Song for the Deaf*

*awesome album and tune name from Queens of the Stone Age.

Stopped by my friendly, neighborhood, new fav head shop, Buried Treasures after work today. I only just discovered the joint last week after working  nearby for almost a year. Sheesh — took me long enough!

I had a rough day in the pixel mines and absolutely needed to treat myself. You know, some days it takes more than a Sesame Street cupcake to kick start the old joi de vivre. Today I found just the thing — it’s a light, loose weave, purple tie dyed cotton summer bedspread.

What’s up with my middle aged re-embrace of the hippy, dippy, Grateful Dead following, stoner look? Eh, I blame my friend Jenny’s husband John (not to be confused with Jen of mayhem causing, escapade fame).

John's the proprietor of Turtle’s Treasures in Phoenix, Arizona — a joint packed with unbelievably gorgeous, nicely priced vintage furniture, books (BOOKS! me and Mr. Books, we got a thing going on), tchotchkes AND tie dyed apparel. Put on one of these fab-ola, colorful schmattas and you’re automatically in a better mood or, at least, a calmer state of being. Honest and true!

So yeah, it’s all about mood enhancement and color and shit.

Here’s the extra added cool² bit — the proprietor was on cash register duty when I decided to pry my bones outta there. He asked me if I found all I was looking for — at least I THINK that’s what he asked.

Remember — deaf here. I do the lip reading decathlon all day/most days in my attempt to get by in this happening aural world.

So I says to him, I says ‘deaf here — say that again slow and I’ll give reading your lips the old college try.’  This tremendous shop keep immediately and willow leaf smoothly began communicating with me in a form of sign language. It was more charades than anything else BUT I understood everything he ‘said.’ Everything. 

Turns out he’s deaf in one ear. He’s got a keen, first hand concept of what works and what doesn’t in the vast communication fields.

Too cool.

Meanwhile, in trolling the net for info on lipreading I found an intriguing conversation/argument going on at AllDeaf.com.

It all started with this statement and question:

'In my survey of The Exceptional Child education class, there was a chapter about effectively teaching deaf/hoh students. Each group had to present on a chapter and, unfortunately I was not in the group for deaf/hoh because I would have corrected many of the misconceptions they had. One of the major things that stuck out to me was that the group said: The student should have a sign language interpreter if absolutely necessary, but otherwise they can just read lips because interpreters are distracting to everyone else. They said "just read lips" so nonchalantly like it's an easy thing to do. I'm hearing and trying to read lips along with improving my ASL because I want to know as much as I can about how deaf people engage with the world. Lip reading is difficult and exhausting to have to do all the time and many hearing people think it's just natural for deaf people to read lips and they shouldn't need ASL. (editors note: HAH!)Thoughts on this? '

 The disagreements, the assumptions on all sides, fascinate me.

Queens if the Stone Age -- A Song for the Deaf