Mr and Mrs Robot Head

 Yes, another post about life during the pandemic - and my rapid spiral into the abyss. It's funny how we adapt to things, and what was once an odd inconvenience becomes a very normal and perfectly acceptable part of our day (unless you're one of those Trump-loving morons from Texas which considers wearing a mask for twenty minutes at the gas station to be a bridge too far). For example, where there a time when we didn't have our temperature taken when we entered a building? Actually, I don't think I ever truly had a problem with that, and it became an everyday part of my life beginning on the trip to India last spring. Truthfully, I find it sort of comforting to know that my temperature is 97.5; it's one of the advantages of going to the gym every day. Oh, and I assumed that the machine at the gym just ran low, but I had exactly the same reading at the dentist's office yesterday. They both told me that the new accepted normal is 97.5. Where did 98.6 go? Have we as a species suddenly grown more cold - feel free to submit the appropriate Trump follower joke here.

In much the same way I'm hoping to adapt to the latest dreadful sign of growing older: hearing aids. I'm on day three of hearing aids, and I'm hoping against hope that I'll adapt to them. Lord knows my friends are happy that I finally got over myself and picked some up. Much like my grandmother Maude I've gotten quite deaf, and, like her, I tried to hide it by becoming a pretty talented lip reader (which all went out the window because of mask-wearing during the pandemic) and appropriate laugh inserter. What made me get around my vanity was that it was simply becoming a major problem in class. Quite simply, I couldn't hear my students, especially the low talkers, which are probably exactly the ones I need to hear the most. Because I'm most deaf in the higher ranges the hearing aids are definitely turned up in that range, which is giving everything a pretty metallic sound now (including my own voice). Has water coming out of a faucet always sounded like someone crinkling aluminum foil? I'm sitting here typing and listening to the dishwasher running - and I've gotten up twice to see if there is actually water splashing out onto the floor. The Tech told me to leave the setting on default (my default, not a standard) for as long as possible and see if my brain simply adjusts. I can adjust them on the app (they're Bluetooth, which leaves too many options for me to mess with them, although it also allows me to talk on the phone with them, which just seems wrong). It's like when you walk down the street but you don't actually feel your clothes moving against you because your brain figures out that you simply don't need all the information (which always makes my first year students get nervous because they become convinced that their brain is working secretly against them - well, ok, so I do tell them that). Hopefully my brain will sort this out on its own, although it's done little to solve my problems over the last year.

Whenever I check in at the gym I have to lean over and allow the machine to take my temperature. At that point I always say, "Thank you, Mrs. Robot Head." The folks at the front desk, polite to a fault, always laugh at this dumb line.

And Mr. Robot Head. Sigh. That said, my friends will testify to how hard I hard to work to get over my vanity and get hearing aids. They seem pretty big, although part of that is having enough room for Bluetooth. I don't know if I'll use the Bluetooth (it eats up the batteries pretty quickly) but it seemed stupid to not have the option. Of course, in corporate America, insurance doesn't cover them.