Auditory Hijinx
I love parallelism. I like it in literature, I like it in cinema, (I could shoot out 5,000 words easily on the amazing use of it in “The Departed”) and I like it in life. So it’s only fitting that I started my week with the exploration of a facial cavity (mouth) and that I ended my week with the exploration of a facial cavity (ears). I trekked over to the old audiornatholoncolgist because for a while my ears seemed clogged up and I had trouble hearing things others didn’t.
Upon arrival I sat in a spiffy waiting room and filled out insurance paperwork. After that was done and with the fear of forgetting my social security number lifted, I took in my surroundings. I sat in a chair against one wall of the nearly empty waiting room. Directly across from me was a cute girl with her mom next to her. It was a Friday morning so I assumed if the girl was there she was college aged and on break. She looked young though, and she was accompanied by her mom which made me think she was possibly in high school. Then I remembered I still drag my mom with me to get a haircut, so having her mom there didn’t necessarily mean anything.
What made this situation truly special was that on the third, connecting wall hung a giant flat screen TV playing Dora The Explorer. Everyone sat in silence for a couple of minutes until Dora ended and on came Ni Hao, Kai-lan. For those of you that are confused and think I just smashed my head into the keyboard, allow me to explain. Better yet, I’ll let Ni Hao or Kai-lan (whichever part of the title happens to be her name) explain it to you here. … Now that your brain has melted let’s continue. The show is basically Dora The Explorer, except she’s Chinese. Dora has a monkey friend, Chinese Dora has an adorable tiger friend. This cuddly-ifying of tigers explains why in Chinese community is so confused about Pandas. Resulting in this, this and this.
The girl in the waiting room is as amused by this show as much as I am and she begins joking with her mom by repeating the Chinese word for “listen” when instructed to do so. I laugh to myself and we make eye contact. (By now anyone who reads this regularly must have noticed 95% of my interactions with women are just series of eye contact. The thing about eye contact relationships is that nothing ever bad happens. It’s just awkward flirting at its best!) We’re going back and forth between watching the absurdity of this program and looking at each other and smiling. That is until her mom gets up and asks the receptionist to change the channel because as she explains she’s past the period of her life when she had to watch children’s shows. They get called in to see the doctor 30 seconds later so it doesn’t even matter that I just got cock blocked by that girl’s mom. If anything a positive comes out of it, because now I get to learn how to decorate a room with under $500!
After watching two women cry because their living room looks slightly different I take my turn to see the doctor. He checks inside my ears, cleans them out a little and sends me to take a hearing test. A man whose son attended Binghamton years ago, sticks a knob in each one of my ears and tells me I’m going to hear sounds. A series of beeps, tones and gurgled noises ensue, and he removes the knobs. I think I’ve been programmed to assasainate the president, but I’m not positive. Next comes the classic “hand raising when you hear the tone” test, followed by a “repeat the word after you hear it” test. When he’s done with this he enters the sound proof chamber I’m in and asks, “Do you play in a rockband?” I answer simply with ”No,” and assume I didn’t do so hot on this hearing test.
The doctor sits me down with a printout and explains that most people can hear sounds at 20 decibels, but I only start hearing sounds at 30 decibels. He goes on to tell me that this isn’t serious, it just means I can’t quite hear as well as most people, and that I should monitor it in the future to make sure it doesn’t get worse. He says I should make another appointment in six months to a year. Let me recap this visit. I come in. I tell the doctor that I can’t hear as well as most people. I take a test. The doctor tells me that I can’t hear as well as most people. I leave. God I love parallelism.
