Christmas. The season of carols, and reunions, where we eat and gab and eat. I wish I could eavesdrop on the aunts’ gossip and hear the babies’ babble. As for carols, I have thirteen years’ worth stored in my cranium. I sing them to myself until I’m hoarse and flatulent, and my mom or my sister hushes me (by a variety of techniques, like throwing a slipper in my direction) for being off-key.

The immutable question: What do I want for Christmas? A cochlear implant? Ninety per cent accurate lip-reading ability?

Both would be miracles. Cost-wise and possibility-wise. Gimme, gimme.

Bar miracles, I want an iPad or an iPhone.

And don’t you say ‘duh’. I have good reason.


Coolness is the Surrogate Mother of Invention~


Until recently, I didn’t care for these i-contraptions at all. They’re fads. But now I want an iPad or an iPhone the same way I wanted Harry Potter Film Wizardry. I have the latter now, thanks to my dear aunt. But the thing with fads, their price tags are so flashy as if the products are forever.

What happened recently? I discovered things from the paper and a magazine, that’s what.

An article called 25 Cool Ways to Work (Or Fake Work). Parentheses theirs.

A full spread of ‘What’s new’ in Gadget magazine, browsed at the hairdresser’s.

The things they dream up these days. Spray-on condoms. A ‘happiness hat’ that raps you a good one on the head if you stop smiling. An i-Bar that can turn into an aquarium or a touch-screen game console for your entertainment while you’re sipping a martini.

To be fair, I wasn't looking at the right place, but it would be nice if they also invent for accessibility. The Nokia 6300 has a light on the side that flashes when you receive a call or text message. Did they put that for the deaf? Maybe. Or it's simply coincidental that it works for us, too. Like the vibrate function. I love that. Very useful. But after reading about cell phones’ health hazards, I’ll opt for the Disabled Shop’s Under-Pillow Vibration Alarm Clock.

Numbers fifteen to twenty-five in the Work/Faking Work list were applications for your iPad. Because of course if you’re cool, you have an iPad. Some are tacky and tasteless (Mobile Mouse turns your iPad into a trackpad. Uh) but one stood out as genius. Dragon Dictation. Seamless voice-to-text translation.

You have something to say to me? Here, take my iPad/iPhone. Now talk.

Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yes, it’s a little weird talking AT your phone/iPad. But weirdness is in, isn’t it?


I Must Needs Parley With This Pad Thing


You talk rather than type.

Talking is faster than typing. Speed, coolness’s comadre.

Talking is also faster than fingerspelling, which is what I use along with lipreading.

I can already imagine the matrons’ faces if I bring an iPad to Mass and look at it rather than at Father Gino. I’ll tell them it’s so I can read the sermon. I bet family and friends will be talking a lot more to me, too. They won’t have to use the manual alphabet or type in their phones or reveal their ugly handwriting for all to see just to say Josh farted or ask about Onchie’s girlfriend.

They also have Dragon for pc. But you can’t always lug around your desktop or laptop, can you?

I’ve been deaf for a decade now, and I’ve been pretty happy. Call it Divine Mercy or plain luck, but there’s no better time for being deaf! This is simply a case of being given fried chicken and then wishing for ketchup.

There are amplifiers and videophones/translators but not all of us are aided by hearing aids or the ASL. Many of us rely on text, and what we have at the moment, like SMS, IM and emails are either sometimes slow and inconvenient or simply doesn’t apply to real-time, face to face conversation. So while everyone’s busy inventing for coolness, an iPad or an iPhone with a Dragon will have to do for me. When I have it.

Oh, right, a mobile Marcos. You know, a mobile voice-to-text ‘dictator’. And I wanted to alliterate in the title.

On the night before her departure:
Mom: Come here and pluck my underarm hair.
Me: Why? Will they inspect it?
Mom: (laughs) It's itchy.

I plucked her.
First time in many months, since Jouie has become the official plucker (I was promoted to colorist).
It was our goodbye.
Me: I will soon have to color your hair here, too.

~ * ~

Day One of Mommy-less Household:
I imitated Mom's habit of laying out all the kids' things, from underwear to hair barettes.
I did perfectly with Jouie.
But the pants I laid out for Josh looked like capris on him. LOL. Note to self: remove outgrown clothes from closets.

~ * ~

Farmville frolics:

Billy the Bull: Don't you point that sickle at me.

~

Me: Dad, in real life, can bulls and cows be placed in the same pen? The bulls will charge each other or rape the cows, right?
Dad: (gives me THE look and then ignores me)

~

Centipedes are NOT rare at all for me. I find them in the bathroom.

~ * ~

The person you are missing right this moment:Mommy.

Heather Leigh Whitestone-McCallum -- thank goodness I was on a mood for ear-research today. Only just discovered her. She was crowned in 1995, a full four years before I got wind of meningitis. She's the only deaf Miss America and now right next to Helen Keller on my favorite deaf people list.

"The Certificate in Sign Language Interpreting shall be a one-year post secondary program especially designed for any hearing person who has the burden to help the deaf understand the world that surrounds them. This aims to professionalize sign language interpreting in our country and to train professional interpreters."

-- found this in Manila Christian Computer Institute for the Deaf. Maybe they didn't notice it. Maybe I should apply as polite copywriter? And while I'm at it, maybe I can also suggest to them to add Creative Writing courses? Computers are for writing as much as for designing websites... :D

A prime candidate (for cochlear implant) is described as:

1. having severe to profound sensorineural hearing impairment in both ears.


2. having a functioning auditory nerve


3. having lived at least a short amount of time without hearing (approximately 70+ decibel hearing loss, on average)


4. having good speech, language, and communication skills, or in the case of infants and young children, having a family willing to work toward speech and language skills with therapy


5. not benefiting enough from other kinds of hearing aids


6. having no medical reason to avoid surgery


7. living in or desiring to live in the "hearing world"


8. having realistic expectations about results


9. having the support of family and friends


10. having appropriate services set up for post-cochlear implant aural rehabilitation (through a speech language pathologist, deaf educator, or auditory verbal therapist).

-- I'm not sure about my auditory nerves. My sensorineural hearing is absolute zero. Check, check, check on family, friends, communication skills, liking and missing the hearing world... Is terror of surgery equipment medical? No? So I have no medical reason to avoid surgery either.

"Post-lingually deaf adults, pre-lingually deaf children and post-lingually impaired people (usually children) who have lost hearing due to diseases such as meningitis form three distinct groups of potential users of cochlear implants with different needs and outcomes. Those who have lost their hearing as adults were the first group to find cochlear implants useful, in regaining some comprehension of speech and other sounds. If an individual has been deaf for a long period of time, the brain may begin using the area of the brain typically used for hearing for other functions. If such a person receives a cochlear implant, the sounds can be very disorienting, and the brain often will struggle to readapt to sound."

-- from Wikipedia. Woot! Should be interesting to undergo a cochlear implant. And ugh, I really hate meningitis. There should be a vaccine. If there is, people should get it. In cancer, you get to prepare to lose something... in meningitis, you go into shock, wake up and go into shock again because a big whack's been done to your existence.

"As with every medical procedure, the surgery (CI) involves a certain amount of risk; in this case, the risks include skin infection, onset of tinnitus, damage to the vestibular system, and damage to facial nerves that can cause muscle weakness, impaired facial sensation, or, in the worst cases, disfiguring facial paralysis."

-- still from good ol' Wiki. Don't you love Wikipedia? When I'm rich, I'll be a sponsor. :D

"In 2003, the CDC and FDA announced that children with cochlear implants are at a slightly increased risk of bacterial meningitis (Reefhuis 2003). Though this risk is very small, it is still 30 times higher than children in the general population, without proper immunizations. The CDC and other national health organisations (such as the UK) now follow the practice of providing prophylactic vaccination against pneumococcal meningitis."

-- this is the meningitis I was talking about, the same guy who sideswiped me a decade ago. The doctors at the hospital I was confined in called it TB meningitis. As in, tuberculosis meningitis. Pneumococcal, men.

You get bacterial meningitis from an ear infection. Meningitis is the inflammation of the meninges, the membrane between our skull and brain. There's an iota of sense in the joke that people with excessive earwax are oozing their brains out. Before I got ill, I was biking in the school grounds. Something-- an insect or maybe a little fairy-- was probably also joyriding and unfortunately slid into my ear. The pain was brilliant and enduring. I was crying during Mass later that evening. It was Sunday.

We didn't recover the insect/fairy. Years later though, I found gauzy things stuck to the q-tip I'd used.

"British Member of Parliament Jack Ashley received a cochlear implant in 1994 at age 70 after 25 years of deafness, and reported that he has no trouble speaking to people he knows; whether one on one or even on the telephone, although he might have difficulty with a new voice or with a busy conversation, and still had to rely to some extent on lipreading. He described the robotic sound of human voices perceived through the cochlear implant as "a croaking dalek with laryngitis". Another recipient described the initial sounds as similar to radio static and voices as being cartoonish, though after a year with the implant she said everything sounded right.[25] Even modern cochlear implants have at most 24 electrodes to replace the 16,000 delicate hair cells that are used for normal hearing. However, the sound quality delivered by a cochlear implant is often good enough that many users do not have to rely on lipreading."

-- LOL. I don't know how a dalek sounds, but I did imagine Donald Duck when I was told about the cartoonish-ness.

US$45,000 to US$105,000 -- er, wow. We'll think about this... :D

I did finish. Has it really been four days? It feels like yesterday that I send the manuscript to Miss Nina. My goal was eighty thousand words but the novel was done at sixty-three.

November 30, around 3 am: I only hav 2 items left on my outline, ms. nina! And it's making me lazy & blocked.

November 30, after 8 am: Well, jaypee, take coffee or something. Maybe you shouldn't sleep at all. Less than 16 hrs to go!

I had a good taskmaster, see? Hehe. She checked up on me regularly, but not too much to hound.

And how good it feels to have actually finished the book! Now I'm busy taking a break. Reading Possession by A.S Byatt, hence the subject title of this post.

...gets done when I'm asleep. That's why I 'brux'. I like that verb. "Why have you been bruxing? Is anything bothering you?" "My son bruxes. What do I do?" LOL.

I should stop reading about it already and get back to work.

For weeks and weeks now, my family tells me that I gnash my teeth in my sleep like some hungry monster. I'm not even aware of it. Sometimes it's so loud my sister hears it while she's showering for school! Typed 'teeth-grinding' into Wiki and was shown Bruxism. Scared me. I like my teeth and would like to keep them.... I'll have to go to a dentist sometime. Preferably soon. Before I start getting the symptoms! *cross posted in facebook.

Wikipedia's medical articles need to be made layman-friendly, by the way.

None of the associated factors match me, except 'disturbed sleep patterns'. It's crazy, no question. But I don't drink cola or coffee much, I prefer fruit juice and flavored green tea. I don't have any kind of apnea, and I've never had problems with my teeth. Never even had a toothache yet. I hope that doesn't change. I do eat chocolate, but my binges are few and far in between, and there haven't been any binges lately. I don't smoke. Oh look, irregular work shifts, that certainly applies to me. Drugs, drugs, drugs, Parkinson's and Huntington's, OCD, nope, nope, nope, nope.

This is so strange and I worry for my teeth.

Still, I'm somehow glad I don't snore instead. Though it's 'fixed' easier. I do sleep on my side, see. Whereas there is no suggestion at all on how to stop me from being angry while sleeping. No anti-teeth-grinding sleepwear or the like. I could prop my mouth open while I still have yet to see a dentist where I might be fitted with mouthguards, but then I'll drool all over my pillows. That's worse.

Oh right.

I'll have to clarify to Ms Nina that I must deliver to her 80 000, as I've said in my email. Most of those 29 000 words I already have had come out before November, in that blessed creative streak I went though. What followed before the accident and the RoCoTyP addiction had been puny spurts, not streaks.

I can do this. 50 000 / 18 = 2777. 77778

Haha. This is why I needed that finger-drumming, even just a pretend one. Pressure is sometimes a good thing. Wanting to prove true to your word is seldom bad, too. And I'm excusing my pun.

Now, to bed.

Yay, yay, yay!

Just saw Ms Nina's reply. She agreed. And will be my taskmaster! Hee.

Nina Macaraig-Gamboa: former READ e-i-c and now Joanna's taskmaster.

~

My email to her:

Subject: Hi Ms Nina! Here be a query...

That was just to get your attention, ma'am. Hee. It's more like a request.
 
First, I hope you and your loved ones are doing well po. Any news whether READ will make a comeback?
 
Now, the request, a tiny favor, though it's a big thing for me. I'm sure you are aware about NaNoWriMo. This would be the third year of my membership. But this time around I haven't uploaded my manuscript. We all work toward the same goal, the same deadline, but we still don't account for it, do we? 50, 000 words, and just for the satisfaction of being able to say you're a NaNo winner. For every person who 'wins', I think perhaps three or even five 'loses'. Me being among the 'losers'. I want to change that this year, but not for NaNo. For myself. I'm getting old. I should get a move on! And this is the only thing I can and am allowed to do.
 
I need someone with authority over me to make me account for my novel and indeed append 'the end' to it by the end of November. I never had trouble writing for a deadline for READ, remember? It's because though it was a joy, it was also a responsibility. Those novelists with contracts must have it so easy, compared to us bums who are only wishing to finish our first drafts without editors drumming their fingers in the background at all.
 
 So I thought to go ahead and be makapal and ask you, dear Ms Nina. You won't have to read it. I won't burden you with such a task! Just pretend to be drumming your fingers and expecting to see it on November 30.
 
It currently stands at 29, 464 words. By NaNo standards, it doesn't have to have 'the end' yet by the end of the month, just with 50, 000 words more. Would you, please, please, send me your editor-ish but friendly reminder email that you're expecting my 80, 000 words by November 30? You don't know how much you'll help me! I'm always just playing Roller Coaster Tycoon or Restaurant Empire on my laptop! Just thinking about you or, say, Ms Fay Ejercito (whose reviews and range of reviews were my favorites), waiting at the deadline is already motivating me to work my butt off.
 
There. Thank you so much for reading this absurd request, and thank you for considering it, too! God bless po.

~

Ms Nina's reply: