf, what is your experience like with words? I mean, when you think a sentence does it run through your head as “sounded out” words, or is it more the concept of the symbol? This is difficult to describe. It is like the “is the yellow you see, the yellow I see debate.”

Do you feel like you think more in visual imagery than in words?

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My Answer: I do think of words by its sounds, but in a mixture of a visual representative — the shape of the words. Many times, I would stall while writing some words out, feeling that the shape of the word is wrong, so I get fixated on the spelling of the word, and feeling convinced that it’s misspelled, even when it’s not.

I am very much a visual person — I remember people faces, scenery locations, and so on forth. I don’t easily remember names of streets, people, and other stuff. When I do, it’s usually the first syllable — so if I am trying to remember your username, it would degrade to something like Jason. At the worst, I would just simply know it’s a 5 letter word starting with “J”.

Funny enough, I don’t do crossword puzzles.

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Her Answer: I usually think out in words but do occasionally hit images instead of words. Probably because in early childhood in preschool and elementary school, it was strongly emphasized on word reading with spelling and vocabularies.

Images sometimes hit when I know the word but it’s right on tip of my hands. Some of unique ASL words where there are no good literal translations to match it.

Q: For example?

A: “Sick” sign but not sick, and “Train zoom“.

Q: So you think of the action of the sign?

A: Yah more like that, since signing illustrates what you are describing, et cetera.

It is natural to be curious.

To be able to learn more on the difference between people, I find it to be encouraging, as this kind of knowledge would help expand our minds toward new things that we may never experience in our life.

Someone on a geek forum (arstechnica.com) took the step to ask me some really interesting questions about my deafness.  Answering his questions, I thought that it would be great to share it with everyone.

I am profound deaf, but are usually misunderstood to be “hard of hearing” as I went through intensive training to be able to communicate with hearing people.  I am not too immersed in the Deaf world (and is slowly fixing that), as I was mainstreamed.

I also took the liberty to share the question with my girlfriend, who is totally deaf (as she does not wear any hearing devices) to gain her insight.  She is very much a part of the Deaf world, even though she was also mainstreamed.

I also would like to invite everyone reading this to share their answers.

I also would like to encourage the readers to submit more questions for all of us to answer.

I hope this will be enjoyable for everyone.

What would you say to a relationship that was born out of a woman who was married with a guy and a single man, ending up with the married guy pushing the woman out, despite previously approving of this relationship, and the woman moving in with the single guy after knowing each other for only 2 1/2 months at a distance?

Whatever it is, I am experiencing it. As the single guy in question.

Yes, I do love her, but… I definitely did not expect any of this to happen. It just does, from the very beginning.

It’s so funny, I gave up looking for women earlier this year, and bam, she comes in the picture, as a former classmate from school (younger than myself, thou). She got pregnant after high school, and married the father, had another kid, and had an open relationship with him.

Then she met me. And now she’s still adjusting on being away from her kids, even though she’s a lot less stressed out by being away from him and being with me these days.

And damn, isn’t the lovemaking the best thing I have ever experienced?!

Experiencing this from this role have really opened my eyes to new aspect of this kind of relationships.

(Naturally, there are plenty who hate either her, me or us for what have happened.)