Huh?

Over the course of the past few months, I've become increasingly interested in my hearing. Now anyone that knew me as a child knows that I spent literally thousands of hours with headphones on. I started out listening to opera records as a really little kid. (Parents -- take note. While it might SEEM like people would say "Oh, how cute!" when you tell them that bit of information as an adult, what they actually say is "Oh, how weird." So thanks, dad, for making me aware of the classics...and also for nearly making me unmarketable on the dating scene years later.) Eventually I moved on to listening to a radio, then cassette tapes, then CDs. I sat in rocking chairs and listened to music for hours as a child. To this day, I'm most relaxed sitting in a recliner listening to headphones. My wife and several friends have noted that I look autistic, sitting there rocking with headphones on. I pay them no mind and retreat into my high decibal happy place. There used to be an online magazine for music fans called "Addicted to Noise," and that's probably an excellent description of yours truly. I love music. I love sound. I love the craft of creating sound. This love of noise has gotten me involved with children's choir as a child and a band as a recent college grad clinging desparately to his youth. It also means I've gone to several hundred concerts in my lifetime, and I've seen virtually every band that I really like, and in many cases, several times each.

This little obsession led to several results as I grew older. First off, I spent a gutload of cash on CD's during high school and college. If any of my apartments had ever caught fire in college, investigators would have probably declared that the place had been occupied by someone with a serious investment in plastic coasters or Tupperware. The second result was that I have developed some hearing loss and tinnitus. Now the hearing loss has never been enough to really bother me...my ears ring when I lay in bed, and I do occasionally have trouble hearing people on the phone. But it's mostly relegated to my right ear (funny...you usually stand on the right side of music halls, and you lose more hearing in that ear...), and I've never really thought of it as a problem. But now I'm getting worried. I'm much more gentle on my ears now, but have I started the ball rolling on having really bad hearing as I get older?

Hearing loss runs deep in my family. Several years ago I joked at a family get together that we should just drop a car battery in the middle of the living room and let everyone hookup their hearing aids to it. The majority of the older adults in the family wear hearing aids, and at holidays, it was not uncommon to look around and see lots of old people cupping their ears immediately followed by various pitches of chirping and humming coming from the hearing aids. It looked and sounded like you'd entered a bird sanctuary full of crazy old people trying to fly away. My family has filled up a landfill with hearing aid batteries, no doubt, and I suspect if you walked barefoot across my grandparents family room, you might be able to build up a charge from old hearing aid batteries embedded in your foot. When they all took their hearing aids out, it sounded a little like the New York Stock Exchange with everyone talking over each other.

I've been debating investing in an iPod over the past few weeks. I think I'm going to go ahead and pull the trigger, but the thought of yet another hearing-killing-device in our house has caused me to pause. I'll definitely have to work to use it responsibly. My dad got one a while back, and he's enjoying his. Since he hasn't succumbed to the hearing aid yet, I suspect he's had to rigup some sort of amplifier meant for a soccer stadium to get enough volume out of it to hear it. (Anyone who knows my dad knows that this is quite possible. He's liable to have welded something new to his iPod by now...he has had it 2 weeks, you know?) I also had to laugh this past weekend when I visited my grandfather. He wears wireless headphones to watch TV, since it means he can control the volume. Previously, everyone else in the family room just sat around stunned by the jet engine volume of my grandparent's TV wondering how long it would take the bleeding to stop. What I noticed this weekend was that his headphones were loud enough WHILE ON HIS HEAD that I could listen to the show he was watching just from the audio that bled out of the headphones. It really is a testament to the strength of a Hawkins skull to have endured that for so long. If I tried to listen to those headphones at the volume he had them set at, I'm realtively sure that my fillings would have come loose. You could launch a missle three feet from his head, and he'd have no idea...

So as I head to Chicago to see two concerts (Belle & Sebastian with the New Pornographers, and Stereolab...) this weekend, I pack my earplugs and pray that I'll be able to hear my grandkids say "PLEEEEASE turn down the TV grandpa!"

Bret