Midlife Meditation

Yes, I do need you to use that microphone. The presenter had just been handed a wireless microphone designed to fit around one of her ears. She held it in her hand for a moment, her expression bemused, then set it down on the table. Here we go again,  I thought to myself. Sure enough, with a smile on her face, and using excellent projection technique, the presenter proclaimed, "I won' be needing thi'. You can all hear me, can' you? I've go' a good 'rong voi', don' I?" At least, that's what I heard. Her vowels came through loud and clear. Her sibilants, though--consonants pronounced with the tongue and teeth--were almost inaudible, even with my hearing aids turned up all the way. If she'd been looking right at me--if, rather than being in a large conference room, we were having a face-to-face conversation (hopefully not in a noisy coffee shop, which presents a whole other level of difficulty)--I probably would've been fi...

I have a problem with song lyrics: I just don't hear them. You may be aware I wear hearing aids. My hearing loss isn't bad; it's just at a couple of frequencies that are important for recognizing consonants in speech, and which also tend to be overused in popular music. This is why being in a party where the music is turned up too high is actually painful for me: it's overloading my ears. It's fun for me to blame the hearing loss on teaching one too many recorder lessons to large classes of fourth graders, but in truth, this has been going on for a very long time. I was first aware of the overload problem at my very first rock concert, when U2 played Autzen Stadium in Eugene in 1997. At the time, I didn't know the pain I was feeling was abnormal; I assumed everyone was feeling it, and used to it from attending dozens of concerts, probably already half deaf, and that if there was any abnormality in me, it was that I was a 36-year-old rock virgin not yet deaf...