Third World Writer

After a [few] afternoon classes and morning masses, I feel like I’m able to sign a whole lot of things [already]. [Enough] to [communicate] at least. So to test myself, and to improve my [vocabulary], as I write the words on this [entry], I’ll [mark] the words I don’t know how to sign with [brackets] and maybe ask a Deaf kid how to sign them later. Everything else I [should] be able to sign, [although] signing things word-for-word is not very [advisable]. You have to sign the meaning of the sentences to be better understood, removing the unneeded words and including only the [main] ones.

Haha, this is fun, it’s like I have a [wide] [vocabulary] of signs, when [really], this is very simple English. It’s like [simple.wikipedia.org], where sentences are so short and simple that [even] a gradeschooler [would] understand.

This month our class will be having our evaluations. Because I’ll be going to Cebu for my brother and sister’s graduations, I won’t be here for the evaluation, so I’ll have to [take] the test early, which is a little [scary]. I’ll also have to sign an [entire] song for Ma’am Beth, our evaluator. I chose [Gary V's] “Gaya ng Dati”, but [might] change it later on if I [find] a better song. (Thanks to [tutor] Anne for teaching the signs to the words!)

Classes on Saturdays and exposures on Sundays are fun. I learn a lot of things that I don’t [really] need to learn (I [took] up Sign Language on a [whim], after all), but I have a lot of fun learning them. Also, last Sunday I signed “Holy, Holy” in church for the Deaf people, and they told me after that I was very red up in [front]. ^_^; I haven’t [turned] red [since] high school, I think. That was [embarrassing]. >.< And they [might] [even] make me do it again! >.

Being [around] Deaf people, you [realize] how [deprived] they are [growing] up, not understanding their parents, not knowing their [own] names, not being a part of the world going on [around] them. But the one thing I can’t help but think about every day, the one thing that I [find] very sad, is that they live in a world without music. All the other things I [mentioned] are hard to [relate] to, hard to [imagine] one’s self in those [situations]. But music is a large part of my life, so when I [imagine] a world without [violins] and [pianos] and [flutes] and [kokia], I feel the world [shrinking], getting smaller and smaller until it’s [unbearable]. A world without music is [scary].

[Ah], I have a lot of words to learn.