Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door, let's go

  We used to do things.  Go to concerts, plays, movies.  Slowly, though, we stopped doing it because I couldn't hear anything.  I last saw a play in 1999 (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Guthrie, excellent production with Patrick Stewart and Mercedes Ruehl, at least as far as I could tell, having missed at least half the dialogue), and have, in the period since 1999 seen two movies in theaters - The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers in 2002 (which I didn't need to hear to know what was going on having read the books several times) and then Gravity in 2013, which actually didn't rely on its dialogue either, you could watch the picture and not hear it and follow the story (presuming you'd left your logic and anything you knew about science at the door). But that's it.  For the last 25 years almost all of our entertainment took place at home, where I could turn on the captions. Now I can hear much better, with my CIs, but we've never tried a live performa...

  The other day an online friend posted this and tagged me: And of course it resonated.  I responded:  " Yep. Screaming babies on planes, stupid people bellowing into cell phones, it all goes away. Silence can be a refuge." And as my late friend and CI sister used to say, being able to turn it off is my superpower!  And it does feel like that.   Today is laundry day at my house, and my husband wanted me to wash his work jacket - one of those yellowish ones that you see at Fleet Farm and Menards.  So I did, and popped it in the dryer, and holy moly.  It was BANGING on the sides of the dryer.  We realized that it was the little plastic knob thingies on the hood cord ends, and took them off, and that made it a bit quieter, but the weight of the jacket was such that it thudded against the dryer drum every second or so. After a while it started to feel as though someone were pounding on my head rather than just a jacket hitting the dryer wall, and I ...