Making progress with CC and ASL

The other day, I decided that I wanted to watch the beginning of Desperate Housewives just to see who was Mike's bride. While waiting for the video to load, I saw "CC" under the screen. CC? You mean, there's Closed Captioning on these videos now?? I gasped and reached for my headphones and turned on the CC. Then I clicked for the tv screen to full screen but the CC didn't show up. So I watched the video as it was before with a big black box below it, showing CC.

It was so exciting for me! I already figured that by leasing this particular apartment, I was commiting myself to one year free of my tv shows because it didn't have cable. Neither one of my roommates were interested in trying to get cable. I only wanted cable to watch ABC and FOX but to spend $60 seemed kind of... stupid. So I let it go. But now I have this... what do I need to pay cable for??

I'm excited that this country is making progress in making tv accessible for the deaf.

I'm also making progress in ASL. It's getting a bit more challenging but the teacher's good at correcting people, including me. It was interesting when she explained that there were different signs for colors and days of the week when she learned it long time ago. Wow. We could sort of figure out what they were so if we ever saw those, we would know what they were.

We learned that there were 126 rules for numbers in ASL. Holy smokes. Like the signs for "1, 2, 3" are different from saying "1 day ago, 2 days ago" etc.

I really do appreciate my classmates being so cooperative and enthusiastic about signing. I mean, very few looked like they just wanted to pass the class. A few asked the professor about majoring in ASL or doing something with it. I was very surprised to learn that, given everything that Michigan seems to offer, they don't offer "applied sciences" at undergraduate level. The professor said if people want to get a degree relevant to ASL, they have to go to graduate school for it . She added that the university does expect its students to go onto graduate school anyhow. Whoa.

I also had a meeting for deaf and hard of hearing students last week. We're planning on some things like a trip to an amusement park for next weekend (which I can't go anyhow because of my marathon training and apple-picking with my roommates), a birthday party for those with October birthdays, a dinner night, etc. I felt much more comfortable this year. Maybe it's just because my first year jitters have gone away and I'm more secure, or it's just that I'm getting comfortable with the whole connecting with the deaf who usually sign. Who knows.