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54 C H R I S T O P H E R J O N H E U E R Value beyond ASL, Value beyond Breasts Back when I was still an undergrad at UW-Milwaukee, I knew this girl whose major source of misery was that she was too beautiful. She was a model—I can’t remember the names of any of the magazines she appeared in, but this is because my brain had to make a choice: look at her portfolio and see the bathing suits she was wearing in the pictures, or carefully memorize the titles of the magazine covers they were on. Guess which choice my brain made! The weird thing is that Susan didn’t have a narcissistic bone in her body. She was my ex-girlfriend’s roommate, and that’s how I got to know her. In her dorm room, she was cool and nice and open. But when she went out clubbing with us? In a word: yikes. Guys would line up to buy her drinks, ask what her zodiac sign was, et cetera. She’d freeze them all with a glare so ugly, the whoosh of deflating male egos would blow out nearby candles. One day, I asked her what was up with this. “I don’t want guys to want me because of how I look,” she explained. “And that’s why they’re coming up to me in the bars . . . because of how I look.” I was a bit irritated by this explanation. She wasn’t narcissistic , no, but the whole thing had a “Poor Little Rich Girl” quality to it. Not to be harsh, but if you don’t like your looks, go B U G 55 give them to the girl who just lost hers in a fire. Now quick, list the complaints she has about it! That’s how I felt back then. But now I see it differently. Last week, I went ice skating with some friends. There were three little girls out on the ice trying to skate. They were so cute! All bundled up like that, they looked like a bunch of multicolored marshmallows! My friend Jen and I were spinning around and signing to each other. The little girls must have been impressed because they kept watching us. Finally Jen waved them over. I thought they wanted to learn how to sign, but lo and behold, they wanted us to teach them how to spin! So we did! And I don’t mean to brag, but twenty years from now, when you see them in the Olympics, you have us to thank for it, baby! Anyway, later on I mentioned how this was the kind of cool learning experience I’d want from a deaf person if I were a hearing kid. Not just some deaf guy teaching me how to sign, but rather a deaf guy teaching me something completely different— like how to spin on the ice—while using sign language! It was projection on my part. Deep down I just wanted to be able to say someone saw me, a deaf man, as being good for something beyond teaching sign language. Jen understood. For those of you who still don’t, let me put it this way: An image of Susan had crept back into my mind. Not the Susan in her bikini gracing the covers of countless midwestern regional magazines, but rather the Susan who just wanted guys to see her as having value beyond her breasts. ...

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