Chutzpah

I've been writing about some heavier stuff, so I need to write a fluffy post that doesn't really have much to do with anything.  

I just wanted to inform you all that my new favorite word is "chutzpah."  Isn't that the best word EVER?!  It's Hebrew, and it means courage, strength, guts, etc.  Here, I'll use it in a sentence: Cats and toddlers usually have more chutzpah than they know what to do with.

I wish I had more chutzpah.  I am chock-full of stubbornness, but a friend wisely pointed out that that's not exactly the same thing :p.

So yeah, I just wanted to babble about my new favorite word.  Have a good weekend, everyone!

Confessions of a Divorce Kid

 It goes without saying that divorce is an iffy topic in the church today.  Christians who are not divorced are quick to past judgment on those who are divorced.  That in itself is bad enough, but what’s even more pathetic is the treatment I’ve received from some Christians because I am a divorce kid.  As someone who has been a DK for about 17 years and a Christian for 9 years, I’ve got a lot to say on this subject. I’ve boiled it down to a few bullet points.  Here goes:

1.)  Telling me that “God hates divorce” or that you “don’t believe in divorce” is a surefire way to stay off my A-list. If you are not a divorce kid, you have about as much authority on this subject as I would on being a Holocaust survivor.  And yes, God does hate divorce.  He also hates every other sin.  So put down your stones.

2.)  Blended families exist.  Deal with it.  The church has this really annoying habit of overlooking people who don’t come from “traditional” families.  Regardless of your views on gay marriage and family preservation, non-traditional families are a part of reality.  I should not have to explain to adults that I have both biological and step-parents.  Adults should also know better than to ask me if I have “real” parents, or “why don’t I have real parents.”  Sometimes I just want to say “Poke them!  They’re real!”  The fact that I have to ask adults to please use the term “biological parents” and “step-parents” is just sad.

3.)  My parents’ divorce has significantly impacted my life, but it hasn’t destroyed it.  It’s a complete myth that divorce has no impact on children.  It will affect them in ways they won’t completely understand until they hit adulthood. Kids don’t fully understand all the ramifications of divorce. If you’re reading this and you’re a divorced parent, this is especially important for you to keep in mind.  However, it’s very important that you don’t send a DK the message that their life and their future relationships are done for because of their parents’ divorce. 

4.)  The church has, for the most part, failed to be a safe place for DK’s to ask questions and receive support.  I’ve always been more comfortable talking about my parents’ divorce with people who describe themselves as non-Christians or not religiously affiliated.  I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case for other Christian DK’s as well.  I wish the church was more supportive, but apparently casting stones is more fun than being supportive and admitting that people are complex and imperfect.

I don’t think the church’s treatment of divorcees and DK’s is just about divorce.  This is just a symptom of the fact that we have turned into a fake church where it’s not okay to be human. I found this article on Sojourners, and I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Un-Cool and Loving It!

 I’ve pretty much had it with this idea that Christians need to be “cool” in order to make the church more “seeker-friendly.”  I don’t mean to imply that churches shouldn’t be safe, welcoming places for new people.  They absolutely should.  But when we start sacrificing sound theology and biblical principles in the name of being “seeker friendly”, we’ve gone too far.

One aspect of church ministry that I’ve grown extremely wary about is “young adult ministry.”  I was involved in one for a few years.  There were definitely a lot of positive aspects of it, and that organization was full of wonderful people.  (If you are reading this and you are/were involved in that organization, please take this the way it's intended.) However, I’ve also noticed some potential downsides of the way most young adult ministries are structured, and I would like to share said downsides in an honest, constructive way.

The lack of older adult role models is a huge concern, from where I’m standing.  Young adult ministries can sometimes be hotspots for people who don’t have decent family situations and don’t have strong role models to look up to.  The problem is that these organizations are not the best place to get those needs met.  Young adults need friends of all ages, from all walks of life.  Young adults need “older” adults in their lives.  Sadly, many young adults today don’t seek out those kinds of relationships because they don’t think they’re “cool.” 

Another issue that concerns me is a lack of maturity and responsibility in young adults. I wonder just how many mid-twentysomethings know how to create and stick to a budget, get out of debt, and be good stewards of their bodies.  Call me crazy, but I’m starting to wonder if the basic infrastructure of most young adult ministries is part of the problem instead of the solution.  A typical gathering for young adults will last well into the night, and most of the snacks that are served are unhealthy.  Back when I was involved in a young adult group, there were plenty of messages on the importance of financial responsibility, and very little information on how to actually BE financially responsible. 

Between leaving that group and wearing more modest clothing, I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I’m “uncool.”  Frankly, I don’t care anymore.  Leaving that young adult ministry and dressing the way I do have made me into a more authentic person.  I don’t care about being cool anymore.  I care about being real, mature, and responsible.  I may not be cool, but I get plenty of sleep, I eat good food, I’ve learned how to manage money, and my clothing choices give me a sense of dignity I’d never had before.  I’ll take that over being “cool” any day!

Contact Lenses: A Month(Ish) In Review

 I recently got contacts after wearing glasses full-time for 15 years.  I waited until adulthood to get contacts for a number of reasons.  I’m glad I did, even if it may not be the conventional way to go, because it forced me to actually think about WHY I wanted them and why our culture idolizes them at times. 

Here are the things I love about having contacts:

1.)  Convenience.  I need vision correction for reading as well as distance, and cannot control my eye movements enough to use bi-focals.  It’s really nice to be able to just throw on a pair of reading glasses and take them off and still see clearly, instead of switching between my distance and reading glasses all the time.

2.)  Being able to see at the pool.  My vision issues are profound, so I feel very unsafe walking without my glasses for any length of time.  Frankly, I don’t care that wearing contacts in the water is “not advisable”, according to my eye doc.  I haven’t lost a lens yet, and if her vision was as bad as mine, she’d understand my excitement at being able to see at the pool.

3.)  Being able to wear “regular” sunglasses.  Thanks to the inventions of fitover sunglasses and transition lenses, protecting your eyes with glasses has gotten a lot simpler and more convenient.  But looking at the rack of sunglasses at the dollar store and knowing I could finally wear any pair I wanted was freakishly exciting, haha!

Alright, now for the things I’m not so thrilled about:

1.)  The cost.  No matter what kind of lenses you choose, or where youyou’re your lenses, wearing contacts is always more expensive than wearing a pair of glasses.  The lenses themselves don’t come cheap, especially for specialty lenses like ones for astigmatism.  Lens solution is an ongoing expense, regardless of whether you buy your solution or make it yourself, because you still have to pay for the supplies to make it.  Part of the reason I put off getting contacts as long as I did was I couldn’t have afforded these expenses. 

2.)  The way our culture idolizes contact lenses.  I can’t tell you how much judgment I’ve received for wearing glasses.  The sad thing is, all the nasty comments I’ve gotten were not during my childhood.  No one really cared about my glasses, believe it or not.  But in my teens and during adulthood, people have let me know just what they think of an adult wearing glasses full-time.  Yes, I like my contacts, and yes, I like how I look with them.  But our obsession with looks is stupid and immoral.  There may be a perfectly good reason NOT to wear contacts, such as cost, or being too visually impaired to put them in safely.  What about in parts of the world that are less developed in the US, where glasses or corrective surgery would be better options?  I refuse to get to the point of taking my contact lenses for granted, or forgetting my true motives for wearing them.  I will “fast” from them for however long I need to if I feel like I’m getting to that point.  Feel free to call me crazy, but I actually care about WHY we do the things we do.

3.)  The challenge for people with astigmatism.  What I didn’t know until I tried to get contacts is that there are varying degrees of astigmatism.  I just thought astigmatism was astigmatism, and if someone else who had it could wear contacts, there should be no reason I couldn’t.  My eye doc explained that with “normal” astigmatism, the eyeball is curved slightly.  I do not have “normal” astigmatism.  I have it so profoundly that my eyes are shaped like footballs.  We had to try three different brands of lenses before we found one that will sit properly on my eyes.  In recent years, I’ve been having farsightedness as well as the nearsightedness I’ve had forever.  It’s so severe that if it gets any worse, I may have to give up on contacts or opt for eye surgery. 

What I wish people had told me about wearing contacts:

1.)    Rinse them THOROUGHLY when you open new ones.  They will most likely be sitting in enzyme cleaner, not saline.  That hurts like all get-out if you get it in your eyes.  I’ve learned that one the hard way, unfortunately.

2.)    Your eyes will look like something out of a horror movie while you are first learning to put your contacts in.  This is simply because you are touching your eyes more than usual.  It goes away as you become able to put in your lenses without touching your eyes much, but it’s a bit unsettling while it lasts. 

3.)    If you have been wearing glasses full time, looking at your naked face will freak you out.  I kept wanting to grab objects to hide behind like Wilson on “Home Improvement.”  I looked very different to myself, and it was weird.  I got over it after a couple weeks.

Listening to Music With Hearing Aids

I’m trying to come out of the hearing loss closet, both because it’s a part of who I am and because these entries might be useful to someone else with hearing loss. 

One of the questions I get asked the most is how do I listen to music with hearing aids.  When my hearing loss was more mild, I would just take my hearing aids out and use regular old earbuds.  Now that my hearing loss is creeping into the moderate range, earbuds don’t work as well.  I can hear through them, but not very clearly, and I can’t make out any lyrics at all.  When I listen to music through my hearing aids, the sound is much clearer and crisper, and I can usually understand at least some of the lyrics.

If you want to have music on in the background and not use your hearing aids as earbuds, you can simply leave your hearing aids on your normal channel, or if your aids have a music program, you can use that.  My current hearing aids don’t have a music channel, but I’m about to get new ones, which will have it.  I’ll let you know what I think of it once I’ve given it the old college try J. 

There are a few different options for using your hearing aids as earbuds.  I’ve used a neck loop for the past few years.  A neck loop is an FM transmitting system that plugs into the headphone jack of a computer, CD player, or MP3 device.  The top part goes around your neck (thus the term “neck loop.”)  You turn on the neck loop, put your hearing aids on the tele-coil channel, and you can hear the music right in your ears at your decibel level.  I learned from experience that the sound quality diminishes with the battery life, so I own two sets of rechargables that are only for my neck loop, and I change them out when it starts sounding “static-y.” 

Cochlear implant wearer Rachel Chaikoff has done a blog entry on listening to music with cochlear implants. The only one she mentions that won’t work for hearing aids is using regular earbuds.  I don’t know how you’d get them to stay put if you wear hearing aids.  Rachel has tried more listening options than I have, so if you want to try something other than the neck loop, click here to read her take on it!

The One Time I Actually WANT Someone to think I'm 17

I'm one of those people who couldn't look their age if their life depended on it.  If I walked into a high school, I'd be mistaken for a student.  I have been hanging out on this planet for 25 years, a whole quarter of a century, and I don't look it.  I know this full well because people comment more on my youthful appearance than they do on my headcovering and hearing loss combined!  I thought my wedding ring would put a stop to that, but nope.  I started getting comments along the lines of "Aren't you a little young to be married?"  Ishkabibble!

I found out that my local library has this new program where you can "read down" your late fees.  Now THAT's my kind of program.  I could read my late fees into oblivion in no time.  Unfortunately, this program is only open to children ages 17 and under.  Irrational Kati began coming up with all kinds of reasons why I should be considered youthful enough to participate in this program:

Sometimes I look like I'm about 17.

I still have to wear a retainer at night.

Coloring is awesome.

I can act extremely childish (just about everyone who knows me can vouch for this one!)


I don't plan on trying to crash this program.  But I will allow myself a moment of frustration since I feel I have been unfairly discriminated against on acount of my age :P.

10 Most Common Misconceptions About Hearing Loss

 I haven’t written much about hearing loss on this blog for a number of reasons, but I’ve been feeling led to be more open about it.  I’m going to start by listing the most common misconceptions I encounter on a regular basis. 

1.)  Either you’re hearing or you’re deaf, and there’s no in-between.

There is actually quite a bit of in-between.  A person with normal hearing will hear any sound that’s 20 decibels or higher.  A profoundly deaf person will hear at 90 decibels or higher, if they can hear anything at all.  That leaves quite a bit of in-between. 

2.)  “You must have selective hearing, because you hear just fine in some situations.”

I hear much better when it’s dead quiet.  If I am on the phone with a woman and my hearing aid is working well and there’s no background noise, you wouldn’t know I’m hard of hearing.  If there’s background noise or I’m talking to a man on the phone, it’s much more difficult. 

3.)  Deaf and hard of hearing people can’t/shouldn’t drive or go on airplanes.

This one cracks me up.  “How can you drive?” is, hands down, the question I get asked the most.  For the life of me, I don’t know why hearing people have this idea that D/HH people cannot drive cars.  I didn’t get my license until after my hearing loss was detected, so when it comes to driving I don’t know any different.  I’ve had a few people point out that I glance in the rearview mirror quite frequently while I’m driving.  I suppose that’s my way of checking for lights and sirens.  I can’t hear sirens until they’re right next to me, with or without my hearing aids.  But again, I have no experience driving as a hearing person, so this just feels normal to me.

Flying doesn’t feel any different either.  I’ve had hearing people ask if my aids give me trouble going through security, and the answer is no.  I have flown twice by myself after developing hearing loss, and I’ve gone through security without any problems.  The only thing is you have to keep your hearing aids on an acoustic channel, because they’d probably buzz if you have them on t-coil while going through the machines.  I imagine the t-coil channel would also buzz while you’re on the airplane, so if you use your t-coil channel for a neck loop to listen to music, you’d have to look into a different option.  But these are all little things.  In the grand scheme of things, deaf and hard of hearing people fly the same way as everyone else.

4.)  “You can’t possibly be hard of hearing because you don’t ‘sound deaf’.”

Whether or not a hearing loss affects a person’s speech depends on a few factors.  It depends partly on the severity of their hearing loss. It also depends on the age of onset.  A person who is born deaf or hard of hearing is more likely to “sound deaf” because they have never heard their own voice clearly.  I didn’t start losing my hearing until I was a teenager.  By that point I had a strong background in spoken English.  A few people have asked me if the fact that I read a ton has anything to do with how well I can speak.  I honestly don’t know.  But speaking clearly doesn’t mean I always hear clearly.

5.)  “You can’t take care of kids as well as a hearing person.”

I sure as heck can!  I will definitely need a few extra tricks when/if I become a parent, such as a flashing or vibrating baby monitor.  But that’s not a big deal.  When I worked in toddler classrooms, if I wasn’t sure of what a toddler was saying, I would say clearly, “Can you show me?”  This usually prompted them to gesture or point at things, and then I could figure it out from there.  When/if I have my own kids, they will grow up using sign as a second language to make communication easier.

6.)  People with hearing loss can’t listen to or play music.

Tell that to Beethoven, haha!  Or tell that to Evelyn Glennie, a profoundly deaf percussionist!  Neither of them were born deaf, which I’m sure made music a lot easier for them.  But it’s just not true that deaf and hard of hearing people can’t enjoy or create music.  Nowadays there are numerous options for listening to music with hearing aids and cochlear implants.  I use a neck loop, which I’ll write more about in a future post.  I was very involved in music before I started losing my hearing, and I still am.  I play flute, piano, guitar, and mountain dulcimer.  It’s getting more difficult to tune by ear, so I have a tuning app on my Ipod.  I’ll readily admit that I may not hear music exactly the same way as a hearing person, but I still hear something that I can enjoy. 

7.)  All deaf people use sign language.

There are plenty of profoundly deaf people who use little to no sign.  Some deaf people grew up completely oral, and others chose to go that route as they got older. 

8.)  All deaf cochlear implant recipients use speech only.

Deaf people of all walks of life make the decision to get a cochlear implant.  While it’s a popular option amongst oral deaf people, there are some culturally Deaf people who choose it so they have the option of being in the hearing world as well as the Deaf world.  Even though they may choose to learn to speak, they typically don’t stop signing.  Some people subscribe to the viewpoint that ASL is a good “backup” in case the cochlear implant processor malfunctions, because CI users are completely deaf once they take off the processor.

9.)  Congenital deafness and old age are the only causes of hearing loss.

While those are probably the two most common causes of hearing loss, there are lots of other causes that have nothing to do with how young or old a person is.  My hearing loss was probably the result of recurring ear infections when I was a kid.  Other kinds of illness and injuries can also cause hearing loss. 

10.)    People with hearing loss can’t live “normal” lives.

Sure, we may need some accommodations, but when our needs our met, we can do anything!  Except hear normally ;)