My new name

Okay, so I am sitting here at the pub waiting for Husband (he deserves a capital “H”, don’t you think?) and typing away on my Palm Pilot with the help of an infrared keyboard; about 1/3 of the size of a regular keyboard and quite effective. Above my head, on a bar TV, The Simpsons entertains via CC when I glance up. Back at the house is one of two Motorola v101 cellphones we have purchased; these phones are designed with text messaging and ICQ in mind, and have built-in qwerty keyboards. We are waiting for the other to arrive from an Ebay seller.

My sister commented to me early on in an email that I was damned lucky to go deaf in the era of technological marvels I live in and how right she is.

Yesterday I got my deaf name. A deaf name is a single sign that is all yours, rather than fingerspelling the individual letters your name all the time. As Ariel pointed out yesterday, "only deaf can give deaf names!" (Since I am sure most, if not all, of you reading have some understanding of the "Deaf culture" and the "Deaf pride movement" I'll leave exploring that to another post.) Anyway, Ariel, who is, I guess, "Deaf by marriage", gave me mine; it's a combination of the first initials of my 'real life’ name and to my eyes looks a little inelegant but hey, I didn’t get to pick my name the first time ’round either so there you go. But I also got the job of assigning Husband his deaf name. So I thought about it and because he is a musician, I've combined his first initial with the sign for 'music'. It makes for a very attractive sign, if I do say so myself.

I realize that I will have to assign “deaf names” to everyone Husband and I discuss on a constant basis. Bit of a responsibility, that! But I will have some fun with it. There’s got to be some silver lining in all this koff! koff! dark cloud!

ronnie