Saturday, August 3, 2019

Overcoming Nausea

We had a get together in our back yard for a group of about eight or nine former students  a week ago.  Corey was there and Kevin and Tenly and their kids.  There was Joann and Mario along with their spouses.  Joanna and Dan and their little girl, Victoria, completed the group.

I had just gotten my "loaner" hearing aids and was pleasantly surprised to see that I could follow the conversation without asking people to repeat themselves.  Joanna and I had a nice side conversation and I remember telling her that I wouldn't bore her by listing my maladies.  Suffice it to say that getting used to the hearing devices was and continues to be number one on my list.  But the point I was attempting to make was that I had come to the conclusion that my maladies were the least of my problems.  They were not the reason that I get nauseated by almost everything, why I can't eat, or sleep, or get up the energy to do anything anymore.

When I told her that I thought I had just become overwhelmed by the state of the world and that nausea was the only sane reaction, I felt myself beginning to tear up.  I quickly changed the subject to life in Singapore, or something like that.

I was a philosophy minor in college.  I gobbled up all that existential stuff.  I read Sartre (Nausea, No Exit, and Being and Nothingness).  I read other French existentialists.  I switched to Nietsche (is that how you spell that?) and Heidegger and Mann and all those other German guys.  I understood the whole idea about existential nausea, but it was nothing more to me than an idea.  I was a husband, a new father, and a student teacher.  I was too pleased with myself to feel Nausea.

I understand it now.  Luckily, I have these new hearing aids to take my mind off all the existential dread that would normally occupy my attention.

My first outing with them happened at Chris' house.  Exactly what I didn't want to happen, happened. People assured me that they didn't even notice them.  Christian assured me that with my newfound ability to hear, people would be less likely to think me an asshole.  That was so comforting.  The thing Chris doesn't fully understand about me is that I've always been something of an asshole.  Hearing had nothing to do with it.  Just ask anyone I ever taught with.

I did have a lovely conversation with Christine's mom.  I think I shared a scrapple recipe.  I wouldn't have been able to do that two weeks earlier.

My best moment with the new hearing aids happened last Monday.  I was hanging out at the park with Willa and Jaydee, helping them swing, standing by while they tried to cross the monkey bars, the usual.  There was a moment when the girls were huddled up and looking at something on a catwalk leading from one slide to another.  I walked over to see what it was.

Do you know those sickeningly sweet commercials for miracle hearing aid companies?  There is always a distinguished looking, gray-haired gentleman in a cardigan sweater with pushed up sleeves. On his lap are two grandchildren looking at him adoringly as they whisper seven year old secrets to him.  He has a great big smile and if the picture moved he would be shaking his head.  His grandchildren smile, validated by their grandfather's new hearing.

That was me on that catwalk on Monday.  I sat between them and helped them investigate whatever it was, a bug I think.  I didn't once have to ask them to repeat themselves.  I didn't once pretend I heard them.

It would have made a nice ad.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I always preferred the "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" section of philosophy, my sense was existentialists took themselves and their existence way to seriously, perhaps the antidote to that is spending the day enjoying a bug.