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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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10:51 a.m. - 2009-11-14
On the list of things I'm gagging to get checked when I have health insurance is my hearing. I know the amplification of a properly modulated hearing aid will help, when I wear headphones and press them tight against my ears I'm astonished by what I can hear, subtleties of speech and sound that just aren't there when my naked ears are listening. The odd thing is that some noises I hear with naked ears haven't gone missing or muffled at all. Some sounds are actually painful. It's like my ears' equalizer is off. High noises, steady mechanical noises are louder than loud. Electronic noises, any kind of hum or buzz or whine drills right into my brain it comes in so clearly. Overhead fluorescent lights will drive me to my knees. Yet, if I'm not looking into someone's face to read their expressions, and I guess, sort of lip read what they're saying, I usually have to ask them to repeat what they just said. At least I've trained myself not to say, "What?" all the time. I say, "Pardon? Didn't catch that." Or something equally courteous. And because I am courteous I'm starting to get hacked with Mick. A low talker anyhow, he's forever saying stuff with his back turned or muttering while the sink is running (background noises like that overpower speech, all I hear is the running water), or he'll say something in the car without a preface to get my attention (car noise + his being on my worse ear's side = me hearing nothing but a mumble). Then when I politely ask him to repeat himself he does, but he sounds really nasty and fed up. Like he's said it 14 times already and is at the end of his patience. Look, I know it's gotta be annoying, but my hearing loss isn't new and I am as polite and as patient as I can be, it's frustrating for me too, you know. Mick's father I've given up on entirely. He refuses to wear his dentures. The slurred mush that comes out of his mouth is impossible to decipher at all. So when FIL says something I just look to MIL or Mick to translate. Hey bud, you don't wear your teeth so I'm not obligated to strain to understand you. The one upside is how people love to talk with me, I look at them so intently it must seem as if what they're saying is the most amazing and interesting thing I've ever heard. Heh. They're flattered and I'm just trying to compensate for being partially deaf. Win-win, I suppose. Tell you what though, when (if) I get hearing aids I'm not changing how I wear my hair. Nor will I stop wearing earrings. Just like my glasses and my sometime use of mobility equipment, hearing aids are there to help me navigate the world better and aren't anything to hide or be ashamed of. So my cropped mop stays cropped and the ears stay decorated. If aids weren't so expensive I'd think about getting a wardrobe of them in a bunch of different colors and coordinate them with my pashminas. In other head decorating news, I hied myself off to Rite-Aid yesterday and bought some hair dye. Three colors of hair dye- a darkish golden blonde, a shiny bright copper, and a deep burgundy. Later today with Mick's help I'll pull as many strands as possible through a tipping cap and then make a potpourri of multi-colored lowlights with the three dyes. Might slip in a few pieces of that screaming magenta I did this summer too. No idea of how the end result will look. Might be wonderful, might be laughably awful. But Wednesday's inadequate application of 40% bleach meant that instead of the expected Billy Idol white I ended up with duckling yellow. My natural turd brown color is stubborn, stubborn, stubborn and I have A LOT of hair, so the one box of Raw was spread too thinly to work properly despite leaving it on for almost 2 hours and frying my scalp to a tender pink sizzle. Those who've seen my duckling head think it looks fine, but I am very dissatisfied. So, an experiment in lowlighting. Looming disaster or not, I'm not too worried. Currently my hair is so long (for me) that if my color job goes awry I can mow it off. When it's less than half an inch long my hair's color becomes kind of moot. So everyone say bye-bye to LA the Duckling. When next we meet I'll either be sporting a festive Mardi Gras 'do again or I'll have joined the Marines.
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