It WAS a joke....golly...but still...remind you of anyone??

**
First there was this post from a few days ago (which I accidentally deleted when trying to get "boots on the ground?" set up) (Sorry yr astute comment went with it, Ex-s!!):

Many will recall that on July 8, 1947, witnesses claimed that an unidentified object with five aliens aboard crashed onto a sheep and cattle ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico. This is a well-known incident that many say has long been covered up by the U.S. Air Force and the federal government. However, what you may NOT know is that in the month of March 1948, exactly nine months later, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Condoleezza Rice, and Dan Quayle were all born. See what happens when aliens breed with sheep?
This information may clear up a lot of questions.

Then the ever-vigilant VC sent this:

Don't make me sic my librarian on you . . .


Subject: Tsk Tsk Re: this explains it!


You should know better than to send this to a librarian.
Setting aside the whole Area 51 premise ( I do not dispute *something*
happened).....

If conceived in March, a baby would be born in December.

Bush was born in July 46
Quayle was born Feb 47
Condoleeza Rice is my sister's age - born in 54
Rush Limbaugh is my age - born in 51
Cheney is older - born in Jan 41
Rumsfeld even older - born in 32
You can't believe anything O'Reilly says about his childhood.

Ahem..."If conceived in March, a baby would be born in December." Thankya, Jesus.

The aliens bred with the sheep in July of '47, so the offspring would be born in March of '48--if aliens mimic the gestational period of humans.

Now we don't really know wot KIND of aliens these were, how long their offspring gestate, etc.

Let's say that an alien ancestor of Bush had already landed some years ago. This can explain why in the name of all that is rational, Bush pere picked Quayle as vice president, causing the startled expression on the face of Ron Reagan, Sr.

Cheney is from Wyoming, so anything to do with sheep is possible.

Rumsfeld was born in Chicago, home of the stockyards--more sheep!

**Dutch Breeders Association of the Drentse Heideschap

Is this what they mean by "boots on the ground"?....

This arrived via e-mail last night from Chicago:

This morning I attended the opening of Eyes Wide Open, the display of combat boots representing American soldiers who have lost their lives since 2003. Because it's gotten so big, this was the last city where it will be shown in its entirety.

I didn't plan to stay past the introduction..., but the main speakers were parents of some of the troops and I just couldn't leave. They all had pictures of their sons - some childhood photos - and it was so sad. One dad talked about how for each pair of boots there was a person who was part of a family. People who should be here now but are not.



In one way or another, all of them said the reasons we were given for the war were false. One mom said this war was a choice, not a necessity, and that our government can't seem to choose to end the war. Many said that war can't create democracy. They talked about the staggering number of Iraqis including children who have been killed. One mom said that when they buried their son they made a promise to speak truth for him. She urged everyone who was listening to "speak relentlessly" to end this war, so this message is for her....

If anyone wants to see it in person, it's at Jackson and Columbus and goes through Memorial Day.

well....

Got this in the e-mail today:

A first grade teacher in Virginia had 25 students in her class. She took a bunch of well-known proverbs and read the first half of each one. Then she asked the kids to come up with the other half. It's hard to believe these were actually done by first graders. Their insight may surprise you. While reading, keep in mind that these are first graders, 6-year-olds, because the last one is a classic!


1. Don't change horses.............until they stop running.

2. Strike while the.............bug is close.

3. It's always darkest before................Daylight Saving Time.

4. Never underestimate the power of........termites.

5. You can lead a horse to water but.......how?

6. Don't bite the hand that...............looks dirty.

7. No news is..................impossible.

8. A miss is as good as a ..................Mr.

9. You can't teach an old dog new ..............math.

10. If you lie down with dogs, you'll.............stink in the morning.

11. Love all, trust..................me.

12. The pen is mightier than the..............pigs.

13. An idle mind is....................the best way to relax.

14. Where there's smoke there's.................pollution.

15. Happy is the bride who..................gets all the presents.

16. A penny saved is....................not much.

17. Two's company, three's ...............the Musketeers.

18. Don't put off till tomorrow what...............you put on to go to bed.

19. Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and.............you have to blow
your nose.

20. There are none so blind as..............Stevie Wonder.

21. Children should be seen and not..............spanked or grounded.

22. If at first you don't succeed.............get new batteries.

23. You get out of something only what you.............see in the picture on the
box.

24. When the blind lead the blind..............get out of the way.

And the WINNER!

25. Better late than...................pregnant.

It's Monday.....

And the news is guaranteed to get your blood pressure going as we begin the work week!

Liars Lying....In today's Salon.com, Greg Greenwald begins his column, "The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated,"
with these words:

Mike McConnell, the Bush administration's Director of National Intelligence, has a remarkably dishonest Op-Ed in The Washington Post this morning, in which he argues for completely unspecified "updates" and "changes" to FISA in order to expand -- yet again -- the Government's powers of eavesdropping on Americans. McConnell's entire argument for expansion of surveillance powers rests on a patent falsehood.

For the entire column, read it yourself here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

The Assault on Reason
Al Gore talked about this same point in his new book, An Assault on Reason, on ABC News's "This Week" with George Stephanopolis. "President Bush has repeatedly violated the law for six years," Gore says, referring to FISA.

Here's the link to this story: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=3195676&page=1

Great Interview by Cate Woodruff in Truthout.org

Woodruff, an editor at Truthout.org, interviews Margaret Lazarus, whose documentary film, "Rape Is," "looks at rape from a global and historical perspective, but focuses mainly on the domestic cultural conditions that make this human rights violation the most underreported crime in America."

Woodruff asks, as Lazarus says, "hard questions," including, "Would you like to see more responsibility for social justice and change taken by filmmakers and the media in general?

Lazarus replies, "We all contribute to the cultural climate of our society, and we need to take responsibility for what we say and do. Media makers need to be held accountable for work that contributes to inequity, injustice, maintaining a destructive status quo."

And at this point, the interview gets really interesting....

Here's the link to the whole interview: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051807P.shtml

Gasohol....

In 1978, the year after we moved to Iowa, some filling stations there began selling gasohol, a blend of 90% gasoline and 10% ethanol. Even though it was a tad more expensive than good old gasoline, it sold well. Benefits included less reliance on foreign petroleum, less pollution, and support for Iowa's corn growers.

Wanting to be a good citizen, I tried it in my rotten old car--with the predictable result: hitchhiking to work and leaving my car at the side of the road for Bill, our town mechanic, to pick up later with his tow truck. The reason for the breakdown was that the ethanol in the blend was a champion solvent for engine goop. The loosened goop clogged the fuel line and made driving unpredictable--as when the engine started coughing and then stopped in mid-trip. Proponents of gasohol said that replacing the fuel line filters several times during the first few tankfuls of gasohol would solve that problem. And it did. Plus, If you had a new car, the gasohol was no problem at all. It was just the old cars, of which Iowa was full back in the late 70s, that caused this particular problem.

Fastforward to May 18, 2007....Truthout.org has a troubling article on the effect of the big push for biofuels by Noam Chomsky, first published in the International News on Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Starving the Poor
By Noam Chomsky
The International News

Wednesday 16 May 2007

The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.

In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.

In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.

In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.

In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.

The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities. The objective is commonly called “free trade,” a posture that collapses quickly on examination.

It’s not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination, imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.

The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when they’re convinced that the economic interests under their protection are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the international order.

The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large companies,” in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President Bush’s trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.

Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.

The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.

Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers — a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural work force has been displaced in the NAFTA years, a process that is continuing, depressing wages in other sectors of the economy and impelling emigration to the US.

It is, presumably, more than coincidental that President Clinton militarised the Mexican border, previously quite open, in 1994, along with implementation of NAFTA.

The “free trade” regime drives Mexico from self-sufficiency in food towards dependency on US exports. And as the price of corn goes up in the United States, stimulated by corporate power and state intervention, one can anticipate that the price of staples may continue its sharp rise in Mexico.

Increasingly, bio fuels are likely to “starve the poor” around the world, according to Runge and Senauer, as staples are converted to ethanol production for the privileged — cassava in sub-Saharan Africa, to take one ominous example. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, tropical forests are cleared and burned for oil palms destined for bio fuel, and there are threatening environmental effects from input-rich production of corn-based ethanol in the United States as well.

The high price of tortillas and other, crueler vagaries of the international order illustrate the interconnectedness of events, from the Middle East to the Middle West, and the urgency of establishing trade based on true democratic agreements among people, and not interests whose principal hunger is for profit for corporate interests protected and subsidised by the state they largely dominate, whatever the human cost.

The Sierra Club's clean car and global warming expert, Dan Becker, has this to say on the massive federal subsidies going to agribusiness for production of biofuel:

"...Given the billions of dollars of taxpayer money going to prop up ethanol, the money might be better spent elsewhere," he says. "If the American people were given a chance to decide how to spend that money, we'd have a much better environment and would have more energy independence." Many people would rather see money spent on wind and solar power, or on fuel-efficiency efforts, Becker said. "Making all our cars twice as energy efficient would take billions of dollars, but instead we're spending billions of dollars on ethanol."

I'll buy that. If we're going to continue to drive our gas guzzlers and eschew public transportation without regard to how much we and the other residents of this planet wind up paying for food, we won't have solved anything.

"Mozart Meets Cuba"....

Elvis (not his real name...heh), the audiologist at Johns Hopkins Listening Center, was very pleased with my progress on Wednesday, when I had my one-month checkup. He compared Wednesday's audiogram to the one he took on my first visit, pre-implant, and said, "This is fantastic!" For 250Hz, I scored a 10; for the next four (500Hz-4000Hz), a 20; and for the highest sounds (8000Hz), a 30. This puts my hearing in the "normal" range. Who knew??!! In the old days, the best I could do even with a hearing aid at 250Hz was 75, and all the rest went down past 100, making me profoundly deaf.



He said also that it takes two years for the implant to work at its optimum, and after just one month, I'm not anywhere near my peak efficiency yet. I don't think this means I'm gonna wind up hearing in the dog ranges, but it will mean that the sounds I'm hearing now will be richer and fuller, and speech without lipreading will be more recognizable. Even so, we let the sign language interpreter go, since I no longer need her to understand what Elvis is saying.

He re-mapped the four programs again so that program One will now be my usual setting, and it's both loudest and most sensitive. (Sensitivity picks up background noises.) So if I really want to hear what's going on everywhere, not just straight across a table from me or next to me on the metro, it'll be One. Program Two is about as loud as One, but not as sensitive. Three is fairly soft--less volume, and even less sensitivity--and it's focused. Four is very soft, and I can't imagine ever wanting to use it, but The King said many people prefer Three or even Four all the time. Everything else is too much.

When I got up this a.m., I put on my processor, now set at program One, and headed out. Running late, I grabbed a taxi. After settling in, I realized I was hearing the news on the radio, not the taxi driver: "It's 68 degrees in Washington; the time is 9:07." This means I was not lipreading the newscaster, but I was actually hearing him. Needless to say, I love it.

For practice last night, inspired by a number of things, I put a new disk in my CD player: The Klazz Brothers & Cuba Percussion's "Mozart Meets Cuba"



All I can say is that if I had a mind left, that disk would have blown it. It's Mozart's tunes played with a Cuban flavor by a bunch of jazz musicians. One thing Restak, the author of Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot, says in the chapter on art & music is "Perhaps Mozart can help you develop the ability to engage in multilevel thinking and thus use your brain in more creative ways." Well, what would Mozart played as Cuban jazz do to a brain? I'd say it'd give it a big boost in functioning. We'll see. My memory is still half shot from the three pain-killers I took after the implant surgery, but it's getting better. However, as mental stimulation, listening to "Mozart Meets Cuba" beats the hell out of watching "Throw Down by Bobby Flay" on the Food Network. Genug with the barbeque, already!!

Cochlear Implant - One Month Later.....

Tomorrow I'll hop on Amtrak and head for Baltimore to visit the audiologist at Johns Hopkins. What a difference a month makes!!

In the beginning, everyone, whether men or women, sounded exactly the same--like Donald Duck. Now people sound like themselves in all their individual richness.

In the beginning, too, music did not sound AT ALL like music. Now Mozart sounds like Mozart, and the Beatles sound like the Beatles. In the beginning, only the words of "Old McDonald Had a Farm," were recognizable. Now I can hear the tune, too (PLUS the COW MOOING in the background!!)

Everyday my implant gives me another gift as my hearing nerve revives under the stimulus of the implant: the best gifts by far have been the conversations I never would have heard before they turned on this implant: at first, just brief chats with store clerks, and finally, last Saturday, hearing my friend Lida's voice clearly and listening to her tell one of her inimitable stories (see "This Week"). Lida has a strong, vibrant voice with a NY accent that's at once earthy and sophisticated. You just might know she'd have a fabulous voice, too!!

But today, the implant surprised me completely! I haven't been able to use the telephone so far, but I ran into my lovely neighbor Patricia at the mailboxes after work. We talked for a bit--"Can you HEAR me???" she said..."You bet!!" She was very eager to try to call me on the phone, and I told her that phoning had eluded me for lack of practice and a number of other technological considerations, too. She said, "Let's practice the phone calling!" She took my number, and I took hers (they're on that list from the condo board, but who ever looks at that--if you can find it!?). Anyway, she ran upstairs, and I let myself into my condo (in which Patricia used to live before I moved in, btw!!) and poured a nice glass of New Zealand white wine. (Sally has a friend who was/is the wine person for Esquire, and she told Sally that ANY New Zealand white was good. Babies, if it's $7 a bottle, I'll take her word for it.) Anyway, with glass in hand, I went in and sat by my two phones (I had to buy another phone to work with this implant. My old phone is for TTY calls, and it doesn't have a T-coil (for use with hearing aids) or a volume control handset. Anyway, I called Patricia's number, and....no answer. Patricia is a real working artist, and a fabulous one at that, and she believes in simplicity in all things, so I don't think she has an answering machine. Anyway, I hung up, and two minutes later, MY phones rang. I hit the speaker phone button and said, "Hello?" and I heard, clear as a bell, "This is Patricia...can you hear me??" I sure could!! We talked for maybe two minutes, then we hung up. Next I called Lida's number, and she answered!! and I heard her voice again! We talked for another two minutes, then hung up.

OK, Peggy....I know I said YOU would get my first phone call, and I would call you right now, but it's 11:44 pm your time, and you are probably in the arms of Morpheus (as they say in the classics). After I've had a bit of local PRACTICE, I'll certainly call you, and you'll be the first person in the fambly to get a fone call from me.

As they say in Northern Wisconsin, "Holy Jumpin' Jesus!!!"

This Week....

This past week began with a welcome sight: elm seeds by the bus stop!! Here they are....aren't they cute? Bless 'em! They spell the end of the tree allergy season for me. But depending on what tree you're allergic to, it can go on a bit longer. The pollen piles up like cornmeal on the walks, and you can see that, too. The amber, stringy things belong to the oak, which is the #1 eye-itcher here.



This week's view across the street from the bus stop. The walled garden belongs to Dumbarton House, home of the first fiscal officer of the United States (they hadn't even started to call this person "Secretary of the Treasury"). The red flowers are azaleas, and the blue flowers?? Well, they're not bluebells.

Kramerbooks & Afterwords opens for breakfast at 7:30 a.m. during the week (it's open 24 hours on Fridays and Saturdays), and this week, I brought my camera along.

The waiters prepare your beverage orders in this little cubby created when they made a third level for dining at the back of the bookstore. It's a cozy spot for breakfast, especially if you love books and enjoy their company.




This week ended with Lida telling me about her plans to donate her body to science.

"When I die," she said....and she paused..."When I die, did you get that?"
"Yes, when you die...," I said.
"I'm 86, you know."
"Yes, I know...."
"I hate funerals!" she said. "I never go to them...well, I buried my father and I buried my mother and I buried my cousin, but that's it! I can't abide that stuff.
When my father died, my mother and I went to the funeral director, a fat guy with a big diamond on his pinky, and he started leading us around showing us the caskets. Finally, after about 10 minutes, my mother (oh, she was wonderful), said,
'Listen. You've never laid eyes on me before, and I've never laid eyes on you before, so stop telling me how I'm feeling about my husband! Just show me the cheapest one!'
So he led us way to the back of this big showroom, way to a far corner, where there was this plain little casket.
My mother said, 'Is that a CHILD'S casket??' and yes, it was.
Anyway, we got the cheapest adult casket, and when we left the funeral director's, she said,'That was a terrible experience. Nobody should ever have to go through that.' Then she said to me, 'When I die, I want you to bury me orthodox.'
Of course, we never went to temple or kept kosher or did any of those other things that make you crazy, but my mother said, 'Orthodox is the cheapest, and it's also the most dignified.'
So I thought that when she died, I'd have to go find an orthodox rabbi and say, 'Hello, you don't know me (you've never seen me in your temple), but....'
Wouldn't you know, before she died, I met this wonderful man, and when I was telling him about my mother's wishes, he said, 'I am an orthodox rabbi, but I don't practice. I can't do your mother's funeral, but my brother, who is also an orthodox rabbi, can.'
So when my mother died, these two wonderful men took care of the whole thing. She was wrapped in a white shroud and buried in a plain pine box. It was simple and very dignified.
But I'm not even going to have that. I'm donating my body to science. NO FUNERAL!!"

She looked pleased with herself now that she has arranged her exit from this plane. Then she went on to tell me that a friend once told her, "Lida, you must have been born with a lucky star over your head."

"It's true," she said. "The most wonderful things happen to me."



OK, but not just yet, Lida. Let's not have that last most wonderful thing you've arranged for your life just yet.

Props to An African Grandmother!

GLEANER/STEPHEN MACGILLIVRAY PHO

Hearing/loss posted a tribute this week to an African great-grandmother whose life has affected hers profoundly. Hearing/loss graciously has allowed me to post the tribute here, too. I love learning about women who have lived through exceptional challenges and become an inspiration to others. If you click on the link, you'll see a newspaper article about Mama Alice.

I want to introduce you all to someone who has had a profound influence on me and who is one of the most remarkable people I've ever met:

Great-grandmother's journey takes her to STU convocation

Althought the article gives the impression that it was her classmates who coined her nickname of "Mama" Alice, the name predates her University studies by years; it is what she has been known as ever since she came to Canada. She is in every way the spiritual Grandmother of every employee at the local multicultural association, and indeed the whole multicultural community. We all call her our "African Grandmother".

She has had a difficult life, touched by many hardships; and she is the most gentle, kindly, steadfast soul I've had the privilege of meeting to date in my life. She is compassionate - Husband and I saw her sitting outside the grocery store one day and asked if we could give her a ride home. No, she said, her grandson was coming to get her - but wait! She ran inside the store and found an elderly Russian lady who was a friend of hers and who didn't have a ride home, and we ended up chauffering this complete stranger and her groceries home. Like many times we've been with Mama Alice, the most mundane meetings can become adventures.

Meeting a woman like her teaches you that we are all the authors of much of our own fortune, and that whining is for wimps - change what you have the power to change, and quit your bitching.

The achievement is all hers, and hers alone, but we're all so proud of her.

Book Review, Sort Of....

I confess I’ve had it with being called “an older American,” “an ex-nun,” “hearing impaired/late deafened/hard of hearing,” “a divorcee,” or “a fallen-away Catholic.” I am, of course, all of these things, plus a few other choice labels, but none of them defines me.

Robin Roberts—and forgive me, dedicated sports fans and viewers of “Good Morning America,” but I had never heard of her until I saw her new book, From the Heart: Seven Rules to Live By, lying on the “New Nonfiction” table at B. Dalton’s day before yesterday—(pause for breath) Roberts has an interesting Rule #4: “Never Play the Race, Gender, or Any Other Card.”

She opens that chapter by saying that any time we think we can’t succeed because other people won’t let us, we’ve effectively “rolled a big boulder into our path.” Bingo!

I’ve been wondering why the whole notion of audism, the “ism” of the hour here at Gallaudet, bothers me so much. There are a whole bunch of young people here working hard at finding examples of audism from which they suffer now, have suffered in the past, or will suffer in the future. Audism, to this prevailing way of thinking, happens when hearing people dump on you because you are deaf.

Of course, they do. Hearing people, that is. Dump on us. In many ways. There’s no getting around it. Any time any of us deviates from any expected norm, whether it relates to our hearing status, our age, our race, our gender, our health and ability, our nationality, our religion, or whatever, we start getting those looks. And it doesn’t stop with the looks. Nobody denies that.

Roberts talks in the introduction to her book about her parents, who would never let her say, for example, “I didn’t get that job because I’m black.” Her parents never let any of their children complain about not getting anything they wanted out of school or life because they had been discriminated against. They’d say, “Maybe the other person knew more about the job than you did,” or when her sister, blessed with a beautiful voice, was in a school chorus and was sure, when she wasn’t picked for a special singing group, that it was because she was black, her mother said, “Maybe they wanted a different kind of voice—an alto or a soprano or just someone that fit in better with their plans.” Her parents instilled in them the importance of doing their best in whatever they were doing—at school or at home—and of being gracious, no matter what.

Roberts went on to become the first black woman sportscaster on ESPN—a daunting job for a woman, whatever her race. But she loves sports and then, later, news and is passionate about them. She says she has been in sports broadcasting for many years but never worked a day. She enjoys her job so much it doesn’t feel like work.

For deaf students to spend their precious youthful energy trying to combat audism is tragic. It’s a waste of time. The book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne tells us that whatever you focus on grows. (It doesn't matter if the focus is negative or positive--Want to stay fat? Keep saying "I hate being fat.") Deaf and hard of hearing students need to pour their hearts into learning and growing and having fun. No matter who you are or whatever life has thrown in your path, you can achieve unbelievable things with your life. Just don’t waste your precious minutes on this planet feeling sorry for yourself or bemoaning your victimhood or hating hearing people because they don’t understand. Roberts also tells us in the chapter on Rule #4 to do our best to think well of other people. (Well, I can think of a few people that are a real challenge to think well of, especially on the national scene, but it's good advice.) It's easy enough not to think well of others, at times, but it doesn't do us any good.

Actually, audism works both ways. The Deaf community has been the only place where I’ve ever run into roadblocks on a consistent basis because I am deaf. Why? Because I can talk. They think I’m hearing. And I’m a lousy signer to boot. I don’t fit the norm. Plus I can be a battleaxe of the first water, although I'm pretty much that way whether I'm dealing with hearing or with deaf people. No discrimination here! Equal opportunity to the core!!

I wanted to come to Gallaudet long before I actually did. The hearing person interviewing me for a deaf program (not at Gallaudet) was not impressed with a nonsigning deaf housewife with four small kids, so he rejected my application. Long story short, I got to Gallaudet, all right, but not until 16 years later. By then I could sign a bit, and I'd also acquired a profession that Gallaudet just happened to need at that very moment.

Do I hate the person who rejected me so long ago? Nope. The only thing about him that ever gave me pause is that after I got to Gallaudet, he was there, too. I worked in the office next to his, and his had a fireplace! Audism, pure and simple....