Another repost. This is probably one of my favorite posts I wrote.

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If there could be one thing I’m envious of hearing people, other than being able to talk on phone and enjoy music, it’s to eavesdrop other people’s conversations. Like when I’m in the airport, waiting for my flight in a hub, I get curious what they are saying. Or at a bookstore and I’d pretend I’m reading a book but actually eavesdropping someone’s conversation. I suspect this is how hearing people become well-versed in English while we deaf people have to rely on a lot of reading to catch up.

Today, I went to Barnes and Noble bookstore to use up my giftcard someone gave me for my birthday. I bought this book titled “Neither here and there.” by Bill Bryson, about his travel experience in Europe. Wow, I really want to go to Europe so badly. Bill Byson is definitely my favorite author; something about his writing that totally captivates me and how much I can relate to his thoughts. As I was reading, I froze upon this paragraph and made me wonder that perhaps it’s not so bad I cannot eavesdrop people’s conversations.

“When I told friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said, “Oh, you must speak a lot of languages.”

“Why, no,” I would reply with a certain pride, “only English,” and they would look at me as if I were foolish or crazy. But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”

Except mine is a lifetime on a series of interesting guesses. :-)

Thanks to a nap I recently took, approximately from 5 pm to 7 pm, I couldn’t sleep despite the fact I finished reading a new book I started two days ago, Freakonomics, which is a fascinating book btw. Thanks to my little friend in my head, I thought about a few things and thought I’d write a few words about what it’s like to be a Deaf person.

A good start to this would be to ask, “how did I become deaf?” Well, pathologically, the cause is unknown but it is possibly hereditary because I was born deaf, and so was my older sister. However, we’re the only ones who are deaf in our family. So, I’ve been deaf since I was born. Ironically enough, it’s my deafness that has brought me here in America. Otherwise, I’d be still in Korea with my family and probably would be working on some rice farm or studying to become a priest. My sister’s husband is a priest, so to speak. I don’t know which is more blessing: being deaf and here in America or being hearing and stay with the family in Korea. Either way, I’m happy with who I am and where I ended up in.

Now, onto being a Deaf person, it annoys the hell out of me when a hearing person says “Oh, I wish I could be deaf like you, so I don’t have to be bothered by all those noises or having to hear those awful things.” Bull$hit. That is like telling a blind person that you wish you’re blind so you don’t see awful things (would you say porn is an awful thing to see?) on TV. I’m not gonna pretend/lie here and say that I embrace every moment of being Deaf or that it’s the best thing ever happened to me. I’m telling you right now, being deaf is HARD and if I were to be hearing, I have no doubts I’d be a lot different person than I am now. But again, I do not know if I’m actually better off being Deaf or hearing. I might end up being a drug lord, being homeless on the street or getting killed in Iraq (people with hearing loss can’t serve in army). I could be anything else in such a way that I won’t find myself writing this entry.

Since Deaf people only account less than 1% of the entire U.S. population, Deaf world is a lot like a high school except it’s a lot smaller. We keep bumping each other and everyone knows who f*cked whom. It sucks when you’re trying to date someone; that someone is also your ex-girlfriend’s best friend or roommate. And when you do that, everyone back-stab you and call you a player. Much unlike Hearing world where you could meet a person at a bar, get some alcohol going, having a good time and you both decide to have a little extra fun and spend a night together. The next morning, you may realize it wasn’t what you thought it’d be, you simply walk out and never expect to see her/him again. Case closed. Unfortunately, that isn’t so with the Deaf world.

I take the metro to work everyday so it’s not uncommon when tourists come up at me and ask where the f*ck are they or where they’re supposed to go. Depends on my mood, I may act nice and try to lip-read, which I guess more than I actually lip-read, their mouths. It looks like they want to go to the Washington monument or Union Station, whatever. But admittedly, most of the time, I simply point to my ear and shake my head as to say “sorry, I’m deaf and can’t understand what you say.” Nothing harm, right? Except when tourists happen to be a hot-looking lady in a short shorts with long legs. I’d be more than obliged to be her tour guide and if she’s visiting just for the weekend, perfect. I can show her around the city and she’d be out of my sight by Sunday. (Think of Adam Sandler in “The first 50 dates” with Drew Barrymore).

Food. I can’t really customize my meal as much as a hearing person can. “Hey waiter, this isn’t what I want. I said no condiments on my burger but I want a Swiss cheese and onions. And this is overcooked; I want mine medium-well. Oh, these buns are overburned too.” Or whatever the hell like that. I suppose I could write on some napkin to tell him what I want but he’d still f*ck it up and got my order wrong. So I just mouth, “everything” and when I get the burger, I have to customize it with my fingers or spitting it out of my mouth barbarically. If I’m allergic to something, God bless me.

So, that’s what I have to deal by being Deaf. First of all, you may notice why I keep using capital D, instead of just deaf. Well, you know, being Deaf doesn’t simply mean you cannot hear and still be able to function within the hearing world as if there’s a perfect harmony between us. When you cannot hear a f*cking word since you were born, you perceive the world differently. You learn the language differently. You can only imagine the sounds but never actually hear it. You end up interacting with similar people, not those who could hear. When you have more than one generation who’s also Deaf, the pattern continues and gradually becomes into this world we all have come to know—the Deaf world. We’re not just deaf; we’re Deaf. When we say that, we don’t mean we’re perfect; we all have shortcomings like everybody else and we dream what it’d be like to be a hearing one day, as much as you’d dream abt being a Spider-man, the next U.S. President, or even Bill Gates the Geek. But don’t ever tell us you wish you’re deaf.

Thought I’d repost this to see if deafread.com will pick it up.

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Who could have thought that in one day, closed captioning would “power” Google’s search engine as the source for searching through videos? Google recently introduced Google Video as a means to search through TV programming and used closed captioning (CC) for indexing. What? Google uses closed captioning!? This may appear insignificant to you who don’t have to set on CC to understand the shows, but ever since TV was created, deaf people were all but stuck to watch TV as if people were puppets behind the glass and they had to rely on their imagination to assume what was going on in the shows. (thus, some deaf people have bad-assuming habits.) Finally in 1971, the closed captioning was finally born behind the glass in the line 21 of the vertical blinking interval (VBI) and required a special decoder since hearing people didn’t want to be bothered with the “annoying” black/white lines invading precious space on their televisions.

In partnership between ABC and NBC, they gave a preview to the deaf audience by captioning “The Mob Squad.” Since it was only a preview, it cost them money to provide such a service, and the Federal Government (Dept. of Education and FCC) realized they had to get involved; otherwise, this project would be dead. So, they gave a push to this project and this “experiment” was finally done. Who knew how many petitions and letters had to be done to get the CC into the TVs?

It wasn’t till 8 years later before the first closed captioning was finally broadcast across the U.S. and that was on The ABC Sunday Night Movie, The Wonderful World of Disney (NBC), and Masterpiece Theatre (PBS). Remember the decoders I just mentioned above? Till 1992, only about 400,000 decoders were sold and the gigantic TV networks saw no reason to keep captioning their shows. Without the government’s intervention, CC would have simply gone extinct and we Deaf people would be back to be watching Tom & Jerry than Law & Order ‘cuz it’d give a better comprehension and less assumption work.

So, in 1996, the Congress passed the law to require CC be available on all televisions. (By then, the CC decoder had shrunk to the size of a chip and it didn’t cost manufacturers much to install a decoder chip inside tvs.) Even to this day, not every show is captioned but we have come far since 1980 when only 15 hours a week were captioned and several close encounters with the death of CC due to money talks.

There you have it, a short bit of history on the closed captioning and you can see why somebody like myself is very delighted to see something like Google that is indexing CC as the source for TV information. All of a sudden, it’s not so insignificant anymore and it’s accessible to the millions of people around the world who watch TV, not to the Deaf people only.

Now, TV networks see a reason to keep captioning their shows ‘cuz they know that people will be searching through Google Video, and the more captioning there is, the more likely those people will be led back to the network that provides the captioning. That is a good thing for TV networks. Finally, after 25 years since the first captioning, we may see 100% captioning on all shows and you can say thanks to Google.

**update: a law was just passed that TV shows not for profits don’t have to provide captioning.

Despite being a man, I’m rather conscious of my own hygiene. I try to shower everyday and wash from my ears to feet. I’d try different shampoo products, preferably the ones that give volume to my hair since my hair foliage must have some Pennzoil in them and my hair becomes very oily within a day or so. So that’s why I gotta shower often to wash and de-oily my hair. I’ve been using Pantene Sheer Volume two-in-one shampoo + conditioner. It’s pretty good, does give my hair to be “poofy” and more importantly, saves the heck of a lot of time by combining two in one. :-D

Now, about my feet. I was sitting in my chair and sometimes I’d move my leg up onto the chair and sort of rest on my knee with my left arm. Well, that’s when I started to smell my foot. You know, our nose is pretty powerful and can detect a lot of things like I read about this guy who works at NASA and his job is to smell everything in the space shuttle prior to the launch to detect anything that might have a chemical leak. Imagine that? A nose-smeller. Google it up, I’m not kidding you.

When I smelled my foot, I thought I smelled something distinctive and interesting. It’s like those scent you know you cannot smell anywhere else. So I smelled my feet more closely and tried to think of anything that might resemble the smell. Well, I couldn’t think of one. Nothing quite smells like it.

Now, don’t get grossed out. Remember, I shower everyday so I wash my feet as well. It doesn’t have this body odor that is found in men’s locker and doesn’t really have a smell that would be considered awful. It’s just distinctive and strangely unique. It’s also addicting because when I smell it, the more I want to smell it again. Ha, I think this post will make me the weirdest guy in the entire blogosphere. Well, that’s just me.

Just testing to see how this gets blogged through gmail.

I’m thrilled that Chicago Bears won in overtime over Seattle Seahawks.
Field goals are so important in the playoffs. The Bears have a good one in
Robbie Gould but Grossman’s got to play better, especially his
decision-making like taking sacks or throwing away the ball instead of being
forced to throw or run.

Looks like I might have gotten a cold as it’s been floating around here
lately—my co-workers, roommates, and friends. I ate a soup of kimchi
noodles to help “spice” down my sore throat. Ha. Research has shown that
kimchi does have health benefits to it. See if it will help and get away from being drenched in a cold, ha.

That was a nice day at the beach. :-)

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Isn’t that awesome? My nickname!
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That’s what I called a bootylicious page!
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As for now, I own three cars under my name—Subaru, Honda, and BMW. Yikes. I’m becoming like a junkyard guy now. So that’s why tomorrow morning, I’m gonna clean and fix up the BMW a bit, putting some fresh mags with alloy wheel insurance making it look clean and nice. Then park the car at my uncle’s workplace where he said it will be sold within a week, guaranteed. So we’ll see about that.

Then in the afternoon, I gotta pick up my friend at the airport, and zoom to Gallaudet (where his dorm is) to watch NFL playoffs games and have some beers and Chinese food. It should be a good time especially with my WRX :-)

Just a little quickie post here to keep the blog streak going. As seen by the picture below, I got the WRX! It’s like a dream come true to own the car. I’ve been hearing/reading about WRX ever since they came out in 2002 and was widely known for their World Rally Championship success. Now that I own one, I gotta learn how to drive like one. Making U-turns, drifting, heel-braking. I’m gonna swap uppipe, downpipe, and exhaust because the factory-made pipes have catalyst converters in them, slowing down the air flow. Man, I’m so excited. This is how you enjoy life!

This video is probably why I wanted the car. :-)

More Car Videos

Man this is so awesome!
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Wisp resort in West Virginia has gotten seven inches of fresh snow! I. must. go!

Time to get my snowboarding equipment loaded. :-D

That’s the final score of the game at the Verizon Center I got back from. It’s my first time watching Chicago Bulls play against the Wizards. Ofc, I was disappointed to see the Bulls lose but it was cool to watch them play in front of my eyes instead of a tube. It was pretty amazing to see how reliable they can knock down baskets during warm-ups, even Ben Wallace too. The best shooter has to be Gilbert Arenas of the Wizards. It’s unbelievable how he can get off a shot and he has a feather-like touch to the ball that gets him nothing but the net. He just brings up the ball and snap his wrist and it’s gonna be in. Ben Gordon was also awesome but it’s too bad that he is pretty short at like 6’1”. He’d be much more lethal if he was taller like Dwayne Wade.

My friend, William Tai, was the one who got tickets for me. He got them pretty cheap because they were employee discount tickets and we sat in the section 219, not too bad, better than the upper section. It was a college night on Wednesday so there were lots of kids sitting in the upper level with a few visible empty seats. He said he loves going to the Verizon center so that’s cool. Now I know who to tag with.

It was cool to see Ben Wallace too. His body is made of irons and he looks more like a football tight end than he is a basketball player. He has quick hands, anticipate rebounds well and can move like a guard. I got a laugh from watching poor Mike Sweetney, number 50. He has the widest body on the floor and he does possess some post moves and I feel if he really works hard to lose some fat, maintain his weight, and become more mobile, he’d make a terrific player that would give a post presence to his team. There’s a reason why he is a professional in the first place.

After watching them play on the floor, it’s a little hard to imagine that they’re earning millions of dollars to play the sport and have us as fans to come watch them play. In the purest sense, they are just like us who enjoy playing basketball and they just so happen to be bigger, taller and faster. They look like everyone else and it’s the media that makes them look larger than life. I think the best part about going to games is not to witness them in person but to hang out with your friends, have some beers, eat juicy burgers, and do some yelling/booing to support your favorite team. That’s truly it’s all about.

-354 days to go.