Welcome to Toepke.org! I’m Stuart and you’ve found my personal blog. I write about many things ranging from my experience with hearing loss to random thoughts.

Hard-of-Hearing

I am the proud owner of a pair of ears equipped with “severe-to-profound sensorineural” hearing loss. Basically, I can tell that a person sitting right behind me at a baseball game is yelling and heckling players, but aside from swear words, I can’t tell you what he is saying. I can tell he’s an ass though.

I am a graduate of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is a college of Rochester Institute of Technology.

Instead of a deaf residential school, I was educated in the regular elementary, junior, and high school system alongside ‘hearing’ students without the use of sign language or interpreters or captions, which was, apparently, considered avant-garde at one time. That’s right, I depended on “speech reading” and amplification to (supposedly) understand the teacher. So trendy! Thank goodness I read a lot growing up.

I still struggle to become fluent in American Sign Language, years after graduating from NTID/RIT. *sigh* I think the main reason is that there are few signing deaf people to hang out with where I currently live. A new language has to be regularly used in conversation to make it stick in the mind.

I have found that many people have misconceptions about the deaf/hoh experience so I want to spread the word and improve understanding.

What’s the difference between “deaf” and “hard-of-hearing”? Based on fellow students with hearing loss I met at college, not much. Students who could hear better than me, but who knew sign language were considered “deaf”. Students like myself who might have had less hearing, but communicated with speech (because I didn’t grow up with sign language) were considered “hard-of-hearing”. It didn’t seem to be a difference of hearing ability, but whether one knew sign language or not.

I tell ‘hearing’ people that I am hard-of-hearing because people seem to have preconceived notions about deafness and are more likely to continue speaking with me if I tell them I am hard-of-hearing rather than deaf. It’s kind of about knowing one’s audience and figuring out what connects with them best.

“Xennial” / Early Gen Y

Generally born during the years 1977-1983 (some researchers extend the range in either direction), “Xennials” are a generational cusp cohort who don’t perfectly fit in with Gen X or Millennials.

Well known Xennials are actors Heath Ledger and Macaulay Culkin, actresses Claire Danes and Kirstin Dunst, and the members of music bands Arcade Fire, The Killers, and The Hives.

Generally, our childhoods were in the 1980s, our teenage years were in the 1990s and our twenties were in the Noughts. The fuzzy line between Gen X and Gen Y is, I believe, the end of the Cold War. Gen X grew up affected by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, whereas Gen Y were children and didn’t internalize the Cold War rhetoric and mindset. Xennials went from a culturally positive 80s childhood to a culturally euphoric post-Cold War 90s adolescence. This contrast led to key differences in the Gen X and Gen Y experience.

(At the other end, the line between Gen Y and Gen Z is, according to generational researcher Jason Dorsey, the events of September 11, 2001, which marked a sharp contrast between them. Gen Y was deeply affected by the event and the following response, whereas for Gen Z it is something they learned about in history class.)

I think Xennials and Millennials are both subsets of Generation Y (similar to how the second half of Baby Boomers are sometimes referred to as “Generation Jones“). It’s a matter of opinion, but we Xennials grew up in a pretty unique time.

Contact

Thanks for visiting and reading and let me know if you have any topics or questions you’d like me to discuss. You can send an e-mail to me using the Contact page.