You are sitting in your living room, which is under a nice piece of coral, with a good view of the shrimp colony. Suddenly, a net is thrown around you, and you are pulled off your sofa, tentacle by tentacle. Someone drops you in a bucket and drives you to an unknown location. Without so much as an introduction, much less a nice dinner, you find yourself being pushed beakfirst in the crotch of giggling woman while onlookers film the entire humiliating event. Someone yells "Cut!". You are given a bath. And a rinse in soy sauce. And then served for dinner.

Now, years later, parts of this appear on the internet, and someone named "Charlemagne Allen" criticizes your acting, saying you look bored and listless.



, Charlemagne

I was rather disappointed with the octopus in that clip.....I know, pornos have horribly acting, but even by those standards, he looked rather bored and listless. No passion at all.

, Mac!

And you made the octopus sign sound so dirty.

Hawt!

To commemorate a truly outstanding contribution to a truly mindblowing thread, I present the sign for "octopus": Take your right hand, thumb and fingers together, and place on the back of the left hand, which also has the fingers and thumbs together. Keeping the right hand on top, "walk" the left hand to the left, opening and closing the fingers and thumbs like how an octopus would walk if an octopus could walk. Make it go faster if it is running away from being used in an unnatural manner to amuse people on the internet.

I give you the gonorrhea line as a present, Charlemagne. It will be my contribution to literature!

"Like gonnarhea, the drama spread"

I think that's going to be the first sentence when I begin to write the Great American Novel. Can I borrow that line from you?

See, there you go again, making me love you! You are too good, Beebo!

But thank you very much. It is a different culture and, as you said quite well, a different frame of reference, one I am still trying to adjust to. The lack of understanding that most hearing people have about Deaf culture and the divide between the Deaf and hearing worlds is enormous. I still feel as if I don't fully belong to either world. Having a hearing person who can see that there is more than just impaired hearing means so much - it is not something that most people understand.

And you can stare. I see that a lot and don't mind. Sign is a beautiful language, and there are ways to disguise your meaning if you are worried about others watching. And I balance this out by following the hands of people who use a lot of gestures with speech. I keep thinking they are saying something in sign, and I'm sure they wonder why this person is staring at their hands.

I've never had the opportunity to learn any sign languages, but I've always found them to be such a visual treat. The lyricism of the body movements and the emotional expressiveness is a joy to watch. I have to try hard not to stare and have my interest mistaken for gawking. At those times I'm very much aware that I am peering into another culture, into a different frame of reference that weaves richness out of silence in ways I can only dimly understand.