Anyone on SG deaf?

i've got a minor case of tinnitus. it's not bad when there is a little background noise, but it can get painful in a really quiet area. the lesson i learned from it is: if it feels like a breeze is coming out of your monitors you should probably back up some or turn down the volume.

This topic is starting to drift towards something more appropriate for the music section. So, does anybody use ear plugs at shows? Custom-made ear plugs, or flat response attenuators, or just those EAR foam things? I had some made for myself about eight years ago, and I still use them, but I'd like to get new ones. It seems like my current ones don't fit and don't have flat response- I tend to lose the high end a little, and that's the part of my hearing that's already damaged (since I was a small child).

Bilaterally hearing impaired. Enough to make life a pain in the ass sometimes. I wear hearing aids in both ears, I read lips quite well, and I know enough ASL to get by when I'm around deaf people. I forced myself to forget most of my ASL when I was forced to learn it in elementary school 'cause they were preparing for me to go completely deaf. That ticked me off for some reason. I'm going to regret that when I *do* lose the rest of it
I've got the ringy ears as well. I stood too close to a ladyfinger firecracker when I was a kid, and my ears have rung ever since.

In any case, here's a memory:
I used to have to use an FM system back in elementary school. I'd wear an earpiece attached to a little reciever and my teacher would wear the mic. Often when she took kids out into the hall to bitch at them, she'd forget to turn the mic off, and I'd get to eavesdrop and repeat everything she was saying to the poor kid to the rest of the class. That was fun.

The most annoying things now are when I can't wear my hearing aids outside 'cause it's raining too hard, and when people who've known me for a long time say "forget it" instead of taking a moment to repeat what they've said. I really like to be able to follow conversations, and it's so fucking frustrating when I can't.


Yeah. that's my fifty cents.

i am glad there more people learning ASL i am hard of hearing myself. i am new to this website. We the deaf people need the hearing world to be part of the deaf world to make our life Easier I would like to see that happen in the future...by the way .. any one from dallas texas? oh yeah... if you are interested in meeting more deaf people look up! deafcoffee.com!! enjoy

My college was very close proximity wise to Gallaudet. I've seen so many very cute deaf girls that I've wanted to approach, but I never knew how.

I'm an ASL interpreter.

my friend/coworker jeremy AKA def jam , professional snowboarder extraordinaire is almost entirely deaf.



he gave up on his hearing aid thing a long time ago, becuase he couldn't adjust to the sounds and figure out which ones he was supposed to focus on.

he reads lips exceptionally well, but speaks sign language whenever possible, although he uses a different form from ASL, so sometimes things seem to get confusing.

it's awesome working with him because on average i learn 5 or 6 new signs a week.

where do you work?? i.e. in a hospital, school, office, or just kinda freelance? I've been studying ASL informally (i.e. i've been in a club for 2 years, but have extensively studied a small dictionary since 5th grade), and would love to interpret. I know the options available, i just don't know many personally who can relate experiences. anything you can share would be wonderful!
and this really is so exciting...ASL seems like such a 'forgotten language' sometimes...not enough high schools offer it as a course, and it's really unfortunate...

i learned a little ASL from this dude who took a few semesters of it to satisfy a foreign language requirement in college. now aside from being able to insult people in many languages, i can insult them in sign too.

i thought one of his stories was pretty cool though. an assignment they had was to sign the lyrics to a song as it was playinig. so he goes and picks Chop Suey by System of a Down. personally, id have been afraid of injuring myself, but thats just me.

one thing i will say, having known a handful of deaf people is that they have more willpower than i do. i dont think id want to live without my sense of hearing. music is such a big part of my life that i dont think i would want to go on without it.

I want to learn, but I can't find any courses near me in England.

>i went to the Rochester Institute of Technology which has one of the alrgest deaf schools in the country, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. I actually was friends with two deaf people who could speak. At RIT there was alot of deaf racism. it could get pretty frightening. the only thing that scared me was when i would walk across campus and see two people in the front seat of a moving car signing to each other. They were signing and driving. that was a little freaky.

I went to RIT as well. (Class of '97) The interaction and relationship between the RIT and NTID students was complicated at best. I knew people who lived in mixed dorms who harbored a lot of resentment towards the deaf students, usually over financial aid but sometimes about the noise. It seemed the population at large had problems with the perceived "special treatment".

In my senior year I became a notetaker for the hearing impaired students. It was easily the best job I had in my student years. We were hired to go to mainstream classes attended by one or more NTID students and take precise notes on the content of each lesson to provide said students with study aids. Sometimes I even got to do it for classes I was already taking. In the Art History classes there were two notetakers - one for the content and one to sketch the slides. I did that a couple of times, what a trip. Sometimes I go back and look at those sketches for a laugh.

I have to agree with you though. I never considered having deaf students around much of an issue until the 'signing while driving' debate came up. There were some public discussions about it during my upperclassman years. They quickly became very heated. Call me a jerk, but I don't really think one should be driving at all if one is completely deaf, never mind signing at the same time.

>One of the sluttier girls at RIT, she was actually really nice and cool and totally admitted to being a slut, actually was one of NIN's go-go type dancers on the 1994 tour.

Well, now I don't know if I believe that you went to RIT. There were no girls there, who are you trying to fool? In all seriousness, I wonder if you are referring to the girl who was involved with the Genitorturers? (if I spelled that right)

Thank you

i dont remember her name

Same way you'd approach anyone else. No, really.

Prior to my current relationship, the best relationship I had ever had was with a severely hard of hearing woman. I met her in college. I had thought about taking ASL prior to meeting her, but the class was full. Then I met her, and decided I needed to do everything I could to get into that class. I did.

I spent two years with her, became fluent in ASL (I'm barely conversational now) and loved being exposed to the people and the culture. My favorite (non-dirty) story from that time period:

I'm up in Tahoe with my girlfriend and two of her profoundly deaf girlfriends. We wanted to get snowboarding lessons, so we were standing in line to get a private tutor. They didn't like me to speak for them, so one of the girls starts writing back and forth on a piece of paper to the clerk once we get to the front of the line. It was taking a pretty long time, and the guy standing behind us in line (Total rich yuppie type... fancy ski clothes, top of the line equipment, trophy wife in a gold snowsuit, etc.) starts bitching about how long it's taking. Only, because I've just been signing to the other people, he assumes I'm deaf too.

So he's going on and on about "Why does this have to take so long?" and "who let these people in the VIP line"... getting progressively worse and worse. Eventually, he lets fly with a "retard" or two.

I wheel on him and say: "Look, it's not their fault they're deaf. But it is your fault you're an asshole."

Ahhhh Good times.