Tag Archives: communication

Communicating Block

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Posted by maxporter on April 22, 2011 – 3:23 PM
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Recently, I’ve been having a bit of a writers’ block. Now, I’m not talking about having problems coming up with story ideas or anything like that – I don’t really care about writing stories anymore. The problem is that I’m having issues stringing together ideas in a way that is pleasing to read. To be honest, it’s a little scary.

I usually feel comfortable in my ability to put together words in the English language to create sentences that flow nicely. I enjoy written English and I usually am able to reflect that in my own writing. Even before I listened to music, my writing style had a pretty distinct cadence to it. But the loss of musicality in my writing is not what scares me. No, what scares me the most is the fact that this is usually the form of communication that I feel the most comfortable with.

A large part of being deaf is choosing how to communicate.1 When I want to communicate, I basically have four choices:

  • ASL. My ASL skills aren’t so great – I can understand my interpreters, but I often have to speak English to them in order to communicate with them. Besides, I don’t know any Deaf people around me who speak ASL. I feel that if I were immersed in a Deaf environment again, I’d pick it up again, no problem. But I don’t have access to that right now.
  • Spoken English. My spoken English is okay. When I was a child, my speech was so unclear that my own parents didn’t even understand what I was saying. After twelve years of speech therapy with one of the the most wonderful and amazing human beings to ever exist in the entire world, I attained a speaking style that was more or less understandable. But I haven’t been to speech therapy since I graduated high school in 2006 because I ended up with a terribly queerphobic speech therapist. That’s probably another story for another post. Since 2006, my voice has changed a lot and I have adopted certain speaking patterns – for instance, I don’t speak ‘proper’ English all the time whereas I used to care a lot more about grammar. (Today, I said, “I don’t got no change on me.” My fifteen-year-old self would have been appalled.) And I’ve taken to mumbling/whispering, which I know is a really bad habit, but I just don’t feel confident in my spoken English.
  • Manual Communication. I still feel extremely comfortable with MC. It isn’t a language – it’s simply a visual representation of English. But MC plus reading books is how I acquired language in the first place, and it’s still a tool that I feel very comfortable with. However, the problem is that nobody uses it. It’s an extremely rare form of communication. I can count the number of times on one hand that I have been around non-family members that use it. Hell, I’m not even giving you guys the real name of the tool because that’d make it too easy to identify me.
  • Written English. Written English – or, to be more specific, typed English, since my handwriting isn’t super awesome – has historically been the form of communication that I’ve felt most comfortable with. All throughout school, I never spoke in my classes. I simply let my essays speak for themselves rather than trying to participate in a class discussion. This is the largest reason that I felt most comfortable communicating with others online – I am kind of embarrassed to admit this today, but I went through a period in my life where I would communicate with people in the same house – the same room, even – by using instant messaging.2

I’m not sure why I’m having such a difficult time putting together words lately. But it’s really annoying to feel so stymied. I just don’t feel like I can communicate my ideas clearly right now.

Have you ever had a writers’ block, or felt tongue-tied, or felt otherwise inhibited in terms of communication? How did you deal with it?

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  1. Or having others make that choice for you. [↩]
  2. Unfortunately, most people put none of their personality in their written English and depended on their body language to convey their meaning, so it ended up being a trade-off. [↩]
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Planning Ahead

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Posted by maxporter on March 21, 2011 – 12:02 AM
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A large portion of my life as a deaf individual within a hearing world involves planning ahead. When I thought about it, I realized a central part of my college experience is that it requires a unique level of planning ahead that most people don’t have to worry about. For example, today I was telling someone that I can’t skip classes at the last minute because I have interpreters.

I feel that that requires a bit of explanation. First of all, I really like both of my interpreters this semester as human beings, and I know that they both commute a pretty long distance to get to my school. So, for one thing, I’d feel really shitty if they commuted such a long way and then found that I wasn’t there. I mean, come on.

Second of all, my school would get billed anyway if I didn’t show up. I once worked at my school’s disability center, so I got to see the numbers. Where I am, it costs between $40-$60 to hire an interpreter for an hour, and you have to pay for a minimum of two hours. That means I’d cost the school $80-$120 at a minimum. The interpreting agency requires that you must tell them a week in advance about cancellations if you want to avoid a bill.
Emergencies happen, of course, but it means that I can’t just skip class because it’s a beautiful day and I want to stay outside.

I’m a senior in college. Let’s get real here – I’m not gonna go to every single class. I mean, come on. So, in the end, what happens is that I skip a class sometimes to take a break from things. I always plan out my absence at least a week in advance. I email my access coordinator to say, “Hey, I can’t make it to class on [insert date],” then I do something productive with my time like taking a trip to see a friend. In the end, planning out my absences helps me feel that I got the most value out of skipping class.

Another example is that, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. I’m not yet ready for graduate school, though it’s a possibility, and I know for sure that I want to live in the mountains again – I grew up in the Rockies, so I fucking miss having mountains around me. But I don’t know if I want to live in Seattle, Portland, Montana, Northern California, Colorado, or… there’s so many choices, really! As a result, I’ve been tossing around the idea of bumming around on the West coast. Basically, I want to keep moving until I find a place that makes me say, “Hey, I could live here.”

Some of my very favorite people in the world have bummed around. So when I look at their bumming-around experiences, all of them basically go like this: “Save up some money, hop in my car, drive until I find a place to stop, get a temporary job or busk to get some extra cash, get out of there, do the whole thing again.” I realize it doesn’t sound great to everyone, but it sounds like a fun adventure to me.

The problem, though, is that I freeze up at the “getting a job” stage. I mean, when I think of bumming-around friendly jobs, I think of jobs that are temporary and have a high turnover rate. That, in turn, leads me to think of things like waitressing, retail, fast food, and working as a barista.

Here’s the problem, though: Many of those jobs involve communicating with the public, especially the ones that pay relatively higher. That’s what stops me. For instance, I imagine myself trying to take orders at a coffeeshop while the espresso machine grinds in the background. In my head, I end up asking the customer to repeat him or herself about ten million times, and the customer gets really upset and then my manager gets upset. It’s not a good scenario.

It’s not entirely about money, though I do admit I get anxious when I don’t have a steady stream of income and that it’s not exactly the best economy to go bumming about in. But you see, I’m not the type who can just live off of his savings forever – I have to feel like I’m giving back to society in some form. I have this strong desire to help others; it’s what propels me through life. When I can’t do something as simple as giving people their food because of the way that this society is structured, that bums me out sometimes.

But then, I remember: it’s simply a matter of planning ahead! Just like I have to plan in advance for something as simple as skipping a stupid core class, I just have to apply a little bit of thought to this “moving around until I find a place I want to live” idea. I could, for example, find a four-month internship with a stipend centered around helping homeless queer youth in Portland. Or I could become a ski instructor. Or I could actively seek out d/Deaf communities as a starting point and work from there. Or… well, I don’t know. It’s a story in progress. Stay tuned, guys.

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Why I Dislike Holiday Music

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Posted by maxporter on December 2, 2010 – 12:02 AM
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Closeup of Christmas ornament and music

Closeup of Christmas ornament and music

I have a pretty neutral opinion on holiday music as a genre. I don’t find it irritating or cheerful. I wouldn’t listen to it in private, but it sounds alright to me. I don’t mind sitting on my couch at home listening to my mom’s Christmas music CD.

No, the problem is simply that a lot of holiday music is at a perfect frequency to cancel out all other sounds, including speaking. Therefore, when holiday music is on, it’s all that I can hear. In the past, this has led to some pretty sucky situations because people play it in public pretty frequently.

One of the more notable incidents that occurred in the past was the time that I volunteered at a disabled seniors’ nursing home during Thanksgiving. We were in charge of things like handing out dishes, cleanup, and, if appropriate, feeding people. Everything was going okay – until they turned on the music. All of a sudden, I couldn’t hear anything that people said. So someone would ask me to get them more potatoes or something and I had to ask them to repeat themselves a million times. It was a pretty damn stressful situation for everybody involved.

More recently, I was trying to listen to my grandmother. She lives in a nursing home and speaks very softly because she’s too weak to speak loudly anymore. It was a difficult task under any circumstance, but I couldn’t do it when holiday music was playing.

So, yeah, I’ve ended up disliking holiday music. And, come to think of it, it’s mostly oldies holiday music. I have no idea why this frequency-canceling happens, to be honest. If one of you guys happen to be a music theory geek, I’d be interested in hearing your theories.

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When fluent communication =/= home

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Posted by maxporter on November 27, 2010 – 12:02 AM
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A few days ago, in A Definition of Home, I defined home like so:

Many people that I know feel most comfortable within a community of like minds, but I’ve decided that I personally feel at home wherever communication is fluent.

Well, I just realized that that’s not 100% true. One of the things that I really like about blogging is the fact that you can go back and say, “Hey, actually…” a lot more easily than other forms of writing.

Upon thinking about it, I remembered my time at a fundamentalist Christian school. Everybody in my grade knew how to use MC and many of my teachers knew it too. People would frequently gather into little clumps and speak verbally, but my best friends were usually good about making sure that I understood what they were saying. So, according to my previous definition, I should have felt at home, right?

As it turns out, the answer is: “hell no.”

When I think back to that time, the teacher who was most diligent about using MC was also the most screwed-up of the bunch. I don’t really want to go into it all in such a public space, but let’s just say that he was inappropriately fond of some of the children, would make fun of the ones that he didn’t like, and was fired in the end. So, technically, in this case, communication was fluent, but I think that my teacher had sadistic intentions when he picked up MC because I was one of the kids he teased most. The fact that he learned MC in order to better communicate to me just facilitated his mistreatment of me, which is pretty damn fucked up if you think about it.

As a result, I’m gonna have to revise my definition of home slightly. Thinking about it, respect is a really important component. I don’t care if I’m in a community of like minds as long as everyone respects each other. Communication also doesn’t have to be 100% fluent, as long as people respect each other enough to work through whatever communication barriers arise. It’s pretty rare to find people who respect each other as equal human beings, so I guess that that’s one of the most important criteria I have for building a home. Everything else can be built around a foundation of respect.

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Deaf camp: a home

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Posted by maxporter on November 25, 2010 – 12:02 AM
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In yesterday’s post about finding a home, I briefly alluded to Deaf camp.

So I figured, I’ll elaborate a little bit on that.

When I was eight years old, I began to go to a deaf summer camp. At the time, I didn’t know ASL. I knew a few signs like “water,” “thank you,” and “please,” but I definitely was not fluent. This is because, when my parents figured out that I was deaf, they taught me some signs but soon realized that they didn’t feel able to teach me a language that they did not know. So they switched to another method of manual communication (which I’m calling MC) to teach me English.

Despite the fact that I didn’t know ASL, the camp welcomed me with open arms. Their philosophy was to welcome all deaf children from all backgrounds: they accepted a wide range of communication modes, from kids who were 100% oral and didn’t know ASL to kids who only communicated in ASL and rarely used English in any form.

This diversity with regards to communication modes is one reason why I felt at home. If a communication barrier came up, we’d just keep trying until we found a combination that worked. Sure, there were some mean kids, like the kid who called me ‘stupid’ because I didn’t sign fluently, but most people truly believed in acceptance.

The first year I went, one of the staff members knew MC, so she was able to translate things for me. The next year, nobody knew MC at all. I loved the camp so much, though, that I kept going back every year. Over the course of the years, I gradually picked up a fair amount of ASL. I could understand the more elaborate ASL stories and used some idioms.1 I mostly befriended staff members or children who also came from an oral background, but I also made several friends with kids from deaf schools who didn’t feel comfortable speaking English.

The diversity went beyond the different approaches to deafness, though. It was not in a very diverse region: the region is predominantly inhabited by affluent white heterosexual Christians. The staff and the campers were a totally different story than the surroundings, though. While I was there, I met people from all walks of life. I really appreciated having that diversity of thought combined with the fluency of communication.

To this day, some of my fondest memories come from that camp.

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  1. I’ve unfortunately become rusty in ASL. [↩]
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A Definition of Home

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Posted by maxporter on November 24, 2010 – 12:02 AM
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I’ve moved around a lot in my life, so I sometimes struggle with the idea of home. Where is my true home? Many people that I know feel most comfortable within a community of like minds, but I’ve decided that I personally feel at home wherever communication is fluent.

I grew up using a rather obscure method of manual communication. You’ll notice that I don’t even name it – that’s because so few people use it that I’d be easily identifiable if I named it. From here on I’ll just call it MC.

My family uses a blend of MC and straight-up speaking to communicate with me, so when I talk with my family, I can understand them completely. It’s most obvious with my younger sister. She’s the only person who’s ever been able to completely understand me fluently from the start and vice-versa – my parents weren’t very good at MC when I was a kid, and my speech or handwriting weren’t very good. So, even though my sister and I are total polar opposites in almost every respect, including appearance, we get along really well. We can communicate easily on a practical level due to MC and we just understand each other instantly because we’re siblings.

Speaking and signing are both things that I learned comparatively late in life. I feel comfortable with both modes of communication at this point, but MC still feels more like my native tongue. That’s not really the right phrase because MC is a visual representation of spoken language rather than a true language1 but I still feel that way.

I’ve felt at home in other places – with my translators who use MC, in Deaf camp, within a trio of queer women (one of whom learned how to use MC), and so forth. But those have come and gone, so my family has probably been the most constant source of fluent communication throughout my life. So, even though my family members currently live in a place with completely unfamiliar flora and fauna, I still feel at home with them. I feel rather fortunate to be so close to my family when many people that I know aren’t.

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  1. Unlike most other modes of manual communication that hearing people have created, though, it doesn’t try to rearrange ASL signs into English grammar. [↩]
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Deaf Cinema

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Posted by maxporter on October 29, 2010 – 7:16 PM
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I recently discovered this lecture from TEDxIslay. It is in ASL and is captioned.

Source on Youtube. Click over there for a transcript.

I really liked how Betts looks at Hearing film theory and constantly questions it – he is experimenting to find alternatives to these rules that just do not work. In my opinion, this is exactly what the future of filmmaking looks like – minorities looking at the established rules and saying, “Hey, this isn’t how I see the world; I should do this instead to represent my world better.”

For example, his idea to use ASL scripts just blew my mind. Also, one of my favorite parts of this lecture is the clip from the film that he created using a steadicam with dynamic captions at ~15:35. That is definitely the type of film I would want to watch.

My personal experience diverges from Betts’s a little bit – for example, un-captioned movies just bore me to tears, even if they are pretty. It’s not just that I need a story to watch a film – I love experimental films that don’t have stories. No, for me, it’s frustrating to watch a bunch of Hearing people talk without understanding them, because that is exactly what I do in everyday life.

But, on the other hand, when I think about the type of movies I like, a good deal of them are pretty fluid, just like how Betts describes – instead of cutting back and forth between shot / reaction shot, they just flow. A good example of this is Elephant by Gus Van Sant – I think they use a steadicam to film pretty much everything. I’m not sure if this is because I’m deaf or if this is just some weird aesthetic quirk of mine. Betts ties it to Deafness, which I find interesting.

Anyway, I’m excited for the future of Deaf cinema and I can’t wait to see what people come up with.

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