Well, I’m happy to report that I finally visited NYC for the first time last weekend - stayed with a friend in Brooklyn for three days and three incredibly late nights (hehe). Absolutely LOVED it - what a great place to SEE, but not HEAR.
I was completely audiologically useless in the chaos of city noise - to the point where it was amusing:
Chinatown was a challenge (I was shopping for back-room black market purses) the vendors and I had to resort to using hand signals to get any communication across. On the Astroland pirate ship ride in Coney Island - the ride operator was trying to tell me something via loudspeaker. Turns out he was suggesting that I sit closer to the end of the ship for a better ride. Numerous people passing me on the sidewalks were asking for cigarettes unbeknownst to me. I got yelled at in the Subway station by the ticket attendent - she hadn’t realized that I was deaf and thought I was trying to jump the gate. Grand Central Station - some man approached me and was trying to initiate a conversation in which he wanted me to model for him (uh, no). Oh, that’s only the tip of the iceberg!
Overall, it was a great experience, but I wonder if I’d really be able to handle all that confusion and noise full-time? It feels like everyone in NYC needs to be communicating 24-7!
August 16th, 2005 at 11:19 pm
You learn to block it out.
Far fewer people try to talk to you when you don’t meet their gaze, or when you just smile and move on. Hearing people do it all the time. They hear, but no one ever listens. So in a way, it’s actually a better place to be deaf, because you get credit for trying to listen.
And you memorise the patterns- how to go in the subway, how to ride the bus, how to barter without language, etc.
Plus, everyone’s foreign. So if you don’t understand something, people tend to assume it’s because you’re from another country and don’t speak English. So you get brownie points for being able to write/lipread English–something foreigners can’t always do.
August 17th, 2005 at 7:41 am
I like living in a city - but I still find aspects of city life potentially unnerving. What I can’t work out is whether this is due to being deaf or just due to being sensible about what we encounter on city streets pretty much every day. The noise of traffic, trains (and trams, in my city) I’m used to - feeling the rumbling of it and that kind of thing. But it’s when actual people come into the picture that I get anxious. I know I am not going to hear them and I worry about what it is they might want to say.
Normally I just walk fast and look at nothing in particular - and the occasionally amusing (if slightly painful) consequence of this is that I quite often walk into street-lamps and the like
August 19th, 2005 at 2:52 am
Wow I never knew so much went through the mind of a person who was deaf on the topic of being deaf…if that makes any sense? I came by your site after googling deafness cause being the idiot I can sometimes be I went to a concert with my father and wound up sitting right in front of the speaker with him, my ears don’t seem muffled any more but I still can’t hear some things, I hope it comes back. Awesome site though, keep up the good work!
August 19th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
*laughs* Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.
Deafness is tolerable, tinnitus makes you want to pull your brains out. The good news is that your hearing will most likely come back completely–or you’ll get used to it. The bad news is, each time you do it, the damage is harder for your body to repair. Hope you’ll think about wearing some earplugs or something next time you go to a concert! There are special earplugs that people wear that allow you to hear very clearly so you can enjoy the music and even hear conversation, but don’t allow your ears to be damaged. I’m not sure what they’re called- I’ll ask my mom (she uses them).
“Thinking about the deafness” is one of those things that I found myself doing way too often. The way people interact, the way I hear things, the experiences that I have that most people don’t. That’s why I started this blog, and why I enjoy reading Julie’s, HoHProf’s and Sanctum’s entries–they make me see humor where I hadn’t before, make me hear beauty where I hadn’t before, and make me think about things that I hadn’t before.
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