this is a story about My Bravery & also about What I Am Up Against. it goes like this.
in ASL yesterday we learned how to count how many "indians" there are projected on the screen with the overhead projector. i say "indians" so that you may visualize for yourself the sort of "indian chief head in profile" icon that graces fine tobacco products & baseball franchises. yes folks i have now learnt how to identify & count "indians" for the first time in a second language, & hot damn have i got a lot of second languages under my belt.
(also H, the teacher, said "actually english is the hardest language to learn" & i sat on my hands. this was before the "indian" counting. & it is utterly beside the point when you consider that there were racist drawings on the freaking overhead projector. but still, my hackles, consider them raised.)
anyway so last night i e-mailed her & told her that i was offended by the "indian chief heads" (which i described just like that, in quotation marks). at several carefully-spaced points throughout the day, my acutely-sensitive activist friends who do things like to go Ally Workshops about five times a year called me up to ask if i had heard back from H. since there is no computer at the clinic, i had no idea & i became progressively nervous. then my acutely-sensitive friends asked me to come over & play with their daughter, who is nearly two years old, so that they could do things like Put Dishes In The Dishwasher & Listen To Belle + Sebastian Instead Of Dan Zanes.
so i have returned home to a very nice e-mail from H in which she applauds my candor & explains that she plans to discuss on wednesday the ways that ASL has changed (as any language changes) in response to changing social attitudes & growing political awareness. et cetera.
i heart ASL with my whole heart. in a way i feel my life has led me to learning it, what with all my training in Figuring Out What People Are Saying & in Making Quick Visual Assessments.
note: i always say "my life has led me to X" when X is something i have just realized i really want to do for the rest of my life. i.e. "my life has led me to doing ultrasounds because why else would i have spent so much time looking at arshile gorky paintings?"
note: arshile gorky paintings look pretty much ZERO like an ultrasound image.
note: did you catch that? there's no computer at the clinic. some people think that's weird. do you think that's weird?
& now a cat has curled up in my lap. irresistible!
