short: news, updates, experiments

so it's been a while. news? my agency put up a collection for Katrina survivors now housed at Woodhaven Baptist Church and I feel we did fucking awesome. You know who you are. Thanks for giving. Tears. Truly.

Also, my hearing aid's fucked. The high humidity of September New York turned all sound into a buzz, then a bleep, and now it just kind of vibrates and emits feedback. My tendency to tinker and fix might have had something to do with it - but then again, might not, seriously. Anyways. This means I get to try a thought experiment I suggested at Haverford but didn't finish developing till Bristol.

I called it fetishization: the transformation of an object into a psychic medium, a focus of obsession. I felt some parents of deaf children practiced fetishization. I saw a Chinese film about a woman trying to find money to buy her son hearing aids; by the end of the film she was talking to the hearing aids. How many parents, faced with the choice of a hearing aid as the only medium of communication, turn that aid into the most important thing to be present when they are together? How does it affect people when they try to take them off?

Because I think sometimes unhealthy attachments develop between user and tool. I dunno, anyone see where I'm going with this? So I'm gonna monitor my state of mind over the next few days, see what comes up. Hearing-aid-free-life....