(Kelley’s note: if you wish, you can follow the conversation back to Lindsey’s previous question).
I’m always bringing something to the table. Today, I’ll have whatever everyone else is having–except beer, unless it’s Zima… I know, chick beer. I get ragged on for it every time. So, feel free.
Your ASL class sounds GREAT! I’m a fan of small classes. I went to a tiny, private, all-girls school (for the last 3 years of high school). It was more like a big blue house. There were 72 students and that was from grades 6 to 12 – 5 in my class. So, definitely no hiding. For two years, I was the only one in my French class. And, our teachers treated us like grownups. When I got to college, I was like, is this it? But it’s so easy.
I wish I’d seen that episode of The Practice. There should have been something like that in Children of a Lesser God. If I remember correctly, William Hurt voiced everything.
Camryn Manheim does rock. So does Allison Janney (C.J. on The West Wing). And I think Ileana Douglas needs more (and better) roles because she rocks too.
As far as seizures go, I should have said, in my comment on access, that it embarrasses me when I see that someone is embarrassed for me (why I wouldn’t discuss it outside the pub). A lot of this has to do with my high school graduation… A snippet of a story if I may: There we were, all four of us (one girl didn’t go. It was said that she thought she was too fat and didn’t want to be up on stage). Our sad little gym, for we were the poorest of private schools, was filled with family and friends and faculty and the lower class and their parents. And so, we sat in our folding chairs on that sagging stage, in our white gowns, our big hair done up around our white caps, and took turns applauding each other for this award or that. I had just returned to my seat with my scholar-athlete award and was bitching to myself because my name was spelled wrong again, when our headmaster announced that he had a special guest who wished to make a special presentation. An alumna, in an orange dress, wearing the same blue and yellow honor society sash as three of us, gimped her way to the podium with her ER “Dr. Weaver” crutch – now, I know that’s not a nice way to put it, but I was a teenager on stage about to get a handicap award. And I was not pleased. I have no idea what she said. I was watching the audience fidget. They looked down or off to the side or to me and then down again. They were uncomfortable or embarrassed. Or both, I couldn’t tell. I glared at my mother so she would know how pissed I was. She tilted her head in the direction of the podium. The woman had finished speaking. I went over, shook her hand, took the stupid Cross pen and looked back at the empty seat (five had been set up in case the other girl changed her mind). “I’m not handicapped. And I’m not fucking retarded, so keep it,” is what I wanted to say. I smiled and said thank you and wished I were somewhere else.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to make myself vulnerable in my comment on access. Talking about seizures doesn’t bother me at all. Weird as it sounds, I’ve had some pretty funny postictal moments. When I said that I wouldn’t ask you about aftershock as seizures (outside the pub), what I meant was, I wouldn’t want that kind of fidgety attention (I should just get over that). Even in the pub, I was nervous that someone would think I was being too personal (side note: I get embarrassed when someone is too personal too soon and I didn’t want to be one of those people). Then I thought, why am I being so wispy about this? When did I start caring about what other people thought about me???
I don’t know what my point is anymore.
Ah, with anything though, it makes a difference when you can laugh at yourself and at each other. And now I sound preachy and I’m boring myself. It must be the Zima….
This was a long one, and with you being a writer with work to do, you don’t have to respond. A simple nod is fine. Besides, the more you talk about your next book, the more we want you to hurry up and finish it (grin).
Lindsey
I went to a boarding school for high school and felt a similar way about college when I got there, although my response was more geared toward the lifestyle than the teaching style. I requested a single room in a co-ed dorm, and was instead placed in a dorm full of freshman girls (all double rooms) for whom the Big Autonomy of college was as much a major adjustment as leaving home was. But I’d been living away from home and doing my own laundry and taking myself off to the cafeteria for 4 years by then, and I felt like a fish in the desert.
I can understand your comment about being embarrassed by other people’s “fidgety attention” (nice phrase, that). Being singled out for “overcoming disability” is a pretty ambivalent experience, isn’t it? I think people have a real desire to acknowledge perseverance and the extra effort that’s required in our society to achieve many of the things that people without physical or emotional conditions take for granted. But there’s also often an unfortunate flavor of “why, she’s really hardly a cripple at all” that I have less patience with as I get older. Our culture is uncomfortable with difference, and we tend to reward people who manage their difference in ways that make them more like “normal” people (lord, don’t even get me started on normative socialization, we’ll be here for days).
I’m getting a hefty dose of this in my ongoing education in ASL. I have a Deaf friend who teaches ASL and starts the first class with an interpreter (the only time an interpreter comes to class) so she can explain that being deaf does not mean being a broken hearing person who has to be fixed: it means being a person with a different language modality. She stands up in class and tells the students, “I’m not broken!” and she’s right – she’s strong, articulate, powerful, and talks with her hands and face and body instead of her voice. Anyone who calls her disabled had better duck and cover.
I suppose what I really want is for people to acknowledge difference with respect and an approach of “okay, how can we all work together” instead of with discomfort or denial. When Nicola and I go somewhere, I want people to ease her passage and observe some standard courtesies (like making sure she has a chair). They don’t need to waste any time (theirs or mine) telling me what a fucking tragedy it is about the MS, or how brave we are, or how sad it makes them. I don’t care. Our bravery is our business, and there is nothing about our life that I would ever refer to as a tragedy, and it’s insulting to imply that I should. But… I also understand that people want to connect and want to express what are, in fact, their feelings. I just wish people could feel differently. I wish that people could understand that there are physical and emotional variations of humans, rather than the “ideal normal” standard to which most of us can’t really measure up anyway. Wouldn’t it be great to train everyone to cope with difference together, rather than having to give out awards for people who cope successfully with it alone?