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August 7th, 2010

30 days of books meme day 2


My book! "I'll Tell You No Lies" by me, Tristan A. Arts! Also available here.

The original post, which lists all the questions for this meme

Eh, sonny?

I've come to the realization that I am hard of hearing. It's not as bad as when I was a kid; I was so hard of hearing as a kid that at some points I was practically deaf. I remember using a device in school one year that was essentially a hearing-aid, so I could hear the teachers.

When I was a kid, this difficulty hearing was due to constant earaches, stuffed up sinuses, and clogged ear cavities. I was almost always sick with a cold or somesuch, to varying degrees. As an adult, I'm now rarely sick. I never get earaches anymore, and am almost never stuffed up. So I'm not sure why I'm still hard of hearing.

Until recently, I thought it was just my brain being weird. And there IS an element of that to it; when I'm immersed fully in what I'm doing, even when I hear someone talking to me then, I'll hear it as indistinct noises; plainly speech, but completely unintelligible. I might catch a word or two if I'm lucky. I used to think I could hear people fine while on the computer, but now I realize I got that impression while living with Lilla, and she would always unintentionally get my attention before speaking to me at the computer, usually by opening the door, or from her loud footsteps. Plus, the door was to my left front, it was hard not to see her if the door was open. But Brooke (kengr) is another matter. At her place, I'm often faced away from her while we're at our respective computers. And she has this bad habit of talking at me when my attention is clearly elsewhere, not even waiting for me to give an indication that I'm listening before going on. Then she gets annoyed with me when I finally realize she was talking at me and turn around to say "What?" Like she thinks that talking loudly (IE, normal speech as opposed to whispering) is enough to make me realize she's taling to me. Which is silly, because even if it worked that way, it takes my brain a second or two to switch gears. So even assuming that I immediately realized she was talking to me, in the time it would take my brain to switch gears, I might miss the first third or half of the sentence, losing a lot of information. What she needs to do is say "Hey Fay!" and wait for me to turn to face her before continuing. Or at least glance at her.

But also, I'm just plain hard of hearing. Brooke plays music and TV at a level she considers to be a loud volume, and I can barely hear it. Hard to make out words a lot when I can't hear them. And phones; I can rarely hear anything anyone says on a phone at normal volume, even if the rest of the room is as quiet as possible. To use the phone at normal volume, I have to push the phone hard against my right ear (I hear better out my right side) and put my finger in my left ear and concentrate really hard on what they're saying. I frequently use the loudspeaker function on my cell phone when I can to be able to hear better. In fact, if the area I'm in is loud enough, like outside by a busy road, and I'm making a phone call, you'd have a safe bet betting that I not only would have the loudspeaker function on, but would have the phone a mere inch or inch and a half from my ear to be able to hear it.

And no, the cause isn't loud music. Even at my hardest of hearing I never had the volume up too high. Hell, I used to listen to Godsmack at such a low volume I'd fall asleep to it. I rarely ever used headphones, still use them moderately infrequently, and always keep the volume to the softest I can and still be able to hear it. I can think of only one time when I had the volume up on earphones really high, and I was in a weird frame of mind at the time.

I don't know why I'm hard of hearing. Maybe the constant earaches and clogged ear passages as a child left permanent damage? *Ponders*

Using the "little girl in rain" icon even though it doesn't fit because I like it and it doesn't get used enough.

I hope that...

I hope that Glenn Beck loses every single one of his sponsors not just in the UK, but in the US and elsewhere, then gets cancelled by Fox.

I hope that Fox News goes out of business and never broadcasts again, and that nothing like it ever surfaces ever again.

I hope that Fr*d Ph*lps dies by being hit by a meteorite or struck by lightning. Something suitably "wrath of God"-like.

I hope that, in 20 years or less, people who rail against gay marriage will be given the same kind of looks that people who rail against interracial marriages now get.

I hope that, if I ever have kids, they'll have the same view of anti-gay laws that modern children have of Jim Crow laws.

I hope that I'll live to see an end to all sexist double standards. Including the one that says male pedophiles are so bad that any male even glancing in the general direction of a child is somehow automatically a threat, while female pedophiles are considered no big deal. NOT ALL MEN ARE DANGEROUS, SEX-CRAZED CHILD MOLESTERS.

I hope that I'll live to see people stop using "protect the children!" as an excuse to curtail basic human rights or as an excuse to enact insane rules that do more harm than good, so children can go back to being children without paranoid adults locking them inside wearing indoor helmets and implanted with GPS trackers, with 24 hour surveilance cameras, and raised with no contact with any man (even their own father), or worse.

I hope that I'll live to see lawmakers the world over realize that a drunk pissing on a bush in public, a streaker, and a boy who just turned 18 yesterday having sex with his girlfriend (who is a week younger than him) should not be punished for life, and that they should not be lumped in with serial rapists and serial child molesters, and that if the law enforcers really think someone is enough of a threat to the public to be punished for life, to give them a goddamn life sentence.

I hope that I'll live to see some sense in law enforcement so that the 18 year old having mutually consenting sex with his 17 year old girlfriend WILL NOT EVEN BE CONSIDERED A CRIME.

I hope that I'll live to see public nudity become decriminalized and even socially acceptable in the USA, and for people to realize that nudity is not inherently sexual; it works in Europe, why not America?

I hope that the insanity of modern society at least doesn't get any worse.

And most of all, I hope we humans don't kill ourselves and/or the planet off.


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