Good article. On super-noticing.

Mr Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important! Or that they’re already doing it. It’s kind of like breathing—we’re not usually that aware of it. It’s much easier to recognize more “outbound” activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important—it’s really where everything begins. There’s a funny Zen saying about that: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

I do believe that anyone who acquires sign language has this ability—to super notice, because we can communicate exclusively with our facial expressions and hands, with no sound.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about human consciousness and our existence, as well as spirituality and religions. I finally understood why people have religions, to explain our existence, our purpose and eventually, our death. That is the fact of life. Doesn’t get any simpler than that.

I believe that we come out of nothingness, which is actually some kind of magic like the birth of universe, by the infusion of one sperm and one egg. A man and woman. As we grow to become adults and getting to our prime, we procreate. Babies are born and the cycle goes on. Till we grow old and can no longer function and then drifts back into nothingness, become unconscious but with our spirit, we’ll be somewhere, wherever we want to be, with our families or loved ones. I support the first amendment, by the freedom of religion that anyone can believe in whatever they like to, just as long as it doesn’t result into violence and compromise one’s life. If they want to believe they were a cockroach or something, there’s nothing wrong with that either.

Because in the end, we all drift into nothingness but worry not, we all mean somebody to someone.

Link

“Do profoundly deaf people who learn to talk have a voice in their head?”
– Heather & Allen Exby

“My best answer to this,” Hauser wrote, “is that the brain has a special capacity to develop phonological representations, even when it does not have auditory input. The representations might be dramatically different from what hearing individuals hear. Nevertheless, they function in the mind as ‘sounds.’” Deaf schizophrenics, he continued, have auditory hallucinations, and blind schizophrenics have visual ones.

This is a good link. I think thoughts are just what they are, thoughts. They don’t really exist physically but from our minds and apparently, 99% of them express theirs phonologically while we express with our hands visually in Sign.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how things are and why they come like that in life. One example of that is our thoughts. Where do our thoughts come from? Sure, it’s in the brain but exactly how they are manufactured? I’ve read that we are capable of having approx. 50,000 thoughts a day. 50,000 thoughts a day! That explains why it’s important for people to communicate, otherwise, our thoughts will go on a rampage, wondering what our friends, families are up to. I now understand why my parents keep worrying about me.

Let me share thoughts that I’m thinking right now in the next 10 seconds.

I need to do my weekly snippets
why am I even typing this post on thoughts!
I wanna buy that honda element
Super Bowl this weekend!
Disneyland next week! (Google trip)
I need to drink more water and exercise.
I need to take a break from being on computers almost 24/7
what will we be like in 5 years, 10 years?
what is my purpose on this earth?

I probably could keep doing that till I get to the 100th thought. Probably won’t be too interesting, I’m afraid.

Since I can’t record my voice on a tape, this blogging is like a recorder of my thoughts, trying to decipher what I’m thinking, learning, and writing allows me to break down information that I’m getting through my eyes. Letter by letter. Bytes by bytes. (8 bits equals one character, btw). When I’m reading something, somehow, I feel fortunate enough to be able to understand it. I’ve never thought that I would be reading a person’s post and then I found out that he graduated from Harvard University or MIT. I thought those guys were too good for me and that I wouldn’t able to understand any of it. But I do, although maybe not to the full depth but I can get the sense of what point they’re trying to make and the application of it. Granted, my writing won’t become as eloquent or pretty as theirs but it’s good enough to express some of my 50,000 thoughts a day.

:-)

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. :-)

So, I’m free from work and on a much needed vacation that shall last for 12 days. Gonna be coming home to spend time with my parents and grandmother—-just four of us. The rest of everybody else is either buried or a distance too far except for one relative. That relative is my uncle, my mom’s only brother. Which is one of the big disappointments that my mom has, as she and her brother were never close. You can probably link that to a communication barrier since my mom is deaf and he isn’t. But that’s still no excuse. Everybody can learn sign language—-don’t have to be equally fluent but just enough to carry a conversational mode—-so it shouldn’t matter. With that, I’m also disappointed with my uncle. Anyway, with just four of us, it reminds me of one funny movie called My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It has that scene where everybody’s at the wedding in a chapel and the aisle of the groom is all empty except for his parents and maybe some relatives. When I saw that scene, it reminded exactly of us and if I ever got married, I think we’d be like that, with the front row barely filled. In case you’re wondering about my dad’s, he is an only child just like me and we’re also born in the same digit year. He was born in 1951 and me in 1981. We graduated in the same digit year too—-1969 and 1999. So, it’s always easy to remember my dad’s age, just add thirty years.

Christmas is my mom’s favorite holiday of all and that’s because I got adopted and came abroad on December 22nd. My mom said it’s the best gift she could have and every year we get to celebrate Christmas together, it’s a bonus. I also ought know better not to ever miss this holiday because I may want to be somewhere else like snowboarding in Colorado with my buddies since Illinois only has bunny hills. My mom would be so heart broken and has said it wouldn’t be Christmas if I didn’t come. (another movie popped in my head, the movie called I’ll be home for Christmas with Jonathan Taylor Thomas, as his family demands him to be home.) Since I’m an only child, it’s true that I get all the gifts any child could dream of, even though I’ve told my parents many times that there is NO need for those but they insisted. I realize my parents wanted to show their love in the most way they can. I’m just grateful to be home with my parents and spend some quality time together. I feel that money spent on expensive gifts could be better invested toward something else like stocks, real estate or even vacation getaways for memories. I would like that very much. Maybe I should discuss this with my parents but a little uncomfortable trying to tell them what they should do with their money.

Today’s December 22nd. I’m grateful for what I have and will never to take things for granted. Indeed, I’m blessed. Mom and Dad, I’m looking forward to come home.