Ten

Posted on by

1

When you come to the edge of all the light you have and must take a step into the darkness of the unknown, believe that one of two things will happen to you: Either there will be something solid for you to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.
– Patrick Overton

Ten years have passed since this terrible day.  In my sadness and anger, I could not see this far down the road, could not even imagine that a life existed for me this far in the future.

These ten years seem both the blink of an eye and a lifetime, and in some ways, I think both are true.  Whenever anyone asks me what happened and I tell the story of that terrifying morning, my face, my eyes, my voice reveal that it’s always with me, right under the surface. But so much has happened in that time, and I am so different from the person I was that day, that it sometimes almost seems like it happened to someone else and I only heard the story.

It didn’t, of course.  It happened to me.  And it was, as I’ve said, heartbreaking and terrifying.  And I was so angry and so sad for such a long time.  I spent literal years in counseling, dealing with the aftermath and accepting my new reality.  Mostly I’m ok with it now.  There aren’t whole days where all I do is cry and feel sorry for myself anymore.  I don’t melt down anymore when someone reacts rudely or ignorantly when I reveal my hearing impairment.  I don’t often get frustrated when I can’t understand someone.  In fact, I rarely cry about it at all anymore.  Not because it’s ok, and not because I’m not still sad about it – there are aspects of my life that will break my heart forever – but because, really, what good does it do?  This is just the way I go through life now.

Truth be told, it’s not that hard anymore.  I “pass” as hearing for at least 90% of my day, thanks to my cochlear implant.  David’s gotten used to communicating with me late at night or in the morning when I don’t have my processor on – we would kick ass at charades.  I’m surrounded, both with family and friends and at work, with people who know about my hearing loss and accept me without reservation and who don’t blink when I ask them to repeat themselves or turn the captions on.  I’m lucky that way.

Ten years ago, I thought the world was over.  Now, though, I can see that it was really just a kind of beginning.

Trade Offs

Posted on by

0

Letting go doesn’t mean giving up, but rather accepting that there are things that cannot be.
– Unknown

When I first lost my hearing, I used to say, “There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice if someone told me it would get me my hearing back.”  I thought, “Want a leg?  Take it.”  “Never get married?  Ok.” “Work at McDonald’s forever?  Yes.”

Ten years on, though, that’s no longer true.  Not because I’m glad it happened – I still can’t bring myself to say that – but because it’s no longer the tragedy it was in the first two years.  Don’t misunderstand me: It is the great sadness of my life.  But having lived my life these last ten years and achieved a modicum of success – personally, educationally, and professionally – it’s clear to me that my early imagined sacrifices were born out of fear and uncertainty about what kind of life I could lead with a hearing impairment.

When my dad came down the day after I lost my hearing, I remember sitting across the table from him in a Taco Bell in Richmond, saying, “How will I ever get anyone to marry me now?”  I already knew that my loss would be permanent, and I really did believe that I was broken, that everyone would always see me that way, and that it probably meant no one would be willing to make the effort to get to know me.  I also thought I’d never be comfortable enough with myself again to let anyone get to know me.  As my world shrunk when friends disappeared or stopped trying, it only convinced me I was right.

Luckily, it turned out I was wrong. And I’m not just talking about David; I mean friends I made in law school and after, too.

So when the Genie comes and says, “You can have it all back – music, the rain, babies talking, singing, all of it – if you only give up David (or your law degree, or your leg, or anything else you value),” the answer will be no.  Because, as hard as it sometimes is, as sad as it sometimes makes me, this is who I am, this is my life, and it’s pretty great, all things considered.

Missing

Posted on by

0

The Greek word for “return” is nostos.  Algos means “suffering.”  So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
– from Ignorance, by Milan Kundera

We’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of my hearing loss at the end of this month, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how my life has changed as a result.  I expect a series of posts on the topic over the next couple of weeks.

Things I miss:

falling asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof

the sound of my arms sluicing through the water when I swim

listening to the radio on a long night car trip, hearing it slowly start to fade out as you head out of range

being able to tell whether a baby is laughing or crying just from the noise (without seeing the baby)

audiobooks

watching TV while doing anything else at the same time (needing captions means I have to be looking at the TV to follow what’s going on)

hearing and differentiating between many different languages while walking in a diverse area

listening to ball games on the radio

talking on the phone for hours

eavesdropping – not in any nefarious way, but just on the Metro or walking down the street

easily understanding children, who never want to look you in the face when they talk, and who do some of their best talking from the backseat

New Rules

Posted on by

2

Rules are not necessarily sacred; principles are.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt

For 30 days, starting tomorrow, I commit to doing the following things to feel better about myself and be healthier:

  • In bed by 11, lights out at 11:30
  • One dessert a week (and candy bars after lunch and Slurpees after WW on Tuesdays are desserts, Mel) – choose carefully
  • Floss (I got out of this habit some time ago, and it’s time to get back into it)
  • Four workouts a week, minimum, including at least one weight training session
  • Wash my face nightly (I never do this, and I’ve never really needed to, but I suspect as I get older, it will pay off)
  • Track everything, no excuses – if I can’t figure out the points BEFOREhand, I can’t eat it

Obviously, the hope is that these things become permanent habits, but I’m not going to look that far down the road.  One month.  That’s totally doable.

What’s Next?

Posted on by

0

She loved the big, proud bodies of the women in the choir, and how they could swing, and how planted on the earth they seemed, with no apology for taking up so much space.  It was as if they assumed they were beautiful, and only needed to decide what color to dress the beauty in.
– from Blue Shoe, by Anne LaMott

Another week, another failure of . . . willpower? Determination? Giveafuck?  I don’t know.  But once again, when I weigh in tomorrow, I’m going to show a gain.  I hate this.  I hate myself like this.  And yet, given the choice between, say, chocolate or an apple for a snack, or going to the gym or coming home and screwing around on the internet, I nearly always choose chocolate and the internet.  I’m so tired of being tired of this.

I don’t know how to start making better choices.  I don’t know how to commit to something, for real, long term.  I mean, just DO it, is the short answer, but how?  I can string together days, even a week or two of good habits, but somehow I always get off track.

I think I need to have something to work for, besides just losing weight.  For example, I realized once Couch to 5k training ended weeks before the 5k, which isn’t until the 22nd of this month, that if I didn’t have something to keep me going, I would just quit running altogether.  So I signed up for a local series of 5k Fridays – a 5k each Friday evening in April!  That’s kept me running at least twice a week (though I haven’t done anything else).  I did the first one this past week and finished in 45:00 exactly.  For me, that’s amazing – my mile splits were 14:29, more than a minute faster than anything I did in training!

Once April’s over, though, I don’t have anything to work for.  I don’t think I’m interested in running longer distances – it’s all I can do to stave off boredom in a 5k.  I could maybe do a 10k, but that’s not what’s next for me, I’ve decided.  I think what I’m going to work towards is a sprint triathlon.  I first read about this mysterious thing on Big Life, Little Blog, and it planted a seed. I didn’t even know there was such a thing – I thought all triathlons were those crazy Ironman ones, where you swim 2.5 miles, ride 112 miles, and then your insane ass runs a marathon.  That would probably kill me.  But a sprint tri?  This one, in particular?  I can totally do that.

I can already swim 300 yards, bike 12 miles, and run a 5k.  The challenge for me will be doing those things in succession and in anything resembling a decent time.  Practically speaking, the biggest hurdle for me will be finding a pool and getting there regularly to train.  I love swimming, so much, and I’m excited to get back in the water.

So, I’m telling you here: I’m doing this.  I need to do some more research and figure out a training program, which I will post here, for accountability purposes.  Come September 17th, I’ll be able to call myself a triathlete!

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday

Posted on by

0

Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted,
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning
Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.
– from Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Parc de la Chute-Montmorency

Shamrock Cake

Posted on by

1

May your blessings outnumber
The shamrocks that grow,
And may trouble avoid you
Wherever you go.
–Irish Blessing

Finally.  It’s cake time.  I found the inspiration for this cake on Pinterest, and the original link is here.  She doesn’t give a tutorial, and I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll give some pictures and tips.  You can do this with any color scheme – rainbow is very popular these days, too!

I thought this would be a great thing to do with Ellie and Adam when they came up to DC for the circus.  When they got here, I mixed up the cake batter (I used one box of white cake mix, but homemade is certainly great, too) and separated it into  6 small bowls and mugs, 1/2 cup of batter per container.  I had some batter left; probably enough to make at least two more layers, but that would have made for a disastrously tall cake!  Then I dropped varying amounts of green food coloring into each of them to get deeper and darker greens and let Ellie and Adam mix them up.  (I took the original blogger’s suggestion to leave one layer white, but I don’t think I will next time.  It’s just a matter of preference.)

I can’t tell you the precise number of drops of food coloring per bowl, except for the lightest green, which has only one drop.  I do wish I could have gotten darker greens at the end for more contrast, but this turned out just fine.  I suspect food gel would give you a more customizable array.

Next, I poured each bowl into a greased 5-inch cake pan.  The original blogger used 6-inch pans, and I can’t say really why I bought 5-inch, but either would be ok.  I only had two, so I started with the darkest two batters, since they would be the bottom layers.  I baked them at whatever temperature the box said, but for much less time.  I started with 10 minutes, and when they weren’t done, I kept checking every two minutes or so.  I think I found 14 minutes to be the perfect amount of time.  However hot your oven runs, they’re done when a toothpick stuck in the center comes out clean.

Once they’re done, they have to cool in the pans for about 10 minutes.  This is where the patience comes in (the kids were long in bed by this time).  After 10 minutes, turn them out on a wire rack to cool completely, and then regrease and refill the cake pans with the next lightest batters.

The cake on the right had a slight dome to it, and since it was the base layer and I wanted it to be flat, I just took a serrated knife and cut the dome off.

Repeat until all your layers are done.

Next is frosting.  I used canned vanilla frosting, and it took about a can and a half.  I cannot emphasize enough the cardinal rule of frosting cakes: make sure the layers are completely cool before frosting.  Otherwise, you’ll have crumby frosting, and no one likes crumby frosting.

Start with the darkest layer and cover the flat top with a thin coating of frosting.  Build up, from darkest to lightest.

When you frost the top layer, you can let the frosting fall over the sides and smooth it out.  I found that it was easiest to sort of do a thin “base coat” of frosting on the sides and then go back over it with more frosting to make it look pretty.  For decoration, I used the aerosol frosting from Wilton; I found it at Target in the baking aisle, but I’ve seen it in the grocery store, too.  It’s like EZ Cheese, but frosting.  Awesome.  It comes with four different frosting tips.  For the base, I used the star tip, and for the shamrock, I used the thin piping tip.  It was hard to get used to the pressure it took to make the frosting come out, so I ended up with more green on top than I would have liked.  But it worked out perfectly, because I just took a toothpick and swirled the edges of the shamrock into the white of the frosting underneath and got this neat textured look on top!

After the circus and the museum and the butterflies on Saturday, we had dinner at Red Robin and then came home for dessert.  The kids were super excited and, I’m not going to lie, so was I.  I couldn’t wait to cut into it, and I wasn’t disappointed:

I was so in love.  The kids were thrilled, and they gobbled it up, along with a little vanilla ice cream!  It was delicious!

You guys, this is so easy, you can do it for any holiday or color scheme you can think of.  I’d love to see pics if you attempt this!

Ellie and Adam’s Day of Fun!*

Posted on by

4

(* to be said in your best Janice voice)

To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kind of scary. I’ve wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.
– Jack Handy

So, my niece and nephew, heretofore referred to as the Princess and the Conductor, came up last Friday night to spend the weekend.  Friday night, they helped me make a special Shamrock Cake – to be blogged separately – and then went to bed to rest up for the big day on Saturday.

We took the Metro into DC – which they love.

Decked out in St. Paddy's Day finest!

Everyone smiled when they saw Ellie with her shamrock deely-bobbers (that’s what I’ve always called them – what do you call them?).  We arrived at the Verizon Center, and they were super, super excited because we were going to the circus, which they’ve never been to before.

I bought Adam a toy (Ellie declined) and we headed to our seats.  The clowns came out for the pre-show, and the kids were laughing and clapping.  Then, the lights went down, and were were asked to stand for the National Anthem.  And then this happened:

After that, it was basically non-stop awesomeness:

Strongmen

glow-in-the-dark jumpers

And my absolute favorite:

Tightrope walkers

But wait – it gets awesomer:

On a bike!

There was lots of other stuff I didn’t get pictures of – more clowns, tumblers, those guys who run around those giant hamster wheel things, oh – and the rope swingers, the ones who wrap the ropes (or fabric, really) around their hands or feet and slide down and back up.  Amazing.

There were animals, too, of course, but aside from the elephants, watching them just made me sad.

I don’t know if it was the PETA assholes outside the entrance protesting making me feel guilty or what, but the horses and the tigers were just a let down.  The tigers seemed almost drugged, and watching the horses run around those tiny rings, with their heads constricted so they couldn’t rear . . . it felt dirty.

Anyway, the big finale was a guy who set himself on fire and launched himself across the arena.  It probably goes without saying that that was Adam’s favorite part – boys and fire, you know.

Afterwards, we took a break for lunch, then headed to the National Museum of Natural History on the Mall.  On our way, we wandered through the Sculpture Garden:

Adam loved this giant bunny.

Once we got to the museum, we wandered around the ocean hall, where we saw the jaws of the largest shark ever known, and then the mammal hall, which had all sorts of animals from all over the world:

(Sorry for the quality; that one’s from my camera.)

Finally, finally, after a walk through the gems and minerals hall, it was time for the big deal, the reason we came in the first place – a trip through the Butterfly Pavilion.  It was as neat and amazing as billed – walking through hundreds of live butterflies of all species, nothing between you and them but air.

One landed on Ellie’s leis, but I wasn’t quick enough to get a picture.  This lady had one land in her hair:

Neither of them wanted to hold the paintbrush this big guywas on, so I took one for the team:

And then.  And then.  All of a sudden, Adam hollered, “Mel-mel, come here, look!”  And this is what we saw:

Untitled from Melanie on Vimeo.

Yeah!  A butterfly being born!  And two more trying their hardest to break out of their cocoons!  How cool is that?

By the time our turn in the Pavilion was over, the kids were worn out and ready to go home.  We drove down to Fredericksburg (they both fell asleep) to pick up David, whose car had broken down, then had dinner and came home.  Then it was time for the super special Shamrock Cake!  I know you can’t wait to see it, but you’ll just have to tune in tomorrow!

Very Pinteresting . . .

Posted on by

2

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
– Erik Pepke

Disclaimer: Although I am a lawyer, I am not an intellectual property attorney, and nothing in this post is intended or should be construed as legal advice.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Pinterest, a web-based social bulletin board of sorts.  I joined last fall, but in the past couple of months, I’ve become a daily user, and I really enjoy it. You can find me here.

Just this past week, however, people are all abuzz over Pinterest’s terms of service, many of them pinning a giant pin that says, “Dear Pinterest, Please change your terms of service or I’m leaving.”  The pin links to this site, which briefly parses the terms of service, basically just to raise awareness about what we’re all getting ourselves into.

I actually became aware of the “problem” last week, through this brief article in the ABA newsletter.  Basically, the deal is this:

Pinterest’s terms of use require that you agree to post only your own original content (because you own the copyright to that) or content created by others from whom you’ve obtained express permission to post on Pinterest.  Additionally, Pinterest puts all the liability on you in the event that you are accused of a copyright violation.

This is pretty standard stuff – they don’t want to be on the hook, given the insane amount of content that is posted on their site daily; there’s simply no way they could curate it all.  And I don’t think that, in itself, this is that big a deal – Pinterest has a very straightforward procedure to handle copyright complaints.  Pinterest will remove content at the request of the copyright’s owner, and, ideally, that will be the end of that, although Pinterest does reserve the right to prosecute you for any violations of the terms of service.

The terms of use also state that you grant Pinterest the right to license or sell the content you post.  This, as the site linked to above explains, means that if you post a picture from my site to your Pinterest Board without my express permission, Pinterest can sell that picture, perhaps to a marketing company that uses it to advertise a product.  If I see the advertisement and call foul, the company will head to Pinterest, which will waste no time at all fingering you, and the next thing you know, you and I are squaring off in court.  I do think this is pretty shitty, given that it’s YOU who will be on the hook for the copyright violation when it was Pinterest who sold the thing in the first place.

As I said, though, these terms are pretty standard.  The problems I have with them are these:

1. Pinterest bills itself as a social media site – the point is “to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”  Part of the fun is seeing what your friends (and strangers) pin and then repinning those images to boards of your own, often starting a conversation when you see who else likes the things you do.  If you can only pin things you own the copyright to or things that you have express permission from the copyright owner to pin, the social aspect absolutely disappears, except for “likes” and comments.

2. If Pinterest was serious about preventing copyright violations, and it says it “respects the intellectual property of others and expects its users to do the same,” it should have come up with a better model.  I’m thinking of something along the lines of the way you can set your account on Facebook to require the site to seek permission from you when someone wants to tag a picture you’ve posted.

As it stands now, no one has any control over what’s posted.  For example, say I pin my own picture, and my friend Karen asks me if she can repin it.  Of course I’m going to say yes.  But once it’s on her board, I’ve lost control of it – her friends can repin at will without ever getting my permission, even though my permission is non-transferable.  The same is true for something I post from someone whom I’ve sought express permission to do so – I can’t transfer that permission to Karen, but there’s nothing to stop Karen and her friends and their friends from repinning it anyway.

3. Look at the link I just posted and the examples Pinterest gives of how to use the site – click on one to enlarge it.  There is no way “Joy” owns the copyright to all those pictures, and she has not cited the source of the picture in the caption (which is supposedly good pinning etiquette).  “Tim” certainly didn’t take that picture of the D&G belt he’s got posted on his style board.  Pinterest is actively encouraging you to use its service in a way that violates its terms of use.  This is the one that bothers me the most.

To be honest, though, I am actually not too worried about all of this for one simple reason: Aside from situations in which people attempt to profit from images posted on Pinterest to which they do not own the copyright, I find it very hard to believe that the companies and people who do own the copyrights will object to their images being pinned on Pinterest.  Because almost no one pins things they don’t like, it’s essentially free advertising for stuff people love, and if you’re a business, that’s always good.  If you’re a blogger and you monetize your site, well, more page views equals more money for you.  If you don’t monetize, it’s still great to get eyes on your blog; it increases community and you never know what will come of it.  Maybe this is simplistic, I don’t know, but that’s the way I see it.

Again, this is not my area of the law; I have no idea how things will shake out.  As the ABA article says, “Courts are still deciding whether the site owner or the user owner should be ultimately responsible.”  Obviously, when you signed up for Pinterest, you agreed to the terms of use, and you’re bound by them.  Of course, like most people, you probably didn’t read them.  I know I didn’t (bad lawyer!).  Hopefully this discussion will get you to do your own research and decide for yourself whether you’ll change your pinning ways, delete your account, or continue on as before.

(Lawyers, chime in if I’ve misstated or misrepresented anything – I’d be happy to make corrections.)