I went to Bernard Bragg's Theater in the Sky tonight. Wow. It was incredible! If you have the opportunity to see it, I would highly recommend it, whether or not you sign or have any connection to the community. Again - wow.

I hope he's planning to release it on DVD - I'd love to have my folks watch it. (And Dad, as a former actor who remembers hearing about NTD when it started, would get a huge kick out of it.)

Edit: I originally directed the above link to the "Bernard Bragg" page at Wikipedia. Which apparently doesn't exist. How is it that the Father of Deaf Theater doesn't have an entry? Someone needs to add that (that is, someone who knows more about BB and Deaf theater than I do.)

The coop living group I've been hanging out at lately offered me a bid, and probably 10 of the residents told me that they'd be not just willing, but excited to modify the house to make it more accessible to me. This is a coop with not a lot of money, where all the renovations (and, granted, they do quite a bit) are done by house residents. They're under no legal (or, I would argue, moral) obligation to do that.

MIT, with money up the wazoo, a "Senior Architect for Accessibility", and both a legal and a moral obligation to be accessible, drags its feet on minor changes either to campus infrastructure or to Facilities' book of guidelines.

Go figure.

What sort of screwed up subway system closes down at 12:30? Gah. Asinine. Short-sighted. Failing to fulfill a major market.

So I was trying to take a cab home from the bar I was at at 12:15. I'm way too short to be seen by a moving cab, but the manager called the cab company, who said they'd send one (this was after I'd given up waiting for an accessible one, and decided to leave my scooter there and pick it up in the morning). Never came. I did some research a while back into how cab companies work; apparently, they like to call their drivers 'contractors' for various (primarily benefits-related) reasons, so all they can do is put out a request; they can't actually send you a cab. (There are a few exceptions.) So, being as it was closing time (what sort of screwed up city has bars that close at 1?), all the cabs were able to find plenty of business without going out of their way to pick up the guy who called dispatch. And I'm way too slow, walking, to beat the other people who also want to hail a cab. I finally made it home at 2:15 - about two hours after I decided to leave, and the bar was only a 20 minute drive from home.

There needs to be some incentive for cab drivers to prioritize called-in requests. Too bad you can't offer a large tip through dispatch. So now it's time to curl up in bed with a big bottle of Motrin, and figure out how the hell I'm going to get transportation out there in the morning to retrieve my scooter.

Thursday (yesterday) in Psych, we were talking about emotions and happiness, and the professor made the not-so-surprising statement that, for the most part, people tend to be generally happy despite major life events. The example he used was quadriplegia - that even a few months after their injury (so I assume he means quads with spinal cord injuries), they tend to rate their happiness as above neutral.

I pointed out after class that this sort of comparison is less than helpful. What I didn't have the words for at the moment was that SCI tends not to be a lasting trauma. That is, we talk about the grieving process that late-disabled people go through; they are, I think, essentially grieving the end of their life. "How will I work and support myself? What can I do for fun? Who will love me, sleep with me, settle down with me?" But then you pick up the pieces and you go on, and you discover that life isn't over, and the event itself doesn't necessarily stay in your memory as a tragedy.

A better example, in my opinion, would be the death of a significant other. Given enough time, people tend to rate themselves above neutral; but they still consider the event a tragedy. No one is going to look back and say, "yeah, my wife's death really changed my life for the better".

This, for me, raises the question: what idiot did this study? I can see someone saying, "we need a standard tragic event to study peoples' reactions to", but to pick an event where you obviously don't understand the reactions involved seems just stupid.

There's a terminology thread over on Feministe about the word "cisgendered" (as in, conforming to the gender binary - not trans, not genderqueer, etc). The thing about cisgendered is that it provides a way to reference non-queer genders without assuming normality on the part of, well, the cisgendered (i.e., "normal gendered" or "non-trans").

Piny points out that the disabled community doesn't have this sort of word - we have "non-disabled" and we have "able-bodied" (or TAB, which is similar). Go read the post - it's much better expressed there. There are subgroups, granted, that have their own terms - autistic vs. neurotypical, d/Deaf vs. hearing, LP vs. BP, but there doesn't seem to be a broader term.

I nominate "cisabled". I googled a bit, and I can't find a single usage that isn't a typo of disabled - I'm surprised that no one has ever used it before. (And no, I don't think it is any more likely to be useful than any other analogous neologisms - how often do you hear people say "cisgendered" outside of a gender politics context? But I think the very existence of terms like these can useful in its own way. I will stop now before my grammar falls completely to pieces.).

Stilts: a Story over at Ballastexistenz, is excellent. Granted, I'm partial to the height analogy ...

Yippee! I got my surgery date this afternoon - I will get a cochlear implant (Advanced Bionics' Harmony) on the right side at noon-ish on May 30th.

I also have finally worked out the FM system issue. It seems that my implant isn't compatible with the Oticon Lexis (I don't think the Nucleus Freedom is compatible with the Lexis, either), so I'll be upgrading to a Smartlink. Insurance will probably cover it. I hope. Anyway, I think I have a Jabra Bluetooth adapter lying around here somewhere. Not sure where I picked it up, but it's from back when cell phones didn't have BT built in, so I should probably see if it's compatible with my phone, and if I can pair it with the Smartlink.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Phonak on whether the Smartlink supports the A2DP profile. A2DP is basically a standard that is optimized for audio sources that are higher quality than your phone. If it is, then when OS X 10.5 comes out later this year, I should be able to pair the Smartlink and my laptop to listen to iTunes and watch movies like I do now, but without the extra cables. (Right now, it goes laptop-cable-Lexis FM-fm signal-hearing aid; if the Smartlink supports A2DP, then it could go laptop-Bluetooth signal-Smartlink-fm signal-hearing aid. Same number of hops, but fewer physical items to deal with.)