If I flunk out of college, it won’t be because I was too stupid or because I worked a full-time job or I was too busy and couldn’t find time to do the work; it’ll be because I really just didn’t give a fuck.

Whitening my teeth whilst doing homework I most definitely could have done ALL day today but put off “because I didn’t feel like it.” I think it’s entirely possible that I will be pulling my first all-nighter tonight. And then I have to work at 8:00 tomorrow morning. WHY AM I SUCH AN IDIOT.

I hate them. My entire life has been deadline-oriented and just thinking about that kind of rigidity makes my blood boil. EVERYTHING has a deadline. I’m a leisurely kind of guy. Why can’t I just promise you that what needs to get done will get done eventually? Life would be far less stressful if we didn’t all have to rush and freak out trying to get everything done “on time.” It’s scientifically proven that doing things slower decreases stress. I just wish I didn’t have to force myself to abide by someone else’s idea of the timeline my life should be lived according to.

I have four roommates. When I refer to them (usually when I post tweets about them to Twitter), I refer to them as Roommate A, Roommate B, and Roommate D. (I live in room C of our apartment.)

Roommate A does nothing but smoke weed. Every single day. Every moment of every single day. He also steals my granola bars and doesn’t ever really go to class. We never see each other, so we also don’t have a problem with one another.

Rommate B is obese and eats massive amounts of extremely unhealthy food in one sitting. For example, he will open up an entire box of 30 taquitos, heat them up in the microwave, and eat them all in about 10-15 minutes. The same goes for boxes of 12 egg rolls, 4 enchilada dinners, and bags of Totino’s pizza rolls. We see each other sometimes, and he is friendly enough.

Roommate C is me. I have one section in the fridge that is mine. I’m always having to move everyone else’s shit out of my section. I don’t buy frozen foods because the freezer doesn’t work properly and I don’t eat a lot, so the food goes bad before I get a chance to ingest it. I mostly keep to my room, which is sometimes dirty, but it doesn’t affect anyone else, so they have nothing to complain about. I keep the apartment cold so my chinchillas don’t die.

Roommate D. He is a decent person. He looks kind of like this:

But his back is in good shape. He smells bad. Kind of like what I would guess a dirty hundred-year-old sloth would smell like. We share a Netflix subscription. He always pays on time. He oftentimes decides to move into the living room. He’ll pretty much just camp out there with his comforter set and his XBOX and play video games all day. He likes to wear a bathrobe around the apartment at night. He cooks really smelly food, such as salmon. His electric toothbrush has mold on it. He sometimes wakes up at random times, such as 3:00am to take a bath, which I find odd. Last week he was sick and instead of using toilet paper, he was blowing his nose into a full-sized towel. We get along, but sometimes his habits gross me out.

But enough about that. Three days ago I woke up to get ready for work (at about 7:30am. He’s an early riser and is always awake before me.) and he had a giant box of Kellogg’s Rice Crispy Treats sitting in front of me. He was unwrapping all of the Rice Crispy Treats, rewrapping them in plastic wrap, and then placing them on baking pans. We had a short conversation as I was walking out the door:

“…What are you doing?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Okay. I don’t actually want to know. Carry on.”

Turns out he took the Rice Crispy Treats to a party and told everyone he made them himself. A girl just brought by a note to our apartment for him that said:

“Dear Person who made the rice crispys,
they were fucking delicious! You werent here when I was for me to give you a huge…so just pretend I did.
Love,
The girl in Janies’ room
:)”

This post doesn’t really have much of a point other than for me to let all of you know that I think the whole “I made these delicious rice crispy treats for all of you” lie is ridiculous and sad.

That is all. Thanks for reading!

-Kalin

            I honestly cannot believe I have been taking American Sign Language classes for close to four years, yet I have never watched Sound and Fury. Before it was assigned to me I had only ever heard of it. The film was very eye-opening and, more than anything else, it helped me to see the perspectives of both the hearing and the Deaf regarding the issue of cochlear implants and the definition of what exactly it means to be Deaf.

            As far as I can tell, the hearing community is—and always has been—extremely ethnocentric. The hearing community believes that to be hearing is to be the closest that one can possibly be to “perfection,” and in a world where the vast majority of the population is hearing, to be deaf is to be less than “perfect.” I believe this discriminatory concept stems from lack of knowledge regarding Deafness and what it really means to be Deaf. When someone is Deaf, THAT is his or her identity, THAT is what he or she relates to, THAT is what he or she is. It is the same concept as someone being Hispanic, Italian, Finnish, or African instead of being white. What most people don’t realize is that being Deaf is philosophically the same thing as being from a specific heritage, and therefore culture. Deafness has its own culture and heritage, and forcing a deaf person to be hearing (or vice-versa) is robbing that person of his or her heritage and culture and ripping away what that person is in order to replace it with something that is more socially acceptable.

            Discrimination has always been a problem, and it is very likely that it always will be. The stigmatization of Deafness is very closely correlated to the issue of what is referred to as “white supremacy.” The idea that prejudice and discrimination both stem from the “white is right” concept has been widely debated for years. If one replaces the word “white” with the word “hearing,” the similarity between the two topics is clearly evident. The idea that “white is right” implies that anything other than white—brown, red, black, red, etc.—is simply “wrong”; the idea that “hearing is right” implies that anything other than hearing—Deafness, or any measure of considerable hearing loss—is also “wrong.” Sound and Fury addresses the topic of why it is generally considered exponentially “better” for someone to be hearing than it is to be Deaf.

            The most common argument as to why it is “better” to be hearing than it is to be Deaf is that it is simply more convenient because the world we live in is primarily hearing. However, convenience is not really the issue here. Hearing people don’t just see Deaf people as “imperfect,” they see them as broken and in need of repair. But Deaf people are not broken. Deafness, unlike other handicaps, does not actually handicap the deaf person. A deaf person can do everything that a hearing person can do and sometimes he or she can even do it better because of his or her deafness.

            The topic of cochlear implants is discussed throughout the entire movie. A Deaf girl with Deaf parents and a Deaf brother is influenced by her grandmother to get a cochlear implant so she can talk and be “normal.” If Deafness were not seen as something negative and bad in the first place, then undergoing major surgery to become “normal” would not even be an issue. I personally think that the majority of parents who force cochlear implants on their deaf children (who are, more often than not, hearing) do not weigh the positives and negatives before making the final decision—and considering the surgery is irreversible, even if a more advanced technology is introduced in the future, it is literally a final decision—to have their child surgically implanted with a cochlear implant. These hearing parents do not want to have to deal with their child’s deafness, so they get the child “fixed.” At the end of Sound and Fury, the hearing couple decides to get the cochlear implant for the child because they feel that it is the easier route for the child (or for them?), and the Deaf couple decides to wait for their daughter to grow older before making this lasting decision for her based on an idea put into her head by her discriminatory grandmother. Whereas the hearing parents had trouble accepting the deafness of their newborn baby, the Deaf parents had an open mind about their daughter getting a cochlear implant, just as long as she knew what she was doing and understood that no matter how advanced the surgery was she would always be Deaf.

If you’ve never seen Sound and Fury, I strongly encourage you to watch it sometime. It’s only 80 minutes, and it’s very eye-opening (or maybe I just think so because I’m in college to become an interpreter for the Deaf). It might change your perspective (if you have one) regarding the Deaf community. Hope you get a chance to watch it someday! (It’s streaming on Netflix!)

Just made this using snippets of the Collin College home page with Microsoft Paint in my Computers and Technology class. I get the feeling that I won’t really be learning anything that I don’t already know in this class until the very end of the semester.