#2019 #yearinreview #eldercare #assistedliving #transition #americansignlanguage #ASL #signlanguage #patreon #developmentaleditor #selfpublishing #smallpress #rarebooks #dealer #thc #legalmarijuana #certification #topten #movies #books #recommendations 

Greetings, my long lost friends! And my apologies for not getting any new blog entries posted during the entire second half of 2019. There's a simple reason I wasn't able to do so, which is that my life suddenly got a whole lot busier starting last August, when my elderly parents officially began the transition that has eventually led to them moving into an assisted living facility, a move which is coming right after Christmas. It's been an event-filled six months, ones with lots of highs, lows, new knowledge about subjects I never knew anything about before, and weekly train trips between Chicago and St. Louis. The problem, though, is that the first thing all these eldercare guides say about eldercare is not to talk about eldercare online, because of there being just such an overwhelming amount of predators who are scouring the internet precisely to find out information about medications to steal, empty houses to break into, elderly people with diminished capacities to take advantage of, etc.

That's essentially kept me on a media blackout for the last six months, since all this has taken up so much of my time that I literally haven't had the space or energy to write about anything else; and this is not to mention that nothing else has really been going on with me anyway, in that I had to shut down my American Sign Language (ASL) classes and meetups during this process, barely got any freelance work done, acquired almost no new rare books, etc. But the process is nearly over, which means that I'm finally putting some ambitious plans together again for 2020, including turning this blog back into a more general one (as opposed to one specifically devoted to sign language, like it was during the first half of 2019), and with any luck getting a new blog entry posted every Monday throughout next year. I thought I'd do a little bulletpoint rundown of everything else I'm hoping to accomplish next year, but with fuller explanations being saved for further blog entries next month...

• To begin with, after years of friends encouraging me to do so, I have finally started a Patreon account, although with a twist; that since I don't want to go to the trouble of a bunch of new activities for high donation amounts, I'm only asking people for $1 a month, in return for a centralized newsletter each Friday that will share the links to all my latest book reviews, movie reviews, blog entries, Flickr photos, Instagram photos, and interesting news items at Twitter. Or, well, technically there's a $2 level as well, which gets you access to a second newsletter with original content not shared with the general public online; but I'll get into that a lot more with my next blog entry here, right after the new year.

• Again based on encouragement from friends, I've decided to once again pivot my freelancing goals for 2020 as well, and really dive heavily into the attempt at getting jobs being a “developmental editor” for self-publishing and basement-press authors. This is basically the job I did when I was running my own small press — I help authors take a big-picture look at their manuscript, identify general sections that need to be majorly reworked, then go in with them and edit the actual writing on a micro scale until it's finally ready to be published — which I've come to learn is a much sought-after skill among self-publishing writers these days, and in theory could earn me enough money that I could stop doing all other forms of freelancing, which would be great. Again, a lot more on this in a separate blog entry next month.

• And then when it comes to the other major way I make money in my life, by selling rare books at eBay, after upping my game in 2019 by starting to attend estate sales here in the Chicago area every Saturday (which literally kicked up my monthly revenue around 500 percent from what it was), in 2020 I'm leveling up again by finally joining the Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association, which will let me put together a traveling table setup and start selling books at actual physical events, like the annual Printers Row Book Fest here in Chicago and more. I have no idea what will come of this, whether it will be a highly profitable endeavor or a complete waste of my time, but I thought it'd be worth at least trying it out and seeing what happens.

• Oh, and the ASL lessons are back on, by the way, with the goal in 2020 being to finally get to a knowledge of 5,000 terms, a nice basic goal since this is typically the amount of terms a child learns through cultural osmosis by the time they're five and are ready to enter school and learn how to read and write. That should make me truly conversational in sign language for the first time; although with me only currently knowing around 1,500 terms, that means a schedule of ten new words a day, every single day for an entire year. Can I do it? Well, helping me out is the fact that I now run Meetup.com's one and only group dedicated to Chicago social meetups for ASL students and the larger Deaf community; and we'll be doing weekly practice nights all through 2020, in a variety of neighborhoods all over the city, so that should go a long way towards helping me stay active. If you're in Chicago and learning ASL yourself, please come out and join us!

• Let's see, and what else? Well, after three years of mediocre results, I've decided to finally get serious about getting good at home breadmaking; I'm planning on buying my first-ever electric bicycle; after a fascinating year of owning a Fitbit, I've decided it would be interesting to start doing a more comprehensive record of health stats, and am planning on acquiring home testing machines for blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol; and with marijuana becoming legal in Illinois on January 1st, I've decided to start exploring the wide world of non-weed THC consumption more, including edibles and dabbing, plus thought it would be fun to try growing my own plants for the first time simply because I can, plus am planning on obtaining the Illinois Dispensary Agent Certification, just in case I find myself with an opportunity to work part-time at one of the city's growing amount of THC stores. (Hint, hint — if you hire me, you can advertise a repeating day each week when Deaf customers are welcome.)

Like I said, the good news for all of you is that all this is precipitated on me getting a new blog entry up here once a week next year, so I hope you'll have a chance to come by regularly for the latest. And as an enticement to do so, I thought I'd end today by sharing my 13 favorite books I read and 13 favorite movies I saw in 2019, out of the approximately 150 of each that I made it through this year. I read barely any new books in 2019, so my best-of list for them is a mix of titles from throughout the years and decades; but the movie list I tried to limit to films that have only been released in the last year or two. I hope you enjoy, and here's hoping for a safe, fun and productive 2020 for everyone.

FAVORITE BOOK READS OF 2019

Adjustment Day, Chuck Palahniuk. This often misunderstood criticism of the alt-right gained controversy over being written as an alt-right fantasy; but as usual with the author of Fight Club, the reality of this book is much more complicated and subtle.

The Burning World, J.G. Ballard. As part of “The Great Completist Challenge” I do at Goodreads, I'm reading the entire oeuvre of New Weird author J.G. Ballard in order of publication these days; this is one of his first, on the surface a traditional sci-fi tale but hinting at all the craziness that would come a decade later.

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett. And along those lines, I've decided to read the entire “Discworld” series in order for the first time too. Here's the very first one; fans claim the series gets better as it goes, but I found this to be really great on its own, Lord of the Rings meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Ice, Anna Kavan. The Paris Review's website overview of underappreciated female writers throughout history is what brought me to this forgotten genius of Mid-Century Modernist science-fiction, with a tumultuous life that led to a short career that was intensely loved by a small cult audience, but buried by all the manly men authors and editors of the time who were so threatened by the success of women writers. 

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry. An 800-page, Pulitzer-winning traditional Western saga? Yes please! It's McMurtry, simultaneous author of sentimental titles like Terms of Endearment and hipster stories like The Last Picture Show, so you know he's going to do a surprising, engaging, captivating job.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb. The closest I got to reading a contemporary trendy title this year, it's an Irvin Yalom-type memoir from a psychotherapist who unpacks the therapy process in plain language, plus mixes in her own issues. Illuminating and charming.

Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson. A later-career noir classic from the guy who gave us The Killer Inside Me, which I specifically sought out because it's the next film adaptation from Greek surrealist Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). The darkest story you'll read next year, the fact that it was published in the shiny Mid-Century Modernist early-'60s is even more incredible.

Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds. Huge complicated hard-science space opera done right. A sweeping tale encompassing numerous planets and a head-scratchingly obtuse climax, it's just the start of a sprawling, fan-loved series.

The Revisionaries, A.R. Moxon. This just snuck in under the December 31st wire, the hugely impressive New Weird debut of this “The Wire Meets Haruki Murakami” author. It's super-long and sometimes gets super-abstract, but worth it for the incredibly inventive visuals and '80s-throwback “Illuminati!” conspiracy plot.

The Revolution Was Televised, Alan Sipenwell. I'm late to the game on this one, a historical and critical look at the rise of the “Peak TV” era in the early '00s. I'd already watched about half of these, ranging from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad to Battlestar Galactica; so the fact that the book convinced me to go back and revisit most of them over the last year is impressive.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John Le Carre. Another author in my Great Completist Challenge, this is the spy author's third novel but the first to become a huge hit, from the same years as the start of James Bond but presenting an MI-6 that's much darker and more incompetent than that more famous franchise.

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood. The much ballyhooed latest novel by the Postmodern master, which just happens to be a sequel to her more famous book, The Handmaid's Tale, which just happens to be going through a cultural renaissance because of the popular “#MeToo” TV adaptation currently being made of it. Surprise — it's funny, inventive, timely, and maybe one of Atwood's best books of her career, despite being written in her eighties.

Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World. 2019 was the year I officially began to learn American Sign Language, because of my increasing deafness in middle-age; I read a ton of Deaf culture and Deaf history books as part of that, but here's one of them that's particular good for a general audience, in which a hearing woman whose father was a Deaf teacher reminiscences about the time she spent as a child and later an adult on the campus of a Deaf school where her father taught.

FAVORITE MOVIE WATCHES OF 2019

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary. The convoluted tale of this documentary, in which a supposedly dying comedy-magician from the '80s may or may not be faking every single thing he's saying to the cameras, is actually much more fascinating as a document of our American Downfall times, the perfect portrait of the exact kind of trainwreck combination of traits has led us to a world of President Trump. 

The Beach Bum. Indie weirdo veteran Harmony Korine continues his recent winning streak, following up his unexpectedly delightful and prescient Spring Breakers with this paen to Jimmy Buffet-like waste cases down in the grimy dark corners of Key West and Miami. Come for a spot-on perfect Matthew McConaughey, stay for the surprisingly astute politics and Snoop Dog cameo.

Brittany Runs a Marathon. A nice simple little character-study, about an overweight and unhealthy party girl who gets all aspirational and decides to run a marathon, then subverts all aspirational movie tropes by being a whiny weak person who constantly self-sabotages her attempts to get better. Cassavettes-style emphasis on complex, emotionally true characters, but funnier and more contemporary.

Good Time. A friend at Letterboxd got me turned on to this indie thriller from the Safdi Brothers, who just this month brought us the likely Oscar contender Uncut Gems. Continuing Robert Pattinson's post Twilight emphasis on challenging roles, it's a gritty noir actioner about two petty criminal brothers facing the most harrowing night of their lives.

The History of Time Travel. A great example of the no-budget super-indies that are nonetheless great that you can sometimes find at Amazon Prime Video if you go wading around in the unfiltered muck there long enough. A supposed documentary in the future about the invention of time travel, the details of the documentary shoot itself (both storyline and even costumes and newspaper headlines) change each time a new development in the time travel adventure continues, a brilliant way to explore sci-fi themes with no special effects at all.

Knives Out. Rian Johnson's ultra-clever followup to making a Star Wars film, a perfect recreation of a 1920s Agatha Christie whodunit but with a very contemporary, race-sensitive #MeToo-like twist. A great example of how you can honor an old, white-dominated story genre but still update it for a more diverse present, without pandering to anyone involved.

The Last Movie Star. Burt Reynolds' last role before dying, a sweet and touching indie dramedy about an elderly Hollywood star who gets invited to be honored at a Nashville film festival, just to get there and realize it's a fan-run underground no-budget fest that triggers an end-of-life crisis for him about his possible legacy. It has its problems, but in general is a tender and lovely way for the often wrongly maligned Reynolds to end his career on a high note.

The Lost City of Z. The best example this year of one of the few drawbacks of our streaming age, that gorgeous, sweeping big-budget extravaganzas can sometimes get totally overlooked if they're being primarily designed to be watched online. A visually haunting callback to '80s anamorphic fever dreams like Out of Africa, concerning the interesting subject of white people slowly mapping South America in the early 20th century.

Marriage Story. The latest by my personal favorite Noah Baumbach is a devastating character study of a couple in crisis, as an increasingly acrimonious divorce brings out the worst in both of them. So emotionally raw that people have been making funny memes of the climax just as a way of processing it, it's a shoo-in for a ton of Oscar nominations coming next week.

Mortal Engines. Glad I got convinced to read this surprisingly entertaining Young Adult novel, about a post-apocalyptic future in which cities have been placed on top of moving platforms to get away from volcanoes and things, but thousands of years later have become battling opponents for the decreasing amount of resources on the badly damaged planet. Doubly glad it convinced me to watch the gloriously batshit, undeservedly maligned adaptation by Peter Jackson, which is way more fun than what you've heard.

Parasite. Another Oscar shoo-in, this is the coming-of-age moment for South Korean horror, a timely look at class warfare as told through a convoluted and violent New Weird tale that will satisfy both Fangoria-loving teens and their NPR-loving parents. Protect yourself from spoilers with this one!

Thunder Road. 2019 was another amazing year for small, devastating character portraits, a growing legacy of our streaming age when not everything has to be a billion-dollar superhero epic to be profitable; and here's another of the best, a super-dark look at the slow mental and emotional breakdown of a young Southern cop who has just had too much real life heaped on top of him at once.

Triple Frontier. And finally, here's another Netflix original movie that got worse notices than I thought it deserved, a tight and lean military thriller set and shot in South America, with the clean look but moral messiness that recalls '70s downbeat actioners at their best. Don't let the Hollywood cast scare you off — it's a dark, intelligent clock-ticker.

*When you contribute as little as $1 a month at my Patreon account, you receive a centralized email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week. Get it all at patreon.com/jasonpettus.

#Chicago #Deaf #community #culture #ASL #AmericanSignLanguage #signlanguage #studies #meetup #group #conversation #practice #slow #mistakes #allarewelcome

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

Well, hello there! “Sorry” that you haven't heard from me since the beginning of May, although I'm not really sorry because I was taking a deliberate break, albeit one that was originally only going to last a month but ended up stretching into two months. The simple fact is that, when I was deeply into doing my daily lessons for my ASL 1 class earlier this spring, I was finding it harder and harder to shift my attention to the drudgery of trawling the internet for more freelance work, something I kind of hate doing in the first place, and that was super-easy to blow off when I was so deeply engaged with learning sign language. As you can expect, though, that got me way behind on my finances; so when my ASL Institute workshop at Columbia College ended in early May, the same time that I finished up the free ASL 1 online classes I was taking at Lifeprint.com and StartASL.com, I decided to take a break from it all for a bit, so that I could re-dedicate myself to the crappy stupid dreary business of making rent and not starving to death.

It was a good pause for me, because I find myself re-energized and excited all over again to start my ASL 2 classes this week; but I also discovered that one of the oldest cliches about learning a language is true, that taking just a little time off from it starts making you immediately forget everything you've already learned, especially true when you're on the tail end of middle age like me and the learning comes slow to begin with. It wasn't exactly a disaster; but definitely in mid-June when I started reviewing the thousand ASL terms I already know, I discovered with some alarm that roughly a third of them now wouldn't naturally pop up from memory when I was trying to sign them, versus the five percent when I was actively studying those thousand terms back in March through May. And when I tried having a video chat with my Texas friend Joy, I learned that my recall for pulling up terms out of thin air was so bad, we pretty much couldn't have a conversation at all.

And why did this suddenly become an issue particularly in mid-June? Well, because that's when I started Meetup.com's very first group dedicated to the Chicago Deaf and ASL community! Or, well, as I learned after stating it this way while promoting it at Facebook, it's not technically the very first group in the history of Meetup devoted to the subject, just that the first one was shut down because the organizers didn't want to keep paying the fairly outrageous $180 a year it costs to maintain a Meetup group; so I suppose it's more accurate to say that my group is currently the only group at Meetup devoted to the Chicago Deaf and ASL community.

Regular readers will of course remember my growing frustrations this spring with trying to find conversation practice partners. Fluent signers at Deaf social events go way too fast for me to keep up, and I feel guilty about asking such people to slow down their conversations with their friends just to accommodate me. Random partners I find through Facebook to do video chats with come and go like the wind, because most of them have decided to learn ASL just for fun, not because they need it as a communication tool like I do as a late-deafened adult; and I've discovered that 95 percent of people in that situation tend to give up as soon as things get hard, which means that nearly everyone I meet through Facebook disappears again just after one or two practice sessions. I thought maybe I'd be able to make friends with the teachers and students at Columbia College during my evening workshops there, and continue to meet up for ASL practice that way; but the teachers get paid so little that they really want nothing to do with students like me, beyond whatever exact minimum amount they are required to interact with me to earn their paychecks, while the students tend to all be nineteen-year-old girls, making it an inherently creepy proposition to try to solicit them for evening one-on-one get-togethers (hashtag me too).

It's been getting me quite frustrated as the year has continued, because with me mostly learning ASL at home online by myself, interaction with other signers is even more important than usual (and usually it's pretty important to begin with). But as I've mentioned before in this blog, I've been trying to take inspiration during my Deaf studies from the Deaf community itself, who tend to have the very refreshing attitude of, “If you want to do something, you better freaking go out and make it happen, because no one is interested in sitting around holding your hand and doing it for you.” So I bit the bullet, made the $180 commitment, and started up a Meetup group; because if I can't find existing places to meet up with other ASL students so we can all practice conversing, then damnit, I will bring those other ASL students to me.

Actually, I have bigger plans than that with the Meetup group — I also want to regularly host social events specifically for people who are already fluent, just so they can have fun with each other, as well as vocabulary workshops specifically for beginners, where we all spend an hour learning 20 or 30 new words on a specific theme (online terms, LGBTQ terms, foods, sports, etc), and plans are in the making for starting a gaming club through the Meetup group, both for board games and for roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, something I can't even think about doing seriously until I get conversationally fluent myself, so likely not starting until next summer. But for now, the Meetup group is mostly being devoted to one-hour coffeehouse conversation practice sessions, which I'm trying to do in a different neighborhood every other week, on a rotating schedule of different weeknights in case anyone works in the evenings and has a specific night that's always busy for them. So far we've done them in Uptown and Logan Square; coming up is Oak Park (late July), then Beverly (early August), Wicker Park (late August) and then Hyde Park (early September). If you'd like us to come do one of these in your own neighborhood, by all means drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know.

So far it's been exactly like what I've been trying to find in the city, which pleases me to no end. Some people are little more than novices, and know maybe five or ten signs altogether; some are close to fluent, and are attending mostly just for fun; while the majority of other attendees are just like me, vaguely in the area of being somewhere from an ASL 1 to ASL 3 student, who have learned somewhere between several hundred and several thousand terms plus fingerspelling, but don't have immediate recall, often forget terms that they once learned, and have slow and halting conversations with their knowledge that are full of mistakes and words they don't currently know. We all have cellphones, of course, so our conversations tend to be a mix of signing and texting, especially since I maintain a “voice-free environment” at the events; so in a typical conversation, a person might sign, “I live in...” then spell the name of their neighborhood, then keep signing, “...I came here how?” then type, “The Dan Ryan?”, at which point the other person might show them the sign for “expressway.”

To be sure, no one will ever mistake our hiccupy, glacially slow dialogues for smooth, social conversation; but what's really amazed me in these first two meetups is that, when I go to the trouble of setting up a comfortable, non-judgmental “safe space” like this, where I don't feel any pressure to sign at a certain speed or to pretend that I'm comprehending the other person when I'm not (I quite literally sign “again, please” several hundred times over the course of an hour at these things, and that's not an exaggeration), I've discovered that I'm actually able to get through an entire long conversation and understand everything the other person is trying to say to me, as well as get my own point across to the other person in its entirety too, literally for the first time since starting to learn ASL beginning last March.

So despite the slowness, despite the jumping back and forth between signing and texting, despite the conversations having all the sophistication of a five-year-old talking with their grandmother — “Where do you live? Do you go to school? What do you do for fun?” — despite all this, the meetups have so far been the exact revelatory experience I was hoping they'd be, actual concrete proof that I'm learning how to communicate in sign language, that I'm slowly getting better and starting to inch my way towards full conversational fluency. To tell the truth, it seems like it's a revelatory experience for most of us who have so far been attending, which is a gratifying feeling that helps to justify the $180 I spent to get it up and going.

So, as my ASL 2 classes get cranked up to full speed again beginning this week, I will continue holding my real-world practice sessions every two weeks like clockwork, and going out to Deaf community social events where I can be regularly challenged to keep up at a level way beyond my current pay grade. And I will continue to maintain this blog without a break for at least the next eight weeks — or, you know, however long I end up going through my ASL 2 material before finally having to stop again to deal with tedium like making money — and as always am glad and humbled to have you along for the journey as well. If you're in the Chicago area, I strongly encourage you to join the Meetup group yourself, and hopefully make it out to some of our events regularly happening for the remainder of this year; or if you're in another city but would like to practice with me via video chat, I encourage you to drop a line too. Onward and upward, brave signers!

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus

ONGOING: The always updating list of essential small words in American Sign Language. ONGOING: The complete list of all my Deaf Studies book reviews.

5/8: Thoughts after a semester of sign language. 4/24: Deaf culture primer: The “Deaf President Now!” student protests of 1988. 4/23: It's been harder than I thought it would be to find good sign language partners. 4/15: ASL Adventures: “Game of Thrones” night at Deaf Planet Soul. 4/8: ASL Adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first “signing in the wild.” 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous!

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#asl #signlanguage #dictionary #tutorial #vocabulary #small #connector #words #suggestionswanted

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? See my blog's main index page for all the entries.]

Traditional ASL vocabulary classes are great, if you want to spend an entire week talking just about zoo animals, another week talking just about colors, yet another week talking just about food. But as I've been learning ASL myself, I've desperately wished that these classes started off with all the small words that are needed in actual real-time conversations; the words like “but,” “about,” “early” and “different” that help us connect together major concepts and verbs when communicating with others.

So I've decided to maintain a master list here at my blog of such words, which I am in the constant process of updating as I slowly make my way through my ASL 1, 2 and 3 classes myself this year. I've linked each word to an online demonstration of it, most of them over at Bill Vicars' Lifeprint.com, but also sometimes at Handspeak.com and SigningSavvy.com. I'm always looking for suggestions to add to this list, so please let me know at ilikejason@gmail.com. I hope this list helps all my fellow ASL students do better at conversing out in the real world!

Across Across from After Again All Almost Alongside Also Always And Any Ask

Back Become Believe

Can (as in: “allowed”) Change (verb) Come Correct (as in: “not wrong”)

Different Do you mind if... Don't care Don't like Don't mind Don't understand Don't want Done During

Early Easy Enough Entire Etcetera Excuse me (as in: “I need to get by”) Excuse me (as in: “My apologies”)

Fast Favorite Feel Feel like Few Finally Find Fine Finish Frequently From Front Fun

Get Get along Get in Give Go Good

Happen Happy Hard (as in: “difficult”) Have Have to Help Here Hey How How many How much

If Important In Interesting

Just

Later Leave Like Little Long Look like Lousy Love

Mad Main Make Many Me too Meanwhile Meet More Most Move Must My own Myself

Need Nervous Never New Next to Nice No Not yet Now

Occur Off Often Oh, I see Old On One more Only Ought to Our Ourselves Out Over

Prefer (as in: “My favorite is...”) Prefer (as in: “I would rather...”) Prior to Put

Quiet

Rather Really Receive Recent Regret Relieved Remember Right now Rude

Sad Same Say Several Short Should Show (reveal) Silly Single Slow Small Smart So-so So? Some Someday Someone Something Sometimes Soon Sorry Sorta Stay Stop Strange Stupid Suppose Sure

Take place Tell Tend to Thank you Thin Thing Think Too much Trouble Type

Ugly Understand Until Use

Wait Want Watch (view) What What kind What time When Where Which While Who Whole Why Will you... With

Yes

Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.

#asl #signlanguage #class #course #lifeprint #startasl #columbiacollege #aslinstitute #chicago #Deaf #community #culture #teenagers #fiftysomething #sadgrandpa #mortality #growthmindset

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So if I haven't made this clear yet, let me explain that I'm mostly learning ASL this year through self-study at home from two websites, Bill Vicars' Lifeprint.com and Michelle Jay's StartASL.com. Both have paid versions if you're looking for the full academic experience of graded tests, teacher feedback, connection with your peers and more; but what's cool about both of them is that they offer the actual lessons themselves completely for free, meaning that you can become conversational in sign language at them for no money at all, which is the way I'm doing it.

It turns out, in fact, that in the thirty years since the 1988 student protests at Gallaudet University, a three-semester “core curriculum” has been developed to teach ASL, presented as ASL 1, 2 and 3 classes that correspond with traditional Spanish 1, 2 and 3, French 1, 2, and 3, etc (and in fact is the second most studied foreign language in America, right after Spanish); and that this three-semester track has become pretty standardized in the ensuing decades, which means that everyone pretty much learns the exact same thing from these three classes, no matter what school or textbook or teacher they have. And so it is with these free classes from Lifeprint and StartASL too; they also present their courses in a 1, 2, 3 format, broken up respectively into 45 and 37 lessons (15-15-15 for Lifeprint, 14-12-11 for StartASL). If you aim for getting through a lesson a week, then, you're essentially looking at one year to complete the three-course track, which pretty neatly corresponds to taking such classes at a community college over a fall, spring and summer semester one academic year.

Of course, the online classes are missing a crucial element of learning ASL, which is the chance to actually practice conversations in real time with other human beings; in fact, this is how most Deaf people learned ASL in the years before a standard academic curriculum, simply by conversing with other Deaf people and learning by example, which is the same way children learn a spoken language long before they enter school and learn a written one. One of the ways I've been doing it, for example, has been by attending an evening workshop at Chicago's Columbia College; called the “ASL Institute,” it meets once a week for six weeks per course (so 18 weeks total if you attend them all), essentially a shortened version of Columbia's normal daytime class, but one that only costs $100 instead of the daytime class's $800 (plus of course the need to enroll in that case; for the Institute, you simply Paypal the money and then just show up).

In fact, Columbia College offers an entire four-year “Deaf Studies” degree, and is apparently one of the more prestigious programs for that in the entire Midwest, which makes students flock from all over to attend; one of the things these students have done is create a social “ASL Club” for themselves, and so I joined that as well in an attempt to meet more signers and practice more ASL conversations. I finally had a chance this week to attend my first event of theirs, a pizza night to celebrate the end of the school year, where I was greeted with a shock; that just like my experience a few weeks ago at the “ASL Game Day” at the Chicago Public Library, the pizza night at the ASL Club this week consisted of me (a 50-year-old man), and a roomful of twenty teenage girls, with not a single other male in sight besides a professor who popped in for five minutes and then left again.

In fact, once I thought about it, I realized that this has mostly been my experience at the various Deaf social events I've been attending around the city this spring; nearly all of them have been completely dominated by women, and for the life of me I don't know why that is. Maybe something to do with different empathy levels between the genders? After all, one of the other surprising things I've discovered at these Deaf community events is that the majority of attendees so far have actually been hearing people, who like me are in the process right now of learning ASL, but unlike me are not planning on it being their main form of spoken communication in the future, but are learning it as part of eventually becoming teachers or interpreters or church volunteers. Maybe this kind of calling simply appeals to women more than men? Maybe men are just not as social in general as women, and it's simply reflected in this specific context? Or perhaps I've just been attending things so far that naturally appeal to women more than men, like arts conferences and library game days and academic pizza parties? I'm not sure, but it's certainly a subject that's worth more pondering this year.

This week was the final workshop of the ASL 1 Institute session; and I'm tackling lesson 12 this week at both Lifeprint and StartASL, which means that I'm very close to “graduating” ASL 1, however you want to define that when it comes to someone self-studying at home, taking no tests and receiving no grade. The good news is that it's been pretty successful so far, and this week I anticipate finally memorizing my one thousandth term in ASL (and currently with a 91% retention rate on the rest, whenever I spend a day running through all 950 flashcards); but the bad news is that most five-year-olds typically know about 5,000 words in their given spoken language before ever going to school for the first time, so knowing 1,000 isn't nearly as impressive as it sounds at first. In fact, it turns out that even dogs can typically learn about 400 different human words and keep them all straight in their heads; so when you learn 1,000 words yourself, what you're really saying is, “I'm slightly more than twice as smart as a chihuahua!”

I kid, of course; in fact I'm extremely proud of how much ASL I've learned in only 62 days so far, and am pretty flabbergasted that in a mere two months, I can already hold entire conversations in ASL without saying a single word out loud. Granted, they're simplistic, fumbling, error-filled conversations, in which I have to spell out every third word I want to say; but that's still better than I ever got in German when doing my book tours in that country back in the early 2000s. But that said, one of the main observations I had during my evening workshops at Columbia College was that, by the end of them, both the teacher and the younger students were fingerspelling at a rate way faster than I could keep up with; and while I'm pleased that I have the ability to fingerspell back in any way at all, absolutely I do so at a speed equivalent to a stroke victim trying to talk again, with there being a fairly good chance that I will never get faster than this for the entire rest of my life.

I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating, that it's an inherently humbling thing to learn sign language for the first time at the age of 50. Hell, it's humbling to pretty much learn any new thing for the first time at the age of 50, which is why so few 50-year-olds ever do. Ever since aging into my fifties earlier this year, I've been intensely aware of how, for example, I can't even really call myself “middle-aged” anymore; the fact is that I'm now closer to being elderly than I am to being thirty, which makes me less middle-aged and more a “gentleman of a certain age,” the polite term for, “You ain't an old man yet, but you're freaking close.”

This comes with certain funny/dispiriting aspects just on its own, away from the challenge of learning a new language at this age; for one hilarious/depressing example, at the ASL Club pizza night this week, I actually ran into one of the teenage girls who had been at the Chicago Public Library game day the other week, at which point I learned that the girls at that had not been high school students at all but rather college students, most of them from the nearby Moody Bible Institute. I don't need to tell my fellow fifty-something brothers and sisters what a depressing thing it is to realize that you're now too old to be able to tell the difference between high-school students and college students; it's essentially exactly as depressing as the first time you hear that someone in your high school's graduating class has officially become a grandparent for the first time.

I suspect it's a pretty common experience, the first time you hear of someone your age becoming a grandparent, to find it impossible to think of yourself as old enough to be a grandparent, which is then the catalyst for a bout of cognitive dissonance; for me at least, it's triggered a whole reckoning this year about age and mortality, desires both professional and sexual, and just how little time I have left to explore any of these topics. I mean, sure, at this point in history, there's a decent chance I could live to 100; but it's much more realistic to expect that I'll kick off sometime between 70 and 80, and if not that than at least that this will be the last age I'll be completely healthy and mobile, which means that in all practicality, I have the shockingly short amount of 20 to 30 good years left in my life, which once you're 50 seems like the blink of an eye.

What do I want to do with these last 20 to 30 years? Who do I want to be? What kind of example do I want to set? When my friend Carrie's twin sons are middle-aged themselves, what do I want them to think of me when they look back at these years? All of these questions have come flooding into my life for the first time this year, when in fact I didn't really ponder them that much even at 49, which proves just how powerful arbitrary symbols are in human existence.

Certainly I want to go out having had an opportunity to embrace messy humanity in all its intimate, social glory, after a twenties and thirties that was mostly inwardly focused, two-plus decades where I went through and survived some very dark times indeed, and have now earned the right to celebrate that survival. This is the main reason I'm learning ASL in the first place, after all, because it's becoming harder and harder for me to interact with the human race through spoken English, and I don't want my functional deafness to imprison me away from humanity like it does for so many late-deafened adults.

And certainly I want to go out while continuing to embrace the growth mindset I've always had as an adult, an incessant and obsessive curiosity about the world that has compelled me to always be trying new things, not really worrying about individual successes and failures as long as I was always learning new things along the way. And this is yet another reason I'm learning ASL, because it pleases me to take on something so big and challenging and full of new insights about the world that I had never thought about before, at an age when most people are opting out of ever learning anything new again, content to officially start spiraling in on their existing lives like a snake eating itself, chomping up more and more of their psyches until eventually nothing is left but a hard, bitter little apple core, sitting in their recliner watching 16 hours a day of television and griping about The Kids with Their Facebooks and The Rubik Cubes.

So in this respect, I'm very proud to be graduating from ASL 1 in a couple of weeks, even if I turned out to be the slowest student in the entire class; and I was the slowest student in the entire class, make no mistake about this being false modesty. The way I look at it, the important part is not that I'm slower than everyone else who learned with me, but that I'm faster than all the people who never tried in the first place, and those are odds at succeeding that I like a whole lot more than directly comparing myself to a bunch of 22-year-old girls. Um, a bunch of 16-year-old girls? Sigh. I started my first-ever ASL lesson on March 6th, the day after my 50th birthday, and I'm looking forward a year from now to looking back on my 51st birthday, and hopefully seeing a fully conversant signer with a new batch of friends in the Deaf community, happy and social and perhaps even no longer fingerspelling like a stroke victim. As always, I deeply appreciate you taking this journey with me, and I encourage you to drop a line with comments, questions and requests any time to ilikejason@gmail.com.

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/24: Deaf culture primer: The “Deaf President Now!” student protests of 1988. 4/23: It's been harder than I thought it would be to find good sign language partners. 4/19: Book review: A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, by William Stokoe 4/15: ASL Adventures: “Game of Thrones” night at Deaf Planet Soul. 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL Adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first “signing in the wild.” 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks

3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.

#asl #signlanguage #chicago #Deaf #community #practice #partners #frustrations #mainstream #religion #christians #tutorwanted #ICOOKEDANENTIREDUCK

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

Another week, another Chicago Deaf community event! This time it was to a “sign language game day” at the Harold Washington Public Library downtown, which they're doing once a month this year. Little did I realize it was going to literally be me and 20 hearing high-school girls! They all knew each other, so I think it was a class somewhere, maybe at a magnet high school because they seemed to be from a lot of different neighborhoods, and I suspect their teacher was the middle-aged woman actually running the event. It was fun, and the girls were extremely nice to me, but I just couldn't engage in any small talk without feeling like a creepy old perv, so I made a hasty exit about halfway through.

I have to admit, so far I've been having a pretty frustrating experience with meeting others for the purpose of trying to converse in ASL. My night class at Columbia College was supposed to provide conversation practice, but so far three weeks in we haven't done a single one, and in fact I still haven't gotten a chance to meet any of my 30 fellow students. I've started to meet some people through my Facebook groups too, but most of them talk with me just once and then kind of disappear and never contact me again. I get a strong sense that this is because a lot of people currently learning ASL in America right now are just doing it as a lark, maybe because it was this or Spanish, and they figure they have a better chance of meeting a Deaf person in their daily lives and knowing just enough ASL that they can do basic communication with them.

And that's great, something I think everyone should do, learn 500 signs so you can at least give a Deaf person directions, or ask them about their day. After all, the main thing that differentiates 2010s Deaf history from any of the other decades is that this is the decade ASL went mainstream, the subject of hit cable TV shows and popular horror movies, and right now there are literally tens of thousands of hearing people currently enrolled in an ASL class in high school or college or a community center or a website, something that would've been ludicrous to even contemplate thirty years ago. But most of these people have only a passing interest in it, and sort of disappear when things get hard, which is why I think I'm generally not hearing back a second time from most of them. It's frustrating to me, because my goal as a late-deafened adult is to get fluent in ASL, and transition my social circle and perhaps even my professional life into the Deaf community, and I'm only rarely coming across people who want to devote the kind of time and attention to it that I do.

And then the Chicago events for the Deaf community are great too, but it's the opposite situation, that everyone there signs three times faster than I can comprehend, and about half the terms they use are ones I haven't learned yet. (As of last weekend, I was at 800 terms I had memorized, which at least is now twice as smart as a dog; but the internet tells me that, no matter what the language, most five-year-olds start their first year of school already knowing about 5,000 words in their spoken language, so I've still got a long way to go before I'm conversational and not just “can at least get my point across” good.) I love going to these events, and I love watching native signers speak at full speed, and I love that I've already started meeting some people who have been at multiple events like me; but for now I'm still mostly standing in the corner of the room just watching everyone, and only reluctantly getting into conversations that are super-slow and full of mistakes.

I do at least have one regular internet buddy I talk with regularly, my school-teacher friend Joy down in Texas I mentioned last time. We're both insanely enthusiastic about our forays into ASL, which is why I think we've ended up making good partners. But she brings up something interesting I've noticed about the Deaf community, that I haven't really gotten to mention in my journal yet, which is the huge amount of people learning ASL because they're Christian or religious or church-goers or however they identify, many times so they can do interpretation at their churches. The interesting thing about this and the Deaf community is most people in the community try not to bring up divisive subjects like politics or religion in the first place, because the community's so small and everyone wants to have as many opportunities to have signing friends as possible. And in this, you can see some validity in the common argument among the Deaf that the act of not hearing not only should not be seen as a disability, but there are actually good things about being Deaf that hearing people miss out on, like a community that's a lot less focused on divisive subjects.

I think what I'm going to have to do, to get in the kind of slow conversation practice I want, is simply hire a private tutor, who are super expensive at these tutoring websites online, so I think at the end of the semester I'm going to reach out and see if any college students might want to do it during their boring summer break for $20 an hour. And in the meanwhile, I continue my online ASL classes at Lifeprint.com and StartASL.com, both of which are completely free; I'm doing lesson 11 from both this week, and their ASL 1 classes end respectively at 15 and 13 lessons, so you can say that I've almost “graduated” from ASL 1 and am ready to start on ASL 2 (then an ASL 3 class before finally finishing the core curriculum that gets most people officially to “conversational”). As always, if you're learning too and ever want to practice on webcam, either entire conversations or just some fingerspelling, drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know!

My friend Carrie's 15-year-old son and I cooked an entire duck for Easter! AN ENTIRE DUCK! Because yes, believe it or not, there are other things going on in my life besides just ASL! I haven't really been writing about them because they haven't been as interesting, and I haven't had any photos to share because as always, we had an insanely long winter here in Chicago, so I haven't had a chance to go out and do any shooting. But the weather's finally turning warm here, so I'm anticipating going out more and having new stuff to share at Flickr soon. As always, more next week, and don't forget to join the mailing list if you'd like an email every Friday with the latest.

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/19: Book review: A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, by William Stokoe 4/15: ASL Adventures: “Game of Thrones” night at Deaf Planet Soul. 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL Adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first “signing in the wild.” 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks

3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.

#asl #signlanguage #Deaf #community #chicago #social #events #DeafPlanetSoul #GameOfThrones #history #oralism #LateDeafenedAdults #middleage #mortality #advice #moralcourage

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So the day finally arrived this week; the day I finally went out and attended an event in Chicago designed specifically for Deaf people to have fun with other Deaf people. As regular readers know, I've been feeling a bit of trepidation about this, for reasons I went into detail about in my last journal entry — how although I'm proud of the surprisingly large amount of ASL I've learned in just six weeks now of studying it, I still don't want to be some beginner pest to native signers who are trying to have a normal conversation at a party, plus I want to be mindful of the history of hearing people barging into the Deaf community and forcing them to change their ways to better accommodate their “hearing superiors.”

Let's never forget, all the way up to the 1990s, not only was ASL almost exclusively known only by native Deaf people, but it was actively banned from most Deaf classrooms (but read about the shameful history of “forced oralism” for more on this subject), which means that sign language was largely an insular and secret activity that helped define the “us” part of the “us versus them” equation among the Deaf. So although I'm sure that most native signers would be patient and tolerant of my terrible beginner skills, I also want to be hyper-vigilant about the idea of barging my way into non-educational social events and being all, “Hi! My signing is horrible and I'm slow and I use the wrong grammar and word order, but I'd appreciate it if you all could modify your own speech to mollify me, the wonderful noble hearing person who is deigning to learn your language (yay me!), instead of me doing the hard work of actually learning your language well enough to speak it correctly back to you. THANKS!”

But still, there's only way to become conversational in any new language, and that's by forcing yourself into actual conversations as much as possible; so when I discovered that the local Deaf advocacy group Deaf Planet Soul (DPS) was having a Game of Thrones season-premiere viewing party as a fundraiser for their organization (something they're doing with every episode this season), I thought this would be a great opportunity for my local Deaf community “coming out” moment, not least of which was because for an hour of it, I could sit there in silence and not have to worry about chatting at all.

DPS is a pretty cool organization; founded by two people of color (Puerto Rican Gallaudet University grad Gregory Perez, and Iraqi-American Muslim Zaineb Abdulla, who you might remember from her 2016 self-defense tips against hijab-grabbing alt-righters, which became a viral hit after Trump's election), it's a group that advocates not only for Deaf accessibility but accessibility among those who typically get most overlooked by society, and they're particularly well known for traveling to refugee camps every year and providing things like hearing aids and sign-language lessons to deaf kids who otherwise live in a solitary world of silence. Usually on Sundays I'm down in Hyde Park, having dinner with my friend Carrie and her teen sons, so I will probably miss the rest of the Game of Thrones parties; but certainly I plan on getting involved with DPS's other events a lot more as the year continues, and also plan on talking with them about their refugee work and whether it might be something I'd be eligible to participate in too.

The party itself went fine, although I was surprised to see that most of the attendees were actually hearing people who didn't sign, I suppose friends of the staff who were there to help financially support the organization. Still, though, I wanted to get in at least a little conversation, so I approached Gregory and Zeineb after the show was over.

“Hi!,” I started. “I want to say hello. I'm Jason.” (I still don't know how to properly sign, “I wanted to introduce myself;” this is something I need to learn soon, if I'm going to keep going out to events like these.)

“Hi, Jason!”, Zee responded. “Thanks for coming out!”

“I want to warn you, I don't know a lot of sign language yet. I'm a student right now.”

“Oh yes? Where are you studying?”

“C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A College.”

“Oh, C-C! They're great.” (Believe it or not, this was the very first time I learned the “name sign” for Columbia College; not even the teachers there had shown me at this point.) “I learned sign language in a class too.”

“Oh, are you hearing?”

“Hard of hearing,” Zee started speaking while simultaneously signing. “I grew up in the hearing world and thinking of myself as disabled, but it was after going to fjkld ajs difl;a jfjld fjdlow jdjmdk jldkfa.....”

“Whoa, sorry,” I said when she took a pause. “Could you maybe repeat everything you just said, slower and louder? Sorry!”

The whole group laughed. “Sure, sorry!” Zee said, and began again.

This is the main problem I'm having right now at these kinds of events; although I'm meeting way more people than I expected who can both sign and speak at the same time, my hearing loss prevents me from being able to follow them in large crowded rooms, while I don't know enough ASL yet to be able to completely follow them in sign language either. It's certainly proof that I'm doing the right thing by learning ASL in the first place, but it leads to these frustrating experiences where I can't exactly communicate with anyone right now, either hearing or Deaf. I'm glad for the experience, and I can definitely feel myself getting a little better at signing after every single evening like this most recent one; but I have to admit, I still have to really force myself at this point to go out to these events in the first place, because I know in advance how difficult it's going to be for me to converse well no matter which language I pick.

But on the other hand, I've also started having this sobering experience online that, although it's kind of a downer to actually witness, has definitely been producing positive emotions when it comes to the efforts to stick with the immersion events here in the city, where I just throw myself into situations where everyone around me can sign much better than I can, and I futilely try to keep up with the few isolated words I can pick out of their conversations. Namely, now that I've reactivated my Facebook account for the first time in three years (which I had to do in order to stay in touch with my fellow Columbia College students), and have started to join a bunch of other Deaf culture groups there, I'm starting to meet more and more “late-deafened adults” (LDAs) exactly like me; for those who don't know, this is a special term within the Deaf community to describe those who grew up hearing just fine, but are only now losing their hearing in middle-age. (Here's an alarming statistic for you hearing folks — two-thirds of all elderly people on the planet are functionally or profoundly deaf, so now you know that you've got that to look forward to. You're welcome!)

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the LDAs I'm meeting online display the exact set of stereotypes that LDAs are known for within the Deaf community. Since they grew up hearing, they see their increasing deafness as something “being taken away from them,” with the resulting grieving and anger that that phrase implies. They've often spent decades now cultivating a group of hearing friends and family members, and rising through the ranks of a corporate job; now their hearing loss is putting an end to that, and at the age of 35, 40, 45, 50, they find themselves without the enthusiasm or energy to go out there and start all over again. They find sign language extremely difficult to learn in middle age, and feel despondent over the idea of putting in all that work and having no one around to use it with in the first place, so most LDAs never bother to learn ASL at all, cutting themselves off from ever being able to get involved in the Deaf community to begin with. And so most LDAs just resign themselves to the idea of counting down the clock of their elderly years in a state of loneliness and confusion, no longer able to communicate effectively with their existing social circle but not capable of making a new one either, their lives dwindling and narrowing into the space of a single room and the giant TV that keeps them constant company in the years before death.

Most of the LDAs I meet online fit this description to a T; and while it always saddens me, it also strengthens my resolve to not let this be my eventual fate too. I mean, certainly it helps that I'm a freelancer and small-business owner who works by himself from home, and definitely it helps that I have few physical friends in Chicago I meet up with regularly, no hearing spouse or children to have to worry about, end-of-life parents who I only see a handful of times a year. But part of it, I acknowledge, is that I simply work harder at this stuff than a lot of other LDAs do; I force myself at the age of 50 to see the world in a growth mindset, force myself to see my hearing loss in terms of the positive new opportunities it's presenting, instead of the negative doors it keeps closing with each successive year. I force myself to practice sign language four hours a day, force myself to stay upbeat when I can still only recognize 1 word out of every 10 when someone signs. I force myself to be this way, because I think it's a healthier way to confront a world that is often shitty and unfair, instead of crawling back into my lair with my tail between my legs, admitting that this shitty unfair world of ours has beaten me for good.

Lord knows I'm a fuck-up in many other areas of my life — just take a glance at my credit score sometime if you doubt it, or note the unending trail of failed businesses and bitter ex-girlfriends that drag behind me like tornado damage. But as I was reminded this week by one of my online ASL practice partners, a perpetually sunny grade school teacher in Texas whose name is literally Joy, overcoming the depression and stagnancy that comes with the failing health of middle age is something that takes legitimate courage and legitimate work, and I'm glad that I've somehow been able to summon up that courage and discipline when it has eluded me in so many other areas of my life. So yes, I will keep throwing myself into Deaf community events, and yes, I will keep messing up royally at them, and yes, I will keep begging for forgiveness from those bemused, exasperated native signers who must deal with my fumbling, glacially slow, mistake-riddled attempts at communicating with them. Yes, I will keep doing all of that. Because life is still worth putting in that kind of effort, even a middle-aged life full of compromises and problems and a trailer park full of destroyed dreams, strewn about like so much garbage and just waiting for a FEMA clean-up crew. I hope you too will have a chance to remember all this, the next time you're forced to confront your mortality as well.

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first “signing in the wild.” 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.

#asl #signlanguage #chicago #deaf #community #fieldreport #inclusive #dance #festival #mayors #office #people #disabilities #kineticism #art #therapy #MOMENTA #AnitaFillmoreKenney #TheProblemWithNormal #ColumbiaCollege

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So for those who don't know, in the last five or six years I've started attending more and more dance recitals here in Chicago, as my hearing continues to get worse and it becomes more and more difficult to attend my previous Saturday night events like movies, plays and rock shows. I'm not a dancer myself, and know almost nothing about the activity's history or theory; but I first became fascinated with the connection between movement and creativity in the 1990s while dating a woman who worked as a “kinetic art therapist,” i.e. someone who helps others work through psychological problems via movement and dance, and since then I've discovered a real joy in attending creative movement pieces here in the city. And better yet, much like the “storefront theatre” community for actors in Chicago, the city also has a network of indie spaces for startup dance companies and independent choreographers, meaning that it's entirely possible to go out every weekend and see an amazing dance recital for only $10 or 20, versus the often $100 tickets for downtown shows at the Joffrey Ballet and the Harris Theatre.

A few weeks ago I attended the spring recital of Oak Park's MOMENTA, which is basically a professional company that was established by the prestigious Academy of Movement and Music; the academy itself teaches students from grade school up to the age of eighteen, but MOMENTA is specifically a professional showcase for their older students and the academy's faculty, many of whom have longstanding ties with the Martha Graham Company, Julliard, the Kennedy Center, and nearly all of Chicago's local universities. The recital in general was great, but what really floored me were two pieces that night that were specifically written for people in wheelchairs, something I had never even thought about when it came to dance until witnessing it for myself. The dancers involved were adept movement artists, and in one case (with dance veteran Kris Lenzo) buff as hell too, using his athletics-optimized wheelchair as essentially an extension of his torso, able to twist and lean and spin and fall as easily as someone with physical legs.

The choreography for that particular piece was by retiring MOMENTA Associate Executive Director Anita Fillmore Kenney; so on a lark, I dropped her a random email the day after the recital, telling her how moved I was by seeing these dance numbers that had been specifically written for people in wheelchairs. And this emotional stirring is of course just a logical extension of what I'm going through this year in general, as I burn through a ton of books about the history of the Deaf community, and come to realize with some horror just how much discrimination and abuse deaf people have gone through in the last couple of centuries, and have frequently been moved to tears by the stories of resilience and progress you find within this community despite all this. It's been a really eye-opening experience this year, and is starting to profoundly and permanently change the entire way I even think about concepts like “disability” and “accessibility” in the first place. I'll explain...

Like most people, I've been raised to look at the US population as basically existing in two general groups: there are the “normal” people, who constitute the vast majority of our country, and then the “not normal” minority (currently known by the politically correct term “disabled”) who have something wrong with their bodies, whether it's that they can't see, that they can't hear, that they're missing arms or legs, etc. Looking at the world this way doesn't necessarily mean that you're thinking any less of the minority in the “not normal” group; but certainly it trains you to think that our goal as an enlightened society should be to provide special, attention-calling options for letting this “not normal” minority exist within the world of the “normals” in a better and more complete way.

What I'm coming to realize this year is that it's much more accurate to instead look at the world in this way — that there's a theoretical model of a “perfect” human being that exists on paper, but that not a single one of us actually lives up to that model of perfection, meaning that every single human being on Earth deals daily with some kind of imperfection to their system (and most of the time several). Some of these imperfections are very easy to see when you glance at a stranger — like people who can't hear, people who can't see, people who are missing arms or legs — but the vast majority of bodily imperfections are invisible to the naked eye, and most often incredibly easy to hide from strangers. Some of us have high blood pressure. Some have low blood sugar. Some are dyslexic. Some are autistic. Some of us have uncontrollable anger. Some of us have a predisposition towards addiction. Some have brittle bones. Some people have epilepsy. Some are color-blind. Some people have attention deficit disorder. Some have one leg that's shorter than the other. Some people are farsighted. Some are nearsighted. Some have acid reflux syndrome. And on and on and on and on and on.

So our goal as a society, then, shouldn't be to provide outlandish alternatives, handed on a silver platter like a benevolent gift from the “normals,” for “allowing” a small minority of people to be “like the rest of us;” the goal should be a constant series of small, manageable changes so that all of us imperfect humans can live in an environment that provides as equal an opportunity as possible for us as individuals to succeed or fail based on our own actions. Think, for example, of how in recent years, fast-food restaurants have started offering more and more “heart-healthy” choices for those who have imperfections with their hearts and blood. It didn't take a lot of effort for these places to offer these kinds of choices (it mainly just consisted of tweaking a few menu items so that they no longer contain salt, sugar and carbs); it didn't take a lot of effort to convince these places to do it in the first place (just a gentle but insistent demand from their customers); no one's forcing you to buy the heart-healthy versions if you don't want (by all means, libertarians, keep shoveling those Big Macs into your pre-diabetic system if that's what you choose to do); yet the addition of this option has meant a world of difference for those who do want to keep careful track of their salt, sugar and carbs, who before recent years simply couldn't eat at any fast-food places at all, making simple things like highway road trips or a day of tourist sightseeing an exercise in frustration.

This is what most people in the Deaf community want as well, I'm coming to realize this year — they don't want you to make a big deal out of their situation, they don't want to feel like you're doing them some big favor that they need to show subservient gratitude towards, they don't want you to somehow feel like you're being “forced” into some big obligation in order to accommodate them, but they do want some simple changes that better allow them to compensate for their own particular version of physical imperfection. I'm becoming convinced that our society will be a lot better if more and more of us can begin to adopt this mindset — that the goal isn't to create a world where “they” can become more like “us,” but to create a world where all of us have an equal chance to succeed or fail based on our own actions, no matter how close or far away we are from “perfect.”

In any case, Kenney nicely wrote back to me and let me know about an event coming up that she thought I'd find interesting — the 2nd annual Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, sponsored by the Mayor's Office for People With Disabilities, and held down at that organization's headquarters on the Cook County Health campus (more familiarly known as “Cook County Hospital” and the buildings that surround it). And she was right — I did find it interesting! It wasn't really a “festival” per se, but more a series of workshops, film screenings, and panel discussions, devoted specifically to the challenge of incorporating disabilities into the field of dance, but more generally dedicated to the subject of disabilities within the arts overall.

Like I said, I'm not a dancer myself, so I skipped the movement workshops at the beginning and end of the day, and instead sat in on the films and discussions that took place between them. Some of it was a little too academic for my tastes; but there was certainly a lot of food for thought that was thrown out during the day, most intriguingly on the subject of “interaccessibility” in the arts, not just the challenge of providing access to the blind or deaf but of the intriguing possibilities of combining access to the blind and deaf. (As one example, a recent Steppenwolf production was highlighted during one talk, in which a French poet was first translated into English and then further translated into ASL, with all three performing on a stage at the same time, and with projections of each version showing on overhead screens behind them.)

As longtime readers know, I myself have been mostly involved with the literary community over the years, and all of this is starting to really make my gears turn as far as how I might be able to help provide more access for the Deaf at Chicago's various live literary and theatrical productions. After all, Chicago has one of the largest live literary-performance communities in the world, is the city that birthed Steppenwolf and a hundred other indie theatre companies, and is also the city where the poetry slam was invented; if there's one place that could benefit the most from incorporating ASL interpretation and live captioning into such events, that would be here, which has me thinking a lot these days about the subject and what I could possibly do about it.

And then of course there was one other big reason I wanted to attend the Inclusive Dance Festival, which is that this would be my first opportunity since starting ASL classes to be around a professional sign-language interpreter, as well as native Deaf people relying on this interpreter for their comprehension. Regular readers will remember me talking about this subject in my last blog entry, about how I've recently started the process of trying to throw myself into as many real-time opportunities as possible to witness and maybe participate in ASL conversations, now that I've been doing sign-language classes by myself at home for a month, and am just comfortable enough now with my skills to know that I can at least sign things like, “I'm a beginner,” “I understand very little,” “I'm here mostly to just watch,” “Oh Lord I'm so horrible at sign language” (not a joke, I actually know how to sign this), etc. I don't necessarily feel the obligation to be particularly good at signing to at least attempt to communicate with others, but certainly I feel the obligation to at least be able to express that I'm not particularly good at it, and to thank others for being patient with my slowness and rookie mistakes.

Watching a fluent ASL interpreter sign in real time was both an enlightening and frustrating thing; frustrating because, as you might expect, I couldn't follow the vast majority of what she was saying, but surprisingly enlightening because I could actually catch about one out of every ten words. I have to admit, that kind of amazed me, given that I've only been studying for a month now, and don't really have any experience yet at trying to follow a native speaker at full speed, and it gave me a lot of confidence in the idea that I'm actually starting to absorb some of this stuff. Then during a break, I decided to introduce myself to her, so that I could say that I had officially had my second-ever ASL conversation, after the one on Tuesday with my teacher at Columbia College.

“Excuse me,” I started to sign. “I wanted to say hello.”

“Hello!” she replied. “I saw you watching me earlier.”

“I'm learning sign right now...”

“Oh wow! That's great!”

”...But I'm just a beginner. I only understood a few words you said.”

She laughed. “Yeah, well,” she made clear through gestures instead of sign. “Where are you studying?”

“Um, three places,” I indicated through counting on my non-dominant hand, a new technique in ASL grammar I recently learned. “Two of them online. The third, a school in the city. C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A.”

“Oh!” She got excited. “That's where I go to school!”

“Oh! Is Deaf Studies your...major?” I signed with trepidation. (This is a sign I recently learned, but wasn't sure if “major” as in “not minor” also translated as “major” as in “main concentration in college.”)

“Yep.”

“Are you hearing?” I asked, which I immediately realized was a stupid question, in that she had been interpreting the hearing speakers of the conference for the last two hours.

“Yes. You? Do you want to talk out loud?”

“Yes. I'm hard of hearing. I have a hearing aid.” (A sentence I'm already saying so often that it's starting to effortlessly roll off the fingers already.)

At this point we switched into pidgin-mode, signing and talking at the same time. “My dad's hard of hearing too,” she said. (This makes her what's known in the Deaf community as a “CODA,” or “child of a deaf adult,” a very common classification among hearing people who are good enough at ASL to become professional interpreters.)

“I don't know very much sign yet, but I'm trying to go to as many events like this as I can, and just throw myself into it.”

“Oh, you should come to our ASL club. It's run through Columbia. Just a bunch of us in the department who get together socially once every couple of weeks, to have fun and practice our signing. Here, I'll give you the contact information.”

Well, what do you know — officially one more step inwards towards my gentle introduction into Chicago's Deaf community! This is exactly the kind of group I'm hoping to get involved with right now, one that's made up of ASL teachers and students who will be tolerant of a slow, mistake-riddled beginner like me. Eventually my goal is to more and more immersed in just the general community of Deaf people in Chicago, but as I mentioned last time, I'm wary of doing this too soon — just like anybody who's a native speaker of a language, I don't want to be a pest to such people while I remain a beginner who can barely speak it, and I also don't want to come across as the “rude hearie tourist” who's trying to barge his way in and stomp around within a community that by necessity over the years has been quite insular and protective of its own. With any luck, the next blog entry I'll have for you will be a report from the club, and at the very least I'll get an update posted in a few weeks about how my evening workshops are going. Talk with you again then!

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

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#asl #signlanguage #lifeprint #startasl #fingerspelling #ASLInstitute #ColumbiaCollege #chicago #Deaf #community #culture #history #ToiletWhere #oralism #AlexanderGrahamBell #LipReadingMyth #Gallaudet #DeafPresidentNow #LateDeafenedAdult #Hogwarts #Magic

[Need to get caught up on my saga this year of learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved with Chicago's Deaf community? The full list of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So after a month now of self-studying ASL at home through two different websites (Lifeprint.com and StartASL.com), and building up a decent but not impressive vocabulary list (around 700 terms at this point, plus I can fingerspell at a rate of around two letters per second), the time finally came last night for me to go out into the world and interact with other signers for the very first time. And that's because it was time for the ASL Institute, a six-week series of conversation workshops sponsored by Columbia College here in Chicago, and taught by their award-winning Deaf Studies faculty as part of their nationally admired academic program.

There's a ton of undergraduates all over the Midwest who come to Columbia to study ASL; but apparently the school discovered that there are also a ton of people like me in the general community who want to learn ASL too, but who don't want to make the financial or time commitment of full-time enrollment. So they now offer this $100 workshop that meets once a week in the evening for six weeks, actually a series of three workshops that last 18 weeks if you go through the whole thing, and which very roughly correspond with the ASL 1, 2 and 3 classes the school offers during the day as a sort of core curriculum for gaining conversational fluency. (For what it's worth, my online classes are structured under a three-semester 1, 2, 3 curriculum too, a fairly standard practice among groups that teach ASL.)

That's an important thing to understand about sign language, that like any foreign language, the key to becoming conversational is to throw yourself into actual conversations with actual humans as much as possible; so while I've been happy to discover that you can actually get a fairly decent education on ASL just through solo home study alone, I knew there would be something missing if I didn't challenge myself to get out into the real world as much as possible too, which is why I signed up for these workshops. Plus, as regular readers know, the whole goal of me learning ASL in the first place is not as some academic experiment, but because I plan on transitioning my social life into the Deaf community more and more as I get older, and continue losing more and more of my hearing; so I figured that a fairly safe way of gently entering this community would be by starting with people who professionally teach the hearing how to sign in the first place, and becoming friends with those people first before then slowly branching out into the city at large.

After all, a very real fear of mine — and something that should be a legitimate concern for any hearing person learning ASL — is throwing myself into the local Deaf community too early, making a jackass out of myself, and alienating everyone involved before I've ever had a chance to make any friends. Like any population of native speakers, no matter what the language, most Deaf people will be bemusedly tolerant of someone like me who's just starting to learn the language, but will quickly grow annoyed with my fumbling attempts interfering with their desire to simply talk with their friends at a normal pace. (“So I was at Tom's party, and you'll never guess what happened...” “Me go now toilet! Where toilet where? TOILET WHERE???” “[Sigh] Anyway, like I was saying...“)

And now add to this the special situation when it comes to the Deaf community and ASL, which for those who don't know was a language that was quite literally outlawed among most Deaf schools all the way from the 1880s to 1980s, when a noble but heartbreakingly misguided competing theory about language called “oralism” instead became the new norm. Championed most notably by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (spoiler alert: don't bring up his name at a party full of Deaf people), and aggressively pushed by the same repressive Victorian Christians who also banned Welsh in the same time period, it was basically a two-pronged attack against sign language: the first argument being that it's better for the deaf to learn how to speak and read lips, because this helps them integrate back into “normal” society better than learning their own special language that no hearing person understands; and the second argument being that ASL is not actually a language at all, but rather a series of crude pantomimes that is unable to express abstract concepts like the future and past or philosophical thoughts, something that will never be able to hold a candle to the rich and sophisticated possibilities of English. And this is not to mention (the Christian oralists argued) that ASL is an abomination against God, since the Bible clearly states that the difference between humans and animals is our ability to speak, meaning that any Deaf person who refuses to do so is essentially spitting in God's face.

But there's one big problem with all this, which is that oralism simply doesn't work, or at least not the way that oralists used to claim that it does; for while functionally Deaf people with some hearing can eventually after years of intense study come to speak and lip-read fairly well, a century of scholarly studies has proven over and over that even in the best-case scenario, the most adept lip-readers still only catch about 30 percent of a hearing person's conversation, the rest basically guessed at through context, gestures and facial expressions. And that's best case; for most people who can't hear, reading lips is a complete disaster that never works, which then in the repressive 20th century got these people labeled by their hearing caretakers as mentally challenged, and relegated to remedial classes and then factory or farm work for the rest of their life. This is how we got the outdated and now shameful term “deaf and dumb,” because for a long time it was just assumed by the hearing world that most people who were deaf were also “mentally retarded” (another outdated term I'm deliberately using here to prove a point about its awfulness), and that the few who thrived at oralism were the rare genius exceptions that proved the rule.

As recently as the 1980s — i.e., as recently as me and my peers already being in college — it was still quite common for Deaf elementary schools to literally tie their childrens' hands behind their backs during class, so to force them through tear-filled eyes to practice the largely useless oralism instead of signing to each other; and so this led to ASL becoming a secret, contraband language that the Deaf used with each other only when no hearing people were around, an underground railroad of communication that tightened and solidified the insular intimacy of their community. So yes, when you're a hearing person in the 2010s learning ASL yourself, you drag this entire luggage rack of baggage behind you wherever you go, which is why so many in the Deaf community are suspicious of you when you show up to “their” events and try to speak “their” language and fumble around and get “their” words wrong. You can complain about it if you want, but that won't do anything about getting rid of that century-old luggage rack of baggage you unconsciously drag behind you at all times; so it's better to simply acknowledge the luggage rack and try to be as empathetic as you can about learning ASL, for example by paying Deaf teachers to gently and slowly tutor you into fluency, instead of just showing up to a Deaf dinner party one night and start barging around yelling, “ME GO NOW TOILET!!!”

My instructor for the next six weeks is A., who surprisingly turns out to be a graduate of the prestigious Gallaudet University, a school with a fascinating history: first authorized by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in the 1860s, to this day it still remains the one and only accredited four-year liberal-arts college in the US to cater exclusively to Deaf students, and it was the 1988 student protests there over the lack of a Deaf president that kickstarted the modern Deaf Pride movement, “Stonewall”-style, which makes me feel lucky to have an instructor who comes out of that environment. But man, am I glad I decided to start studying ASL on my own for a month before showing up, because she just threw us into the heat of things with no warning — after repeating the fingerspelling alphabet just three times, she was already spelling out entire words in class and expecting us to comprehend, and literally covered close to 50 ASL terms in two hours, which would've had me dumbfounded if I hadn't already practiced most of them at home over and over and over for the last four weeks.

This is something I first learned when attending a computer coding bootcamp back in 2015, neither a good nor bad thing on its own but simply an objective fact that exists — that in late middle-age, my brain simply can no longer operate at the same speed as someone in their twenties (the age group that constitutes most of the other 30 people in my workshop, who seem to mostly be undergraduates taking this evening course for extra credit), and that I have to work harder and longer than everyone else if I expect to keep up at their pace. And in this I take inspiration from the Deaf community itself, as often expressed in the Disney Family television show Switched at Birth I became an obsessive fan of earlier this year (but see my blog entry specifically on that subject for more); how at one point in the show's run, the main Deaf character Daphne decides to major in pre-med at college, gets frustrated by a series of hurdles that develop around her (technical terms with no equivalent signs, surgeons wearing masks that cover their lips, doctors who dismissively scoff at the very idea of her interning for them), and is reminded by her peers and family that if she wants to do something ambitious like that, she simply has to work harder at it than hearing people, and that there's no point whining about it because complaining won't change the situation. It's a powerful example of why Deaf people hate being referred to in victim terms like “disabled” or “handicapped;” they don't see themselves that way, no more than we would consider a person with high blood pressure to be “disabled,” but rather as someone with a bodily imperfection that can be easily compensated for through intelligence (less salt), discipline (daily exercise), and community involvement (convincing restaurants to offer heart-healthy menu items).

I'm what's known in the community as a “late-deafened adult” (LDA) in that I grew up as a hearing person, think in the word order and grammar of English, and see my hearing loss as something “being taken away from me,” with all the resulting emotional grieving that that statement implies. In addition to studying the Deaf community, I've been doing a little bit of studying about the LDA community in the last month too, and have quickly come to learn that most late-deafened adults never successfully learn ASL or transition into the Deaf community; they simply count out the clock in their old age within a world that becomes increasingly narrower and lonelier, unable to make new friends and with it increasingly difficult to communicate with their old ones. I'm determined that this will not be my fate, because the very thought depresses me to a point of despair; but that means I simply have to want it more than the people around me, have to put in the extra work, have to put in the extra time, have to practice four hours a day like I've been doing this month, have to burn through a book every day or two like I've been doing this month.

The workshop itself last night mostly consisted of A. instructing us through Powerpoint slides and demonstrations of individual terms, which we basically practiced as a group without actually having any conversations; but still, I was determined to have at least one back-and-forth talk with someone before I left, so I approached her after class. “Excuse me,” I started in sign. “I wanted to say hello and thank you.”

“Oh, you're welcome,” A. replied.

“For a month I've been self-studying at home online,” I continued. “But this here is my first time chatting people. Or, er,” I corrected, “chatting with people.”

“That's great,” she said. “You're good! You said you're hard of hearing?” (This came up earlier in the evening, when she played a DVD and I had to request that she turn on the closed-captioning.)

“Yes,” I confirmed. “I have a hearing aid, but my hearing is decreasing each year. This ear” — I pointed to the left one — “surgery, year 2000. This ear” — pointing to the right — “Too much music when younger.” I paused, then spelled out “P-U-N-K,” and we both laughed.

“Okay,” I concluded. “I see you...L-A-T-E-R?”

“Later,” she showed me in sign.

“Great. Later!”

And there it was — the first-ever ASL conversation I've had in my life. And I have to admit, it felt like freaking magic, like I was a Hogwarts student and had just successfully performed an Expelliarmus spell for the very first time. The moment I got done with my first-ever ASL conversation, the thing I most wanted to do was immediately have another ASL conversation, which made me profoundly appreciate the stories in these Deaf culture books I've been reading this month (especially the ones written in the 1970s and '80s), relaying the stories of Deaf kids who grew up without knowing that ASL even existed, and how they went through a lightning-fast explosion of intellectual curiosity the moment as adolescents that they learned how to sign. That's simultaneously the most heartbreaking and the most uplifting thing of all about the shameful history of forced oralism in the 20th century; when so-called “dumb,” so-called “retarded” Deaf kids were finally allowed to learn ASL, most of them blossomed within literally months from a remedial learning level to above-average, yet this wasn't seen by their hearing caretakers as proof that everyone should learn sign, but rather they were considered “rare miracles” that merely proved that not every single deaf person was fated to be a janitor or a maid.

At the age of 50, I'm starting to get a taste of what this so-called “miracle” must've felt like; and I have to admit, I want more. EXPECTO PATRONUS!

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus

4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.

#Deaf #community #culture #history #anger #politics #StupidHearieTourist #Chicago #ASL #signlanguage #SwitchedAtBirth #DisneyFamily #TV #series #Netflix #LizzyWeiss #writinglesson #characterization #SeanBerdy #EbayShipper #EmmettAndBayForever

[WARNING: Spoilers abound today for the Disney Family TV show Switched at Birth. Put off reading this until later if you're in the middle of watching it yourself.]

So did you hear? At the age of 50, I'm in the middle of learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the very first time this year! Longtime readers will of course be familiar with the saga regarding my hearing: how I had my left eardrum surgically removed in the year 2000, due to an infection known as a cholesteatoma, effectively turning me completely deaf in one ear; and how the hearing in my right ear has been slowly degenerating in middle-age, mostly because of too much punk rock in my youth. Even with my cutting-edge $5,000 hearing aid system (four mics in my ears, an external fifth mic that the other person can wear, the whole thing Bluetooth-enabled), I'm still at the point now where I can essentially no longer hold a conversation inside a bar, and am getting closer and closer to no longer being able to do so even inside a coffeehouse.

When I did my annual big-picture overview of my life for my 50th birthday a few weeks ago, I realized with some alarm just how much my social life has shrank away in the last decade to almost nothing, which I lament because I used to love meeting and talking to random new strangers so much in my twenties and thirties. So for me, learning ASL is not some interesting new hobby or experiment, but literally an attempt to completely shift my life into a whole new group of friends and lovers, now among the estimated 20,000 people in the Chicago metro area who can converse in ASL, and by extension the approximate half a million who can do so nationally. And so in this regard, I'm not only learning the language right now, but also taking a deep dive into the culture and history of what's known as the “Deaf community” with a capital “D,” as opposed to lowercase “deaf” which simply indicates a person with hearing loss, but who hasn't made this hearing loss a core part of their identity as a human being.

It's a complicated subject that deserves its own journal entry later this year; but the most basic, fundamental tenet of the Deaf community is that they don't see their lack of hearing as a disability or handicap — that is, something that deserves pity and that permanently limits them from fully participating in human society — but rather the way that you and I might see, for example, high blood pressure — a simple imperfection that can be easily compensated for, using a combination of lifestyle, technology, and shifting social mores. This is just the start of the Deaf rabbithole, and please be aware that this simple recap doesn't do it justice — for one good example, most Deaf people don't just see their Deafness as a “lack of a problem,” but rather as an asset that provides benefits that hearing people don't have, the argument being that Deaf people's relationships are more powerful and intimate, that they have a greater sense of their surroundings than most hearing people do, better concentration, a bigger curiosity about the world, more tolerance and empathy, purer political beliefs, etc.

Or for a more troubling example, another hallmark of the Deaf community is that they're extremely quick to anger, and tend to lash out at hearing people for making mistakes no matter how innocuous. This can be baffling to hearing people at first, until you take a deep look at history and realize that Deaf people have been treated way more appallingly than you ever knew, and that this horrible behavior has lasted until way more recently than you would ever guess. For example, the Supreme Court didn't recognize ASL as an official language until all the way in 1989, which means that as recently as the George Bush administration, it was perfectly legal for police to arrest a deaf person then refuse to provide them with an ASL interpreter during interrogation, or for the court to provide one during their trial. So if you one day make a remark to a Deaf person that seems perfectly innocent to you (for example, “I think sign language is so beautiful!”), and that Deaf person jumps all over you (“IT ISN'T MY JOB TO ENTERTAIN YOU, HEARIE”), be aware that there's several centuries of human-rights abuses that justify that quick and seemingly irrational anger (in this case, for example, the fact that from the 1920s to '70s, the official position of the US government was that ASL was actually a form of theater but not language, beautiful to look at but that essentially forces deaf people to talk in caveman pantomime, and that will never be able to express nuanced and sophisticated intellectual thought like English does, a theory that was disproved only after being recognized as a legitimate language worthy of academic study).

So before I start attending my first Deaf social events beginning next month, I'm trying to learn as much as possible about the norms of the Deaf community, so that I don't make a bunch of beginner mistakes and get dismissed as some “stupid hearie tourist” before I can ever go deeper into the community. And that's where the Disney Family teen soap opera Switched at Birth comes in, created by TV veteran Lizzy Weiss (who you may know from her cultishly loved surfing movie Blue Crush), which ran for 103 episodes from 2011 to 2017 and can now be found in its entirety on Netflix, which is rapidly bringing it a whole new audience in reruns. The central gimmick behind the show is that two couples in Kansas City (one rich and white, the other poor and Latinx) have their babies accidentally switched at the hospital after birth, which the families don't learn about until the girls are 15, leading to all kinds of chaos and eventually the Latinx family moving into the poolhouse of the rich family's McMansion compound so that everyone can finally get to know everyone else better.

What's gotten it so much attention, though, is that Daphne, the red-headed white girl who grew up with a Latina single mom, got meningitis when she was an infant, and is now functionally deaf; and so not only does ASL play a huge role in this show, as everyone around her slowly learns to sign so that they can communicate with her, but an entire half of the show's milieu is set at the Deaf school that Daphne attends, and the producers made the unprecedented step of hiring actual Deaf actors to play all the roles. This then infuses the series with all kinds of trendy issues that come directly from Deaf culture, a way to enrich and deepen the world that surrounds the family mechanics that lay at the show's heart, and has turned out to be a fascinating way for those of us in the hearing world to understand many of the issues that the Deaf community grapple with, from discrimination in the workplace to the pleasures and pain of a Deaf person dating a hearing one, the controversy within that community over cochlear implants, the perils Deaf people face when, say, confronted by the police, dealing with the myth of lip-reading (that is, the myth that lip-reading is an actual realistic alternative for Deaf people), and a lot more.

This is why I started watching the show, to learn more about Deaf issues and to practice my ASL; so imagine my surprise when it also turned out to be one of the smarter, more subversive shows I've seen in a long time, with a much bigger embrace of darkness and sexuality than you would ever expect from a series endorsed by Disney. And I don't say this lightly, as a childless middle-ager who's spent his entire adult professional life in the indie arts, and whose usual viewing habits skew much more along the lines of shows like Mr. Robot and Black Mirror and Lodge 49. The secret here, and what makes Weiss such a brilliant showrunner, is that she started on day one with super-complex characters to populate her universe, which then over six years allowed her to take these characters in all kinds of unexpected directions and let them do all kinds of fascinating things, while still making it all feel organic and natural and unforced, turning the show into something riveting and at all times surprising.

Take for example the teen girls at the center of the show, the aforementioned Daphne (played by Katie Leclerc) and also Bay (Vanessa Marano), the half-Puerto-Rican, half-French girl who grew up in the lily-white Kennish family. Weiss and company show that some of the girls' personality traits come from straight DNA — for example, Daphne's natural talent for sports (which mirrors her biological dad's time as a Major League Baseball player), or Bay's natural talent for art (which mirrors her biological mom's similar talent) — but they also demonstrate that some of the girls' traits come from their upbringing — Daphne is much more fiercely confrontational and unafraid of danger than she probably would've been if growing up in the posh suburbs, while Bay has an appreciation for refinement and talent for negotiation that clearly comes from her adopted family. It results in a delicious frisson between nature and nurture when it comes to the two, giving Weiss and co. ample opportunities to send either careening off in unexpected directions^, but in a way that it never feels forced or unnatural.

[^One of my favorite moments, for example, was when Daphne had a meltdown after the unexpected death of her adopted father near the end of season 3, and the notorious goodie-good ends up doing cocaine and having sex with a Latino gang leader from her old neighborhood, among other delightfully transgressive behavior. I tweeted about this at the time, and Weiss actually responded, reminding us that her behavior came from a place of grief and that there was a heavy price for her to pay for it in season 4, which I agree with; but still, I love the idea of Daphne in her forties, having too much to drink at a suburban dinner party one night and blabbing all about that summer she did cocaine and had sex with gangsters, which would instantly make her the coolest mom that suburb had ever known.]

This can all be applied to the show overall as well, from Lea Thompson's mousy soccer mom who eventually becomes a bestselling author of steamy “herotica,” to Constance Marie's journey from a home-based hairdresser to the owner of an interior design firm. But perhaps my favorite aspect of all about Switched at Birth is the breakthrough performance by Sean Berdy, who might possibly go down in history as the world's very first deaf teenage heartthrob, a designation I'm sure he's grappling with now but that I bet he'll look back on with fond amusement when older. He plays the rebellious, motorcycle-driving Emmett, who starts the show as Daphne's best friend but then eventually gets into a tumultuous on-and-off epic romance with Bay, the details of which turned me for the very first time in my life into a non-ironic, unapologetic teen-girlesque 'shipper. (Goddamnit, Bay and Emmett, why can't the two of you just fucking love each other like you both know you want???!!!!?????!!!!11!!!1!!!)

Emmett serves as our stand-in for the Deaf community at large, personifying many of the political and social issues that that community grapples with (at one point he's beaten by the police for not being able to hear their demands to put down a wrench he's holding; he starts the show angrily declaring that he will never date a hearie or talk out loud, just to eventually do both; he emotionally grapples with his divorced dad's decision to get a cochlear implant), and Berdy brings a cool, firm finesse to it all, an impressive performance that hopefully bodes well for his future in Hollywood. (This is not to mention that he's hilarious in real life, away from the show — for example, to see one of the fastest and wittiest ASL conversations ever recorded, check out this improvised talk he once did with his TV mom Marlee Matlin, in which he riffs comedically on her 1987 Oscar win for Children of a Lesser God, and as a surprise whips out a cheesecake photo Matlin did in her twenties for a lad magazine.)

I'll undoubtedly have a lot more to say about my adventures this year into ASL and the Chicago Deaf community, and of course I hope you'll follow along for the latest (and also feel free to drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com to let me know your own thoughts — this goes for you as well, Ms. Weiss, if you'd like to send along any corrections or clarifications to this essay). But for now, if you have Netflix and haven't watched Switched at Birth yet, I don't know what you're waiting for, a mind-expanding Peabody Award winner that just also happens to be one of the most entertaining shows you'll watch this year. I thank everyone involved for the care and consideration they put into making it, and I'm excited to see what Weiss and co. have in mind next.

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