Rachel and the Italian Asshole

I'm on Luca's archaic work computer because my internet has been down for six days. FRUSTRATED! I have so much to say and five minutes until some pop-up on his computer erases what I've written. Typing my ass off, right now.
I miss Rachel.
The Italian guy was a first class Asshole. He called Friday night to try to get together, but we were in Siena, Pienza and Montalcino drinking Brunello and eating pecorino cheese with honey. Then, he called Saturday morning (motivated, wasn't he?)and asked to meet us at the beach. Me, being the naive American that I am trusted that I could leave Rachel alone in the water with a guy and his friend in broad daylight. I underestimated the asshole-ability of an Italian guy. If I ever run into him again, I'll pop him in the nose. He tried to kiss her. Imagine that. Rachel blew him off and broke his heart.

REWIND

I will say this. When we met the guy and his friends at the outdoor pub, Rachel had her hair down, so that her processors were not visible. Not one of the group suspected that she might be deaf. I kind of watched the scene in wonder and curiosity.
On Saturday at the beach, Rachel had her hair in ponytail. When the guys arrived and suggested they go for a swim (assholes), Rachel told me that I needed to explain to them that she was deaf and that they would need to speak to her so that she could read their lips. *smile*
My reply: Rachel, I'll tell them, but the point is kind of irrelevant considering you won't be able to understand each other anyway.
Asshole took the lipreading thing a little too seriously.
Anyway, as I have been saying throughout my blog, living in a foreign country and not understanding or being able to communicate in its language is very similar to being deaf.
The guy apparently decided that body language was the correct approach given the situation.
Rachel shot him down.
She is a princess.

Rachel,
Thank you for your post and the beautiful things you had to say about my family. I miss you already, my car seems empty without your calming presence amidst my freaking lunatic children. *smile* I learned a lot from you, appreciated your calm and deep way of viewing the world and life in Tuscany, and Loved watching Sound and Fury with you, somehow that just seemed right.
Love,
(Young) Aunt Jodi and Fam.

And this...is ART.


Next guest...my dad's comin' to town (God help me!)

Rachel and Her Italian Romeo

 

*Wiping sweat*
Ok. I decide to take Rachel out for a little Grosseto nightlife (no easy task given that there is no nightlife in Grosseto) and manage to find an outdoor bar with a decent amount of people hanging out and casually drinking. We choose a table in the back of the place and sit down next to each other to people-watch. Ten minutes later two guys sit down right next to our table.

The waitress ignores us and goes directly to their table to take a drink order.
Rachel and I begin speaking about stuff in general, in English, and the guy closest to Rachel notices that we are obviously American.
He begins staring and smiling at Rachel.
I get up to get Rachel and I drinks because the waitress is obviously never coming back, I see a friend, text another and return to the table.

The guy has inched his chair closer to Rachel's in an "I'm trying not to be obvious but I think you are REALLY hot" kind of way...

More smiling between the two.

Finally, I can take it no longer. I stick out my hand, smile and say, "Hi, I'm Jodi (smile)...and this is my friend Rachel."

I have no patience for blatant flirtation - I'm too chicken-shit to make a move guys. I just spent fifteen days in Dublin with five girls who were the same way. I had to do something.

*Rachel is dangerous*

She is so sweet and tiny that every man who meets her wants to hug her and protect her from the world. But she also has these piercing green eyes, so that ain't all they want...(Don't worry, Melissa, I instigated, but I supervised...and translated, and translated)

The highly stimulating conversation goes a little something like this:

Romeo: Uh. Hi. Where are you from?

Rachel: Atlanta, Georgia.

Pause of about ten minutes while Romeo tries to think of another question to ask in broken English with me translating.

Romeo: Uh, eh. Do you study?

Rachel: Yes, I study photography at the University. I'm spending the next two months in France studying.

Eight minute pause.

Romeo: Tell her I think she's pretty.
Me: You tell her you think she's pretty, this is how you say it in English. (I draw the line at telling Rachel she's pretty as if I were the guy hitting on her. Italian men are so weird)
Rachel: Thank you.

Fifteen minutes pass as Romeo's friend Laura starts speaking decent English so that I can take a break from this stressful work of boy meets girl.

group shot

Romeo: Ask her if she likes guys who bodybuild and go to the gym. (Romeo flexes non-existent muscles)
Me: (I grimace and translate this latest hot item)
Rachel: Um. A man's personality is more important than whether or not he goes to the gym.
Romeo digests this tidbit, decides that it is an acceptable answer (God was I tempted to say that she said she likes guys with REALLY big muscles)and goes back into his corner to debate the next thought-provoking one-liner.

How interesting to vicariously live a blatant pickup attempt by an inept, lost in love Italian 26 year old boy. How do Italian women deal with this shit on a daily basis?

He was so cute, though and so into Rachel.

*Rachel plays it cool*

Romeo: Um, uh, em. Do you like Science Fiction or horror films?
Rachel: No, I hate them. I like Romance films.
Romeo: (devastated) oh.
Rachel: But my brother and sister love Science Fiction films.
Romeo: OH!
Me: Oh God.

(Interrupting for a special message to Naomi: Jordan held Rachel's hand...good luck to you in December with "A")

I would love to say that the conversation gets better. It doesn't.
I'll keep you posted.
Round 2, Saturday morning, beach date.
Romeo was definitely no Paotie (got your back), but he was a persistent little Stallion.

 

Hurricane RACHEL!

Rachel's powerful voice is rocking the Deaf Community:
COOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUGH! Same old criticism that I get all the time - My life’s not good enough without ASL. Deaf people should own deaf children, not the parents.

First of all, I believe that deaf people or ANY people do NOT have the right to make a decision for someone else’s child. ONLY the parents should make the decision for their own child. (AMEN)

I believe that deaf children who qualify for AVT and CIs should NOT learn sign language before learning spoken language; however, I will not go after parents and say to them, “Do NOT teach your child sign language.” I will just share my experiences and tell them that I got a CI when I was a toddler and a second one when I was older, I was raised with the AVT approach and did not learn ASL, and I’m very happy with my parents’ decision. If they ask me what I believe, I will tell them that I believe that deaf children who QUALIFY for CIs and AVT should get CIs as soon as possible, go with the AVT approach, and not learn sign language until they master their auditory skills, unless they find that the CI and/or AVT is not working well for their child for some reason, and then they can try a different method. As I said, I’m not going to go in parents’ faces and say, “YOU should do this and this and YOU should NOT do this and this.” Parents have the right to make their own choices. Choosing the best method is an individual choice, not one big group’s choice nor one famous leader’s choice, not anyone else but the parents’.

Wow...inspirational words for the hearing mother of a deaf child with a cochlear implant. I cannot speak for my son, I can talk about him and his progress, regression, behavior, personality, but I do not know what he will say about this entire experience ten years from now. Please, please let him be as proud of himself as Rachel is of herself. Let him find a strong voice, stronger than mine based on his life experiences.

The Deaf Community requested to hear the voices of cochlear implantees and here she is...RACHEL! Her purpose is not to grandstand, it is to be proud of who she is, what she has accomplished and where she plans to go in the future. She speaks with that young, collegiate, "I'm going to kick some serious ass, because I can" voice. There is NO subtlety of hopefulness in her voice, she is convinced and self-reliant. Independent. Amazing.
This is part of a post I wrote back in December that quotes Melissa's comments about Rachel's travels in France:

Here's a story that is a real testament to how necessary the ability to hear
and speak are to be truly independent in the hearing world. As I had
written before, Rachel was in France. She was volunteering with an
organization called Volunteers for Peace. The organization is affiliated
with UNESCO and recommended by the Princeton Review, and so it looked pretty
good. According to their write-up, she was supposed to be working with
kids, with people with disabilities, helping out in the fields on the farm,
etc. Unfortunately, it turned out that the woman who ran the farm was very
nasty.

She was constantly yelling at the volunteers but especially Rachel
as she apparently does not like Americans. In addition, rather than
activities to help promote peace, she had the girls doing nothing but
cooking and cleaning the house. Rachel tried to speak to her about the
situation as she was the only one who spoke French and could communicate
with the woman, but the woman only got nastier. *There were two other volunteers with her for the week, both from Korea. The Koreans spoke English but not French. The leader spoke French but not English. So, my deaf daughter, whom the experts told me 20 years ago would probably never speak English well, acted as the translator between the leader and the Korean girls since she's fluent in both languages.*

NOTE: Rachel didn't start studying French until the second semester of her 9th grade year. Her high school was on a semester system, which enabled her
after taking French every semester to study through French 5 followed by a
full year of AP French her senior year and a semester of French in college.
Plus, she went on two exchange programs to France and then spent 3 weeks
there with her French friends last summer as well and has maintained email
and written communication in French with a couple of French pen pals since
9th grade as well.

...Rachel had spent $250 of her own money plus her frequent flyer mileage and
my parents' to get there, and so she wanted to try to salvage some of the
trip. Therefore, she opted to leave the farm and make her way to Bayonne,
France, where she has some very close friends and which is at the opposite
end of the country from where she was in the middle of rural France outside
of Marseilles.

She got a ride to the bus stop in the little town near where
she was. She knew that she needed to get to the train station in Marseilles
but didn't know anything more than that. In French, she asked two high
school students at the bus stop how to get there. They were very nice and
sat on the bus with her, showing her where to get off and telling her which
bus to transfer to. When she got off the second bus, she asked the bus
driver in French how to get to the train station. He told her how to get
there. She walked a few blocks to the train station and asked in French at
the station how to get to Bayonne. This entailed taking two trains for a
total of 7 hours, transferring in Bordeaux.

Throughout all of this, she was in constant touch with me and with her friends in Bayonne via cell phone. I cannot imagine what she would have done had she not been able to communicate as well as she can. She certainly would have been stuck at the farm for the full 2 and a half weeks. Also, being able to speak to her throughout this ordeal certainly kept me from being one basketcase of a totally anxious mom.

All's well that ends well as she's back home tonight safe and sound, having
enjoyed the last part of her trip much more than the first. Oh, one more
thing - If anyone knows of any great organizations that run volunteer
programs in Europe for college students, we'd love to hear about them
because she will be there again this summer and has about three weeks to
fill before starting her semester abroad in France in September, and she's
certainly not going through Volunteers for Peace again!
HOW'S THAT FOR AN AMAZING STORY? YEAH, SHE'LL BE AT MY HOUSE NEXT SUMMER FOR EUROPEAN VACATION PART 2 (CAN YOU BELIEVE HER MOM TRUSTS ME WITH HER?:))
Yes...Hurricane Rachel is blowing away Deafread.com with her candid and confident voice.

Re: Ci Controversial, Why?

Delicately dipping my big toe in the freezing water...
*Brrrrrrr!*

60 posts later, I have finally taken the time to research the word "Audism."
To do so, I went straight to the About.com queen, Jamie Berke

I'm Better Than You
In the deaf culture, calling someone an audist is akin to calling someone a racist.
What is audism? A simple definition would be that it is a negative or oppressive attitude towards deaf people by either deaf or hearing people and organizations, and a failure to accomodate them. People who have audist attitudes are considered to be audists. For example, the refusal or failure to use sign language in the presence of a sign language-dependent person is considered audism.

According to an article in Capital D Magazine (vol. 1, issue 1) (now apparently defunct), Tom Humphries invented the word "audism" in 1975 to mean an attitude that people who hear and speak, or have good English are superior. This applies whether the person who hears and speaks is deaf or hearing.

*Hmmm*

The writer of this post says,
Think about it. What are advocating of CIs blogs about? Success stories. Oh, I can hear the lake! Oh, I can hear the crickets! Oh, I can hear music! Oh, I can hear the sounds of human voice! And the list goes on. Doesn’t it seem audistic to boast of hearing success as if being deaf is not so cool?

What if deaf individuals who have worked so hard in avt and in life in general are just proud to live their deaf experience with a ci and the "superiority aspect" of being fluent in the English Language has nothing to do with it? What if they are advocating "Choice" in the deaf experience by discussing the benefits of ci? If Rachel is here on deafread.com to interact in productive dialogue with individuals interested in her experience, is she an audist because she is willing to openly answer questions about her journey? Or is she an "audist" because her views conflict with those of readers?

She responds to criticism, reads it, listens and reflects...she is not an audist.

*Audism is in the eye of the beholder*

Jamie Berke has been so generously relating her Cochlear Implant Experience, this is what she shared earlier today:
On the way home, I found I could hear Bob's voice. At home, I even heard him laugh. At the grocery store, we were asking the pharmacist questions, and suddenly I realized I could hear the pharmacist's voice. On the way out of the store, talking to Bob, I heard something else that it took me a moment to realize what it was...my own voice.

I now suppose that Jamie Berke will be considered an "audist" for wanting a cochlear implant and being amazed that it actually works.

But, no...because your post interestingly incorporates two aspects in the equation, "...the linguistic perspective. Why? Because the AVT therapy’s sole purpose is to train CI implantees to speak what? English!" You continue by saying, "But when we Deaf are faced with this attitude that ASL is ok for somewhat successful deaf children but spoken English is a must for a successful deaf child to grow into the world, it rubs the Deaf people WRONG way!"

suc·cess (sk-ss)
n.
1. The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted: attributed their success in business to hard work.
2.
a. The gaining of fame or prosperity: an artist spoiled by success.
b. The extent of such gain.
3. One that is successful: The plan was a success.
4. Obsolete A result or an outcome.
*Success is not in the eye of the beholder, it is in the eye of the person who has desired, planned or attempted*

Do you measure your level of success based on how others see you or as how you see yourself? Really consider the answer to that question and you will begin to see Rachel as a twenty year old woman who sees herself as successful. This is why she is not an audist, just a person who has achieved something desired after working so hard for so many years, and that she wants to share this experience with others. Audism carries a component of hatred, just like racism...do you really feel that Rachel hates you?

Or do you feel judged?

You wrote:
"Now, if ASL was not dismissed by CI advocates as unnecessary, the story COULD be different."

Rachel does not dismiss ASL in general, it just does not have a part in what has been her experience until now.

You conclude with this:
It is up to you, CI advocates, to drop the dismissal attitude of ASL as an important part of d/Deaf people, not just because it is a culture thing but also because it facilitates their connection to the language expression!

No one has dismissed ASL as an important part of Deaf people and Rachel is a success story for me as the hearing mom of a deaf child with a cochlear implant...I will NOT allow her to be dismissed.

As seen on the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Circle, Learn2Hear and Listen-Up yahoo support groups, many parents of children who wear cochlear implants are incorporating the use of sign language with their AVTherapy. There is no written law regarding communication methods and the cochlear implant. Actually, ALL communication methods are accepted and welcomed on these groups.

Why are so many people having so much trouble accepting the Cochlear Implant as a tool in approaches to Deafness?

(Paotie...I know, this was not one of my sexy, fun-loving posts just not feelin' it today...*wink*)
PS. Mike McConnel's hitting the road and I for one am really sad about it...check out his farewell blog here.

PILGRIMS AND PIONEERS

Feeling kind of nostalgic today, missing my family...so what I really need is an excellent video of a very special person, Rachel Chaikof, a pioneer cochlear implantee AND a designer extraordinaire of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Circle COCHLEAR IMPLANT AWARENESS CAMPAIGN. I'll let Rachel do what she does best...speak for herself.



Entry taken from Rachel and Jessica's (See my blog from November 1st -Jessica)Blog
September 19th, 2007

"Just wait and see when your kids become 18 years old or finish high school. I was one of them. I grew up oral and I often was told that I am hard of hearing (which is not true) because I speak fairly well. Today I have considered myself as a Pride Deaf woman. I wish that I had learned ASL many years ago. I also wish I had made alot of Deaf/HH friends back then. I respect you that you've chosen your kids to learn to speak and many more. I am not surprised that you will regret this later on. Wait and see ....."

While my sister and I have been raised in the hearing world, our deafness will always be part of us, but it does not define who we are. Nearly 30 years after the revolution of the cochlear implant, the debate of using sign language is still endless. Deaf advocates are taking advantage of the cyberworld by using blogs to advocate that babies with cochlear implants and even normal hearing babies use sign language starting as newborns. They believe that deaf infants who start learning sign language as soon as possible will have better expressive language than children with cochlear implants who do not learn sign language. As a 20 year old adult, I firmly prove these deaf advocates wrong because I do not regret that I have not learned sign language. I feel that ASL is absolutely unnecessary to be part of my life as I am leading a rich life in which I hear and speak well. I graduated from high school with honors and am now a sophomore at a regular mainstream college.

Many people have been fooled into thinking that I am not deaf because my speech is clear and also because I hear well. This is to thanks to all the years that I worked in Auditory-Verbal therapy where my therapist and family taught me to listen and speak.

In my public middle school, which had a total communication program, I met a few students with cochlear implants and hearing aids, and they all signed and also spoke. Their speech was very unintelligible because they relied on sign language frequently. Most of them were also not mainstreamed and were in a self-contained classroom all day. If I relied on sign language like these students, my life would have been like theirs In that I would not have fully participated in the mainstream environment, and my speech would have been unclear and, thus, more difficult for people to understand. Also, my parents’ first language is English. Why should my parents have spent a great amount of time learning another language just to teach me for only a few years when there was an easier and valuable option of implanting me and teaching me their first language that they had a full grasp of? Also, my sister's language evaluation at age six showed her to have language that was 6 months to two years above age level.

Many deaf advocates told my parents that, when I became an adult, I would discard my CI processors, adapt to the deaf culture, and be angry at my parents. As a 20 year old adult, I am happily living in the hearing world with bilateral cochlear implants and would never discard my implants in the future. I am bilingual, but not in English and ASL, but rather I am fluent in both French and English. I listen to my iPod on a regular basis and attend movies in theaters with my normal hearing friends, fully enjoying the sounds of the movies.

My deafness will still be part of me as I have attended several cochlear implant conventions where I met other people with cochlear implants also raised with the Auditory-Verbal approach. We share our fortunate paths of being raised with this wonderful technology, the cochlear implant, by telling each other of our achievements that could not have happened without our cochlear implants and also share some small obstacles that we’ve had, such as not understanding people who mumble. At the conventions, we hung out in our hotel rooms or in the lobby and TALKED to each other until past midnight! These friends are my deaf community, but my main community is the entire world.


As the mother of a deaf child who wears a cochlear implant, I am constantly looking for role models. Rachel and Jessica are two exceptional young women with two strong inspirational voices and one helluva motivated and devoted mother!