About a week ago I received an email from a friend of mine who works at UW-Milwaukee. She said that she liked my recent blog on conflict resolution, and felt bad that the whole thing happened in the first place. But she also felt somewhat wary, because after the blog was posted, a few prospective deaf students called her to ask if that kind of thing still went on at UWM. “The thing is, Chris,” she said in a subsequent IM conversation, “it happened a long time ago. What about all of our hard work since then? What about all of the improvements we’ve made? Don’t they count for anything?”

She had a point. A lot of people think that the deaf community (“community” in the sense that its fractured factions can still get together long enough to fight) is being overrun by negativity the way it is. So how does another story about a problem—especially a past problem—help anyone?

I asked my friend if I could answer that question with yet another UWM story, and though she’s by now almost certainly warier than she was before, she did say yes. So here goes: During the summer of that same year, 1990, I elected to live in the dorm and work in Milwaukee because it would’ve been as boring as hell to move back home. A deaf buddy of mine, Kevin, was a crew leader for this dormitory work thing called the Project Crew. Sign on with them and you’d basically spend the summer cleaning out three skyscrapers’ worth of old loft posts, beat up couches, and other junk left behind by the students who had just moved out. Kev told me they were hiring so I went and applied… and voila, this dream job became mine!

Anyway it came to pass that one day in July the supervisor of the crews told Kev to pick out six or seven people for a warehouse trip. None of us knew what this meant so Kev explained that UWM owned this huge warehouse about a mile off campus on Kenilworth Avenue. From what I could gather, it used to be a torpedo factory before it was donated as a gift to the University some years back, and had been used for storage ever since. We piled into a van and were there in ten minutes.

After a couple of hours spent moving some extraordinarily heavy metal desks around, we finally got our mid-morning break and went exploring. Kev found a bunch of us rifling through boxes of old Psychology Today magazines dating back to the 1970s—one contained some rather revealing photos depicting nude poolside therapy—and said he wanted to show us something. So we followed him up to the second floor to a wide hallway, and there it was: a water bubbler with the word “COLORED” stenciled above it. At first I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. I looked across the hallway and sure enough, there was another water bubbler (neither of them was hooked up, by the way) with the word “WHITE” stenciled above it in the same bold, black letters.

What can I say? It was a surreal moment. A couple of guys were muttering and touching the letters, as if using some other sense besides their vision would help prove that they were real. Another guy on the crew, a black student, looked on silently. Why hadn’t anyone painted over those words in all of these years? It was 1990, after all. How long had they been left on the walls? Forty years? More?

Now as bad as this all sounds, I also have to tell you something that will initially come across as contradictory. If you had asked me either then or today if—based on this story—I thought UW-Milwaukee was a racist campus, I would have said “no.” Even if you dragged me back to that warehouse and stood there with me as we looked at the word “COLORED” together. It’s not that simple. What if that sign was made when the warehouse was still a torpedo factory, before the building became a gift to the University? If so, what did its existence have to do with UWM? Nothing. Maybe the people who knew the sign was there but didn’t do anything about it bore some measure of responsibility (this wouldn’t include people who mentioned something to their supervisor, as Kev did). But how many people really knew? Enough to implicate an entire campus? Enough to prove that everyone who ever worked or went to school there believed the same things, endorsed the same things, and ignored the same things? That nobody there ever hoped for something different? The vast majority of people who went to UWM probably didn’t even know the warehouse existed!

Not that this is really the point. A painted sign on a wall is hardly a requirement for racism to exist on a given college campus. But if that’s true, let’s say we take that sign off the wall. It’s highly likely that it happened eventually anyway. The warehouse was recently converted into an upscale dormitory complete with studio space for art classes. We can safely assume the layout of the entire building has been probably altered to the extent that not only the signs but also the water bubblers and possibly even the hallway and stairs no longer exist.

What do these changes mean? Are they a good thing? In a sense, yes, because at least one of them shows that time has moved on. Shameful signs depicting a shameful era in Milwaukee’s history have been removed. It doesn’t matter if this happened for a reason as noble as the fight against segregation or for a reason as practical as needing to paint a wall so that a Coke machine could be installed. Or even some combination of the two. The signs are gone and we should be glad, right?

But it’s a good bet that somewhere, someone isn’t glad, and not because he’s a racist. All too often we move on at a price; one this world pays over and over, in one fashion or another, when our stories aren’t told. Suppose that there really is a Coke machine or something standing where that water bubbler used to be. Some kid drops a buck fifty in quarters into the slot to get his soda… but that’s all he gets. Is he better off for it? Are the rest of us? He has no opportunity to see what I saw that day, to run his fingers over those letters, or alter his life accordingly… even if in some small way. Outside of this story, what proof does he have that they were ever there? We can’t build a museum around every mistake we ever made. Yet for every choice that we made to preserve one sign, we painted over dozens of others. Thus we end up producing generations of students who not only will probably never visit a Black History Museum… they’ll also probably never learn anything about the humiliation black people once endured in the very building they live in.

So to my friend I’d like to say this: If some of our stories are painful or negative, then in telling them, we should strive to not destroy the progress that has been made since the time that we lived those stories. But we still have to tell them. If we don’t, how will we ever be able to judge whether or not any progress has been made?

Plenty of us take to the skies, whether it’s to visit family, friends, lounge by the pool while everyone’s suffering with the bitter cold days or simply to get away for a day or two. I take to the skies at least two times a year. I haven’t really had any dreadful experiences. Though I will say this, don’t watch any crazy shows that have anything to do with flying, that just makes me more nervous.

I’m a pretty causal and laid back flyer. I tend to keep my outfit as simple as possible, nothing with belts, sandals (or shoes I can easily slip on/off), keep the liquids to a minimum and pack that in a 1 qt bag, and keep that on top of my carry on, so I can take it in and out. Often times, I check my bags, but if I’m just traveling for two or three days I carry on my luggage. I rarely panic unless I know my flight’s leaving in 20 minutes or less and I still haven’t gotten through security, then I start panicking. But that’s only happened once, and when we got to the gate, the flight was delayed. Ugh, no one knew that until they told us right when the flight was supposed to be taking off.

Anyway, one of my biggest issues is that I’m not the kind of person that’s going to state that I’m deaf first thing, simply because I really don’t want to board the plane first. I hate being trapped in such a small amount of space, and if I get really unlucky, I might end up next to some people that, oh you don’t want to know what I’m thinking. And the one time I did mention that I was deaf, I ended up being escorted on the plane first. Being checked on like 20 times during the entire flight, and was escorted all the way to the person who was picking me up at the airport. it was the most BIZARRE thing ever. The only reason why I had mentioned I was deaf, was because the plane was being delayed numerous times, and there was no way of knowing unless I told them, so I wouldn’t miss my flight. Yeah, it was weird being escorted all the way to the car.

So over memorial day weekend, I decided to fly out of town (I’ve never really traveled during a holiday, but this trip wasn’t too bad). I didn’t have to wait in line to check any bags, I didn’t have to wait too long to get through security, and the flight was on-time. Ironically, I ended up sitting next to another DeafDC.com blogger. Small world, I say! She’s a different kind of traveler than I am. She likes to pre-board simply because she never knows when your row is being called. So it’s easier to just pre-board. It makes sense, but I would much rather, board when I’m supposed to board. I tend to guess when they call my row. But really, I don’t think I ever get it right. Who understand these intercom things?! But as we were talking, I thought it’d be so inexpensive to have one of those monitors where they can just tell you what rows are boarding, that way everyone can understand what’s going on.

On my flight back, I was on stand by, and the flight attendant said he’d call my name if I’m able to get on the flight. I told him I was deaf. So he just asked where I’d sit, and he’ll let me know if my name is called. So I waited till most people boarded, then they actually called my name and even though he was checking people on the flight, he remembered, and looked over in my direction and told me to go up to the desk. It was easy, but it can’t possibly be easy to remember people’s names all the time!

I’m curious, what do you think would make it easier for us to fly? All I want is something that makes it easy for me to understand the intercom if there are any delays, what rows they’re boarding, etc. That way I’m not constantly going up to the desk to find out what’s going on. Sometimes I’ll ask someone sitting by me, but it’s not guaranteed that I’ll understand what they said or that they’ll understand what the flight attendants on the intercom said.

Till next time, enjoy flying!

Technology to turn text into speech already exists. But what about the way around?

A new product just caught my eye. For hearing people, using SpinVox would be like having a personal secretary transcribing your speech. It can convert spoken words into a blog, e-mail and the such.

It means that the technology to instantly caption everything from obscure DVDs to podcasts to CNN.com video clips is here.

Should it migrate to portable devices, its ramifications for deaf people are great. We’ll be giving directions to lost hearing people in no time.

Wearing a hearing aid can increase your salary by up to $12,000 according to a Better Hearing Institute research article titled, “The Impact of Untreated Hearing Loss on Household Income” by Sergei Kochkin, Ph.D. (For the HTML version of the article, click here) . The researcher gathered data and quantified the relationship between what he calls “treated” and “untreated” hearing loss and a person’s household income as well as its impact on Federal income taxes.

Source: The Impact of Untreated Hearing Loss on Household Income

Source: The Impact of Untreated Hearing Loss on Household Income

Kochkin concluded that the decline in income for “unaided” people is cut in half for hearing aid owners. Also, for every 10% reduction in hearing loss (in “deciles”), an unaided and aided person loses approximately $1,000 in income. The research, conducted in 2004, was pretty balanced with 3,840 respondents. All of the respondents were divided equally among the “unaided” and “aided” as well as each level of “decile” loss. While the data is fascinating and most likely true, a few things about the report bothered me or raised unanswered questions.

For example, Kochkin said, “Indeed, hearing loss has been shown to negatively impact nearly every dimension of the human experience including: physical health, emotional and mental health, perceptions of mental acuity, social skills, family relationships, self-esteem not to mention work and school performance.” He also explained that, “…untreated hearing loss results in underachievement on the job.” This sentence along with the tone of the rest of Kochkin’s article implies that the culprit for these problems among deaf and hard of hearing people is their hearing loss. The fault really could lie in the attitudes of perceptions of many hearing people which in turn may foster poor self-esteem in the deaf individual. If every dimension of our human experience is as negatively impacted as Kochkin indicates, then we all would have a difficult time finding reasons to be alive.

In sum, Kochkin wants to repair a perceived problem that was created and perpetuated by the biases and attitudes of hearing people. It is well known that black people and women earn less than their white and male counterparts. Do we see research on disproportionate income levels among races and genders suggesting that Black people undergo surgery to change their skin color and women change their genders (both which are possible today, see skin bleaching and sex reassignment surgery from female to male)? No. Gender and race researchers educate society about the inequity and encourage the implementation of programs or incentives to even the playing field. And they’ve made progress in the last several decades.

The U.S. Census reports that the real median household income between 2002 and 2003 was $43,318. At five deciles, “unaided” people fall below the median household income for the U.S while “aided” people equal the median salary at the lowest decile. I am not confident, though that all “aided” people have salaries above the U.S. median household income. There is something off here.

It is interesting to note that there is no mention of Cochlear Implants in this study. Another researcher could do a follow-up study comparing the U.S. real median household income between hearing people, non-CI users, non-hearing aid users, hearing aid users, and CI users. But let’s take it closer to a true reflection of the qualities that hearing people really look for in a deaf person that may boost their income level. It’s not about whether or not they wear a hearing aid or Cochlear Implant; it all depends on whether they have intelligible speech and how well they can lip-read and/or listen.

It’s no secret that hearing people in general gravitate towards deaf people who are fluent speakers and understand them/hear them well. For instance, I’ve seen people with Cochlear Implants who hearing people struggle to understand while a deaf person with hearing aids is able to articulate him or herself better than the CI user. Each person could be surveyed or evaluated for their speaking/and listening comprehension skills and their salaries compared. Perhaps then, the true divergence between salaries, a person’s combined speaking and lip-reading/listening skills, would be more evident?

The price of hearing aids and the lack of insurance coverage is another story. Could we use this study as justification for insuring hearing aids? Well, according to a 2004 article about purchasing hearing aids, the average cost of hearing aids is $2,300. So if we decide to insure the full cost of hearing aids for all 24 million unaided people, it would cost a grand total of $55 billion. That would boost the overall earnings of all deaf and hard of hearing people by $122 billion according to Kochkin. He also says that the $122 billion translates to a Federal increase tax income of $18 billion (it seems like the Federal government is taking a higher proportion than that out of my paycheck though). This would be good for deaf and hard of hearing people and the Federal government, but it won’t appeal to insurance companies. What about Cochlear Implants? Well, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders a Cochlear Implant is about $60,000. Implanting every “unaided” deaf person would total $1.44 trillion. Of course, all of this is assuming that every deaf person consents to a free hearing aid or Cochlear Implant and that every device works as advertised (which we know is not true). Even after the person becomes a fully-fledged member of the “aided” society, the salary will still not become equal to that of hearing people. Will hearing people also extend the amount of respect that their “aided” colleagues deserve?

I have a better suggestion, why don’t we take that $55 billion and invest it in educational programs and tax incentives for businesses to hire and promote deaf and hard of hearing people. Once the people are hired, then businesses will realize that their attitudes and biases serve as the actual barrier, not the employee’s deafness. Hearing people don’t care about deafness; they care more about being able to communicate freely without barriers.

No, this isn’t an spam message or advertisment on how to prank calls. But it is about prank calling.

I ran across this website earlier today; take a look at it. It is a group of people, presumably hearing, discussing how to use ip-relay calls to prank people. There are even descriptions of prank calls that they have taken.

For me, the most interesting thing about the forum exchange wasn’t the fact that they were pranking people with ip-relay, but it was the glimpse into another world. A world that most of us deaf folks live in but sometimes don’t participate in. And I thought it was amusing how much fun they were having with something as simple (and important to us) as ip-relay!

A curious socio-biological phenomenon: As a deaf man I apparently don’t know how to get anywhere in a town that I’ve lived in for eight years.

Now this isn’t as strictly true as it first might appear. I can draw you a pretty decent map to everything within two or three miles of my house, and I can get you to all of the major highways with no problem whatsoever. The only thing I can’t do is direct you to indecipherable gibberish.

I was trained to lip read the differences between a “b” and a “p.” I can spot that little tongue-behind-the-teeth flick that indicates a “t.” And that goldfish pucker? A “w,” no sweat! I can pick all of that up. My lip reading skills are actually pretty good! If a guy pulls up next to me while I’m walking to BlockBuster or wherever and says, “Can you tell me how to get to indecipherable gibberish?” then by my count, if I lip read everything except those last two words, I successfully lip read eighty percent of everything he said!

Now my question for you is this: How should I respond to the guy?

People ask me for directions all of the time. I’m a walker. I look like I know where I’m going because more often than not, I do! I have long since tried to make myself less accessible-looking by shaving my head and growing a satanic goatee. You’d figure people would leave me alone, but no. Floridian retirees in station wagons ask me for directions. Pregnant mothers in SUVs filled with Sunflower Camp children ask me for directions. On one memorable occasion even the leader of a gang of unicyclists (he had a goatee too but his was merely unfashionable) asked me for directions. So let’s face it: Absolutely nobody finds me threatening. People will be asking me for directions for the remainder of my gentle walking deaf creature existence!

I used to have a similar problem with BlockBuster clerks. Whenever they asked me if I’d like to join their indecipherable gibberish programs, I used to say, “I’m sorry, I’m deaf.” But I soon forced myself to stop apologizing, because there’s no reason that I should be sorry. It’s not like I did anything wrong, right?

But I’ve since found that dumping the apology and simply telling people I’m deaf does a lot more than get me out of joining indecipherable gibberish BlockBuster programs. It also causes people to apologize to me, as if they did something wrong, and then drive off toward (or away from) whatever indecipherable gibberish destination they originally wanted directions to in the first place! This is not psychologically healthy for anybody, because what happens if they never get there? Bam, they end up projecting their navigational incompetence onto me, the gentle walking deaf creature!

Even worse is when these people have already tried (and for the exact same reason… probably failed) to get directions from some other deaf person in the past. Imagine the seething resentment that has built up by now! This is why I also hesitate to say “I’m deaf, would you mind writing down the name of the place you’re trying to get to?” All of a sudden I see in their eyes the math of a lion calculating the distance to an unsuspecting gazelle. “Sure!” they’ll say, grinning toothily, and then wave me over from where I’m standing on the sidewalk. It doesn’t matter if you look both ways before you cross the street. Once they start writing that note, it’s all too easy to get lulled into the trap and lose sight of the fact that you’re standing in the middle of the road. Some of these people write so slowly, you can’t help but wonder if that’s exactly where they want you to stay!

So help me out here. How should I respond? I’m morally averse to statements such as “I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” because I certainly can help them get to almost any destination they might wish to arrive at other than indecipherable gibberish. Equally problematic is saying “I won’t help you,” or some equivalent of that. I find such statements unbearably rude (and untrue, because even if I ultimately end up not helping a given driver find indecipherable gibberish, I was certainly willing). It might be easier to just keep on walking as if I didn’t hear the guy—pause here to appreciate the irony—but this action hurts my sense of personal pride. Lost motorists are not bums hitting me up for change. Whether I choose to ignore him or not, there isn’t a bum in Washington D.C. who doubts that I know how to direct him back to his street corner.

Hopefully you’ll have some advice for me soon. I’ve considered giving up walking, but even when I’m stopped at intersections in my Toyota waiting for the light to change, people will pull up next to me and ask me for directions anyway! It’s existential hell I tell you!

I can’t escape!

By Kevin McCaul

About two months ago, I was at the dentist’s office. It reminded me of the two best things about going to the doctor when you’re little: candy and Novocain shots. Um, wait, not Novocain shots, but Highlights for Children. Highlights for Children featured an illustrated story starring two kids, Goofus and Gallant. The purpose of this strip instructed kids on the right and wrong things to do by way of contrasting examples, for example:

Gallant helps elderly Mrs. Hartley with her shopping bags.
Goofus laughs at frail old Mrs. Hartley as she carries three heavy shopping bags up five flights of stairs.

or:

Gallant makes sure to wear clean shirts at dinnertime.
Goofus shows up at the dinner table wearing his old “wife-beater” t-shirt.

Man, I hated Gallant. What a total brown-noser.

Bing! A little light bulb went off in my head. There should be a Deaf version of Goofus and Gallant. Let’s call them Doofus and Dallant because I do not want to receive a “cease and desist” letter from a snarling pack of power-hungry lawyers.

Doofus and Dallant go to DPHH!

Entering the bar
• Dallant politely shows his driver’s license to a large bouncer.
• Doofus angrily says “I’m Deaf!” to a puzzled bouncer.

Attire
• Dallant wears his neatly pressed polo shirt and khaki pants.
• Doofus wears a faded t-shirt and ill-fitting denim shorts, with white tube socks.

Grooming
• Dallant shows up freshly shaved. His newly coiffed hair is admired by many.
• Doofus sports an unfashionable goatee. The hair underneath his old baseball cap, needs a long-overdue trip to SuperCuts.

Greeting his friends
• Upon entering, Doofus stops to give his old school buddies bear hugs and begins chatting away, thus blocking the doorway much to chagrin of other people attempting to walk through.
• Dallant quickly makes his entrance and politely excuses himself through a crowd of signers. He finally says hello to everyone at the far end of the bar.

Ordering Drinks
• Dallant walks up to the bar and waits for the next available bartender. He orders a drink of Grey Goose Vodka with lime and asks fellow deaf people if they want drinks. He signs “thank you” to the bartender.
• Doofus slams his hand on the bar and demands the cheapest beer in the house.

Tipping
• Dallant tells the bartender to keep the change.
• Doofus waits for the bartender to be distracted by other customers so he can sneak away without leaving a dollar.

Socializing
• Doofus accosts the most skanky-looking girl in the room and demands that she be his new girlfriend.
• Dallant introduces himself to several nice girls and buys drinks for them.

Dancing
• Dallant proudly shows off his latest moves he learned at the Arthur Murray studio.
• Doofus starts signing wildly with his friends on the dance floor, getting the way of deaf and hearing patrons who are attempting to dance.

Using a pager
• Dallant discreetly checks for messages on his pager. After 45 seconds of use, he promptly puts it away in his pocket.
• Doofus blatantly yanks his pager out from his fannypack. He lets out a loud yowl in pain after hitting the delete button 20 times.

Saying Goodbye
• Dallant looks at his watch and quickly says farewell to his new friends. He promises to finish his stories at the next month’s DPHH.
• Doofus says good-bye but changes his mind. He refuses to let his tired friends to go home. He keeps on blabbering about the same old stories all night long.

Exiting the bar
• Dallant politely signs “good night” to a bouncer.
• Doofus angrily yowls “I’m Deaf!” to an exasperated bouncer.

Kevin McCaul is one of the chairpersons for the New York City DPHH. He attended DC’s DPHH event last summer and is impressed by the cohesiveness among the Deaf community in DC. He may be back this summer.

I used to love watching MTV’s The Real World when I was younger. It was fun watching seven strangers at first be polite and syrupy to each other, then, as the show progressed, start yelling and going at each other’s throats. Personality clashes made for very good entertainment, indeed. However, with each passing season, the show’s cast of characters seem to be getting stupider and sillier. Is it because I’m older and more mature (in teenspeak: clueless)? Or is it because kids these days seem to have lost a sense of accountability for their actions?

Need a recent and popular example? Look at Paris Hilton. She gets arrested for DUI and driving on a suspended license. Now she is going to jail and she decries her sentence as “cruel and unusual”? She even went as far as establishing an online petition to ask California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to pardon her, which was met with some amusement. **eyes rolling**

A friend forwarded me an email about the “Rules of Life.” Perfect timing, I thought, what with all the high school (and college) graduations coming up ready to sprout out the next generation of “spoiled” kids. In that forwarded email, Bill Gates supposedly gave a speech to a high school. I’ve copied the content of the email:

—————-
BILL GATES’ RULES OF LIFE!
Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a high school graduation about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
—————-

Even though Bill Gates is considered the epitome of Rule 11, the truth is, he did not give this particular speech. That credit goes to Charles Sykes, the author of Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, or Add. Yes, the title alone is a mouthful– or signful. Sykes mouths off about some interesting things in his book. If you want to know what they are, buy it. This isn’t a book review. Here’s a few more rules to ponder:

Rule 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.

Let me throw in a rule of my own: If you wear clothes full of holes, people may think your story is full of holes. If the kids wearing ripped up clothing think it’s oh so cool, let’s see them going to a job interview like that. Appearances DO count towards the perceived trustworthiness of a person, like it or not.

Another friend chimed in with one of her rules: “You may want it badly today, but you’ll forget about it tomorrow. A year later, you’ll regret wasting your money/time/energy on it.” That particular piece of wisdom came from her experiences in high school and college. She now applies that wisdom to shopping. “My personal rule is when I see something that I may like, I keep it in mind and wait three days to a week. If I remember it, I’ll buy it. If I forgot about it, well…it’s obvious.”

I think nowadays we have a sense of entitlement and “want-it-right-now” without any serious elbow grease or sacrifices. Both the young and the young at heart can take the above rules to heart. These lessons have yet to outlive their usefulness, and don’t end with whatever milestone(s) you’ve set/established in your lifetime. So kiddos, in the spirit of Rule 10, wake up and smell the coffee! Then get up from your seat at the coffee shop and go to work!

Got any rules you follow or any advice to give to people to help cope with life in the REAL world?

Let your inner Irishman run wild at Sine Irish Pub for the June 1, 2007 DPHH! Nothing says “warm summer weather” better than shepherd’s pie and some stout — enjoy this in Sine’s outdoor seating in the heart of Pentagon Row, or ham it up with other DPHHers at the bar inside! Smokers rejoice — Sine is in Virginia, your last indoor smokeable refuge in the DC Metro area. Wallowing in cigarette smoke not your thing? There’s also a non-smoking area with its own bar access.

But what if you simply don’t feel like being sociable? Nurse your beer and catch the latest baseball game on a large projection screen, or one of the several other TVs scattered around the bar. In short, there’s something for everybody at Sine Irish Pub!

Check DeafDC’s DPHH page for more information. The Washington, DC area DPHH would like to thank Viable for their sponsorship of our event.

China and Darfur have a long relationship and it has strengthened over the years, to a point where the Chinese are a major source of investment and trade to the Sudanese government. One of the main commodities imported by China is oil. The Chinese are most definitely pro-Sudan and have been reluctant to address the on-going genocide in the country.

The latest report by Amnesty International claims that China has been supplying the Sudan government with weapons despite the UN weapons embargo in place against supplying weapons to DARFUR government (AI also claims that Russia is doing the same). In addition to this, the Chinese have used their veto in the UN Security Council to block moves to sanction the Sudanese government for continued violence in Darfur. After this report released by Amnesty International, a lot of human rights groups are calling for boycotts in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Lo and behold: China appoints its first envoy for African affairs and has offered personnel to assist the international peacekeepers in Darfur. A change of heart, or a smooth PR move?

China is emerging to be a strong global player and wants to be viewed as being responsible player. They are already strong in terms of economic prowess but are sorely lacking diplomatic clout. They are trying to balance a relationship between Sudan and the rest of the world body. They definitely do not want negative attention drawn to the Olympics (matter of money and prestige), so they are changing their stance slightly to appease both Sudan and the rest of the world.

The UN arms embargo that is in place prevents arms supplies to the DARFUR state, but does not say anything about Sudan. This provides the loophole for countries like Russia and China to sell the arms to the Sudanese government. The weapons are then in turn used in Darfur. The countries that supply the arms to the Sudanese government have to be held responsible for getting the weapons to the irresponsible Sudanese government. Despite the arms being sent to Sudan, it trickles into Darfur and the genocide wages on. The UN is trying to extend the embargo to encompass all of Sudan, but in the meantime people continue to suffer and die. Does a country like China, which wants to be seen as a global player not shoulder any responsibility? China just announced an interest free loan to build a new Presidential Palace!?!?!

This has to be one of the smoothest PR moves done in China’s history. They are trying to appease without doing anything! If they really wanted to change and make an impact, why not stop the arms supply completely? Oh, wait a minute; they may lose the oil and all the other lucrative deals in place. Basically, this is just another smokescreen to make everyone think things are all rosy but behind closed doors it’s the same old story: another barrel of oil, another gun sold, one too many lives lost….