Public service announcement

I've seen various people talking about not getting their comment notifications, and I've had some troubles with it myself.

Do you all know about this?
http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml

Try it. If you're logged in, it'll show you most recent comments, and you can click on the link for recent comments posted, too. It may be a paid-account benefit, I'm not sure.

Thoughts on phone conversations

I tell people that I don't generally call people on the phone very much. I'm always worried about what am I interrupting, am I going to get someone at a busy time who doesn't want to talk but doesn't want to be rude to me. Are the kids going to interrupt me and make noise - well heck, sure they will. Etc. So I tend to communicate by IM and email and such. If someone's given me contact info but is rarely online, it doesn't bode well for our contact.

Today I realized another reason why phone calls aren't working for me - and I suspect I've realized this subconsciously and not wanted to face it and it's part of why I've been shying away from phone calls. I ended up with a longish phone call with a friend. And I had a heck of a bad time following what she was saying, kept having to ask her to repeat and such. There were parts I didn't get at all but were too embarrassed to keep asking for repeats.

I can't lipread on the phone at all. It was worse because I haven't had enough time talking to her to get her speech patterns down well. I realize the phone calls I do make are only to people I know really well - Karl, my family, one or two very special friends. Those people I've talked to enough, especially in person where I can lip read, that I know their speech pattern well enough that if I miss a bit, I can fill it in by guess, sorta by statistical expectation, most of the time.

For those of you who may not have heard me admit this, I have a slowly developing hearing problem. Put me in the standard hearing test - soundproof room and pure tones - and I will pass it fine. (Or at least I did in the early 90s.) Have me try to deal with conversation against background noise, and I better be able to see the person's mouth. I use subtitles on DVDs extensively, etc. I spent a long time in denial and developing my lipreading without admitting it.

I think maybe I better go ahead and call the speech and hearing clinic that tested the kids. They told me they have tests that work for what I'm talking about. I've postponed it, as they're not open on Karl's off Fridays, but I have gotten a babysitting offer.

I still would like to talk with people. But if people want me to talk to them on the phone, they should tell me when - or possibly call me and I can call them back, I've got unlimited long distance - and be willing to be careful of enunciation (yeah, I know, I'm the pot calling the kettle black, and I'm embarrassed about that) and willing to put up with lots of repeats.

Hm, I wonder if this problem is going to make it impossible for me to learn to sing in parts? I thought it was hard for me to pick out the alto line because I've spent 30-odd years singing along by finding the melody, but I hadn't thought about if this was related. Thinking about that makes the problem scarier... edges it back towards facing "what if whatever this is continues to worsen?"