Singing Hands

WRITING #2


My fascination with speaking hands began early in my life when my deaf cousin came and lived with my family for a while. He was able to speak properly, though slightly different, and read lips like an expert. After learning the alphabet my fascination grew only stronger. I didn't really have a need for the language but I still just had to learn it. My family decided to move and there I was, in a new environment and friendless with no one who understood me until she came along. A deaf girl that lived on the next street began talking to me and I was hooked. She understood me like no one had before and she taught me how to sign. We shared a love for music, though she had never heard any before, and we became best friends and it opened me up to a completely different way of enjoying music and the sounds I so often took for granted.

My cousin, the most wacky human being I've ever met, came to my house to stay for a while and since that visit, I have never been the same. He was an expert at reading lips and could speak very clearly for some one who could no longer hear the pronunciation of words. There was no need for sign language in our conversations but when his deaf friends came out the glorious language was all I could focus on. The beautiful gestures and motions combined with such expression was a language I was dying to learn. I asked him one day to teach me how to communicate with my hands as he did and he informed me that it would take some time but he was more than willing to try. We began with the alphabet.



I practiced and practiced until my fingers just about fell off but one thing I did not do was give up. I was determined to learn this language and determined I remained. That time came when my cousin was to be on his way and he moved away and I didn't see him again for quite some time though I never let that discourage me.

My family decided it was time for a change in scenery and we moved to a different county, far away from everyone I knew. I was surrounded by a new environment and new people and nothing and no one understood me. I was all alone in a vast and desolate world, or so I felt.

That was when she came along. A girl who had an awesome personality, understood me and shared my love for music, though she had never heard any, and I knew I had found my best friend. Our conversations started off very slow and tedious but humorous and adventurous to say the least. I would slowly spell out a word and she would introduce the sign to me where I would use it and remember it. It took me a while to become fluent but it was time well spent. Even though she had never heard music before, she desired so strongly to be a dancer. She asked me to teach her to dance and let me tell you, that was an adventure. We would crank up some music with a strong bass line and I taught her how to tell the difference between the main bass line and the little background bumps in order to keep with the right beat. After many many hours of practice, I had her dancing like a star. Okay, maybe not like a star but very well and on beat. An accomplishment if I do say so myself.

Not only did I help her learn to feel the music and dance along with it, I would sign songs to her when the closed captioning was not available on certain channels. Signing music was a completely different kind of sign language and though it was challenging, it gave me a better appreciation for the emotion put behind words and music and fun is something I can definitely say it was. Throughout my years of practicing sign language and the art of signing music and songs, I discovered that this was an art form practiced more commonly than I had believed. I began searching for songs interpreted in sign language to better understand the difference between words and concepts and how to translate them in a more emotional manner.

Music was and still is a major part of my life and without it I believe I would go crazy. On the other hand, sign language gave me the ability to show what I'm saying on top of just verbalizing my ideas. Combining the two gave me a better appreciation for both the language and music of all different kinds. Rather than just listening to the music, I now understand how to feel it. I guess if you really wanted to look at it from the beginning, I should thank my cousin and my family for moving us to a place where my fascination of speaking hands would grow and teach me more about the English language I speak everyday. I am glad that I was part of a conflicting love between silence and sounds. I must thank each and everyone who helped me along my journey and although I am fluent in the beautiful language of American Sign Language, I have much more to learn still and that is what I intend to do.

Under the Influence

WRITING #1



An extremely hot August day brings an American girl to wear her cute little pink shorts that say “Flirt” across her bottom and a white tank top so revealing she might as well be topless. All of her friends are in outfits very similar to the one she is wearing and society does nothing to stop this. It is popular for young girls to parade around in basically their underwear because the media and other social influences say it is okay. If these girls who barely dress were never exposed to the media where “skin is in” would they still want to dress so provocatively? Why is it that a majority of young Muslim women and older women as well dress so that only their eyes hands and feet can be seen? Is it because they are ashamed of their bodies and do not wish for anyone to see what they look like? Doubtful. No, it is not because they are not confident within their own skin but rather because their culture believes that is the right way to be. We, as human beings, are all born with certain knowledge and we see things how we see them but also, as human beings, our perception and the way we perceive and interpret our surrounding environment, long-stretched ideas or any other type of imaginable substance has been molded and shaped based on the container we are forced to survive in. Take for instance, a painting of the night sky on a winter night, one person viewing this art might set the emotion as being cold and lonely, surrounded by vast emptiness and a cold chill to really imprint the harsh conditions in the viewer’s mind; one might also see the painting as an endless quest for opportunity, the cold rendering a slow process to get to the main goal to have it built up much more beautifully or just for visual pleasure. So many different ideas on how things should be perceived and there is only one thing to blame, social influence.
Whether one is influenced by family, friends, music or what have you, it is still social influences and personal experiences that made us who we are. If not for social situations, personal experiences would not exist. Environment is also a major determining factor on how we perceive things. My boyfriend might feel safe walking through the park at 2am whereas I would not. For one thing, I am a woman who could be taken advantage of much more easily than a man. I appear to be an easy target whereas a man does not. Not only that, but all depending on where that park is located, I might not even feel safe walking through the park and 2pm. If I made a joke about a tough girl who could walk alone through the park at night with a bunch of girls who reside in a bad neighborhood, that would be perceived as a funny joke whereas if I made that same joke to a group of older women in the rich neighborhood where everything is as right as rain, that comment would be rendered pointless. What we are taught and how we are taught it affect how we view other’s ideas of what and how we should be taught.
My parents are against bi-racial and gay relationships and I grew up my whole life hearing that two people of different ethnicities or of the same sex should not be together. I am sure that this belief was taught to them just as they were trying to teach me. The only difference is that I did not let my parents sway my personal belief that no one can help who they love whether the two people share the same gender or do not share the same skin color. I believe that if two people want to be together, no matter what genetic background or any other factors that are commonly disagreed upon, that they have every right to be as miserable as the rest of us. Even though my parents are not racist nor do they act differently towards people of different beliefs, they did try to instill certain beliefs into me that society (or rather parts of) had already affected.
No matter what example is used or how many examples are used, it is quite evident that social influences affect how we interpret different styles, pictures, art, music and any other part of life. Everything is tied together somehow and by affecting one individual part, you have affected the whole, the statistics and every component of its existence therefore leaning toward someone else learning a new concept and starting a new style of living. Social influences are what made us who we are and we need to keep that in mind when new lives are brought into the world because if not, nothing will ever get better.