I've discovered the up-side of losing my hearing. It's music. More specifically, it's not being able to hear most of the appalling gloop being pumped out in every bar, shop, lift and public space I enter. It's particularly bad at Christmas - 90% of secular Christmas music is unlistenable. Most of the religious stuff is bad too, and all of it, well, ideologically unsound, as Dan said after singing all 12 verses of The First Nowell at a carol concert the other day.
Me, I'm fine. I'm catching only one in every six words spoken. That goes down to one in ten sung words, and nothing in the high and very low end. It's just a drone. This is, obviously, a crushing blow normally, especially as I have many, many thousands of CDs and vinyl records in my home, but I'll live with it over the Christmas period. No Cliff Richard. No Little Drummer Boy. No Paul McCartney, no Frank, Bing or whoever. Peace, perfect peace.
Deafness is also making everybody's conversations sound fascinating. Catching one word in a sentence makes me feel like I'm missing out on all sorts of interesting things, when in fact they're talking about marking and other exciting and really wild things.
4 comments:
I can't believe you're still deaf! Sure you don't have an infection going on still?
It's the inflammation - can't hear until that dies down and there's an actual canal again! Infuriating!
Just be grateful to be temporarily deaf, it must be so infuriating being actually permenantly deaf. Ben often says he can hear bits of a song but not much basically just the beat. It is really funny though when he makes up his own words to the song...some of the things that he has come out with through mishearing have really made me laugh. Although in all seriousness going out with someone who is deaf has really made me appreciate my own hearing. It is the little things like listening to music, or being able to have a conversation in a busy place or being able to answer when someone asks for directions that I would miss the most If I suffered with deafness. I see Ben deal with this everyday, and it makes me sad sometimes, the fact that people may think him rude or ignorant for not replying to them. It is fustrating sometimes when I have to repeat myself over and over but then I think whatever im feeling then surely he must be feeling it 100 times over. And as for university then I can not imagine what it would be like to just sit in a lecture for an hour maybe two without a virtual clue of what the lecturer is saying, I can't imagine anything more boring or soul destroying. I have full admiration for deaf people and hard of hearing and I am so proud of Ben. I hope your hearing recovers soon. I would recomend watching the t.v with subtitles, but to be honest they are rubbish and are either too fast or too slow.
Thanks Lauren. It's temporary (I hope), which lessens my grumpiness a bit, but it has increased my respect for Ben and others who cope with much more, for ever…
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