LOUD

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• March 12, 2022

One of my favorite movies of last year is Oscar contender “CODA.” Which stands for ‘Children of Deaf Adults.’ It’s a quite a simple story, but a moving one about family. I highly recommend it.

While I’m not near deaf (thank goodness), my hearing is shit and getting worse. This all started when I was a small child. Because of bad allergies and being extremely susceptible to strep throat, I used to fall ill quite a bit. Sinus infections often lead to middle ear infections. Such was the woe of my childhood. Ear infection pain is extremely hard to alleviate, would make me dizzy and ultimately, infection after infection permanently damaged my hearing.

My right ear is worse than my left ear. For pretty much as long as I can remember, I’ve had to ask people to repeat themselves because I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Loud places are difficult for me to function because I can’t hear anything but muffled noise. Even when I was young and sneaking into bars I would complain about loud music.

Conversely, though, I am very good at tuning things out. This is partly because I have two siblings that would annoy me when I was young. Sometimes (before gigs especially), I’ll have time to kill and I’ll go to a bar and read a book. I can be gifted when it comes to tuning out chaos.

I do love concerts though. I’ve always been a music junky and seeing live music brings me as much joy as anything. I love how loud it is there (and not talking to anyone). Same goes for seeing movies in theaters.

My phone is constantly warning me that I listen to my headphones too loud too often. What makes that painful, is I don’t even think it’s that loud. When I bought my first car as a teenager, I blew out the speakers in less than a week (haha) and has to replace them. Sometimes, when I go to someone’s place to watch a movie, I get embarrassed because I can’t hear the movie. If I’m staying somewhere and I’m watching their TV, it’s not unusual they ask me to lower it.

It’s my hope that in the next 20 years, the technology for fixing hearing with lasers is there. I will need it. In the meantime, I probably won’t lower the volume on anything. Despite knowing it’s damaging me. But we also know looking at screens all day is destroying our vision and it’s my job to look at computers all day. At least the laser eye surgery technology is amazing.

Excuse me, I have to now go drown out my thoughts will very loud music.