I'll be the one in the corner not saying much...

Tonight we went to a birthday party for Lucy's paramour, Antonio (tell me a storio). It was a big family party, which is interesting because half of Antonio's family is deaf and the other half are Puerto Rican. Actually I guess there's a third half that are deaf AND Puerto Rican, leaving only his mother who is neither deaf, nor Puerto Rican but who was very busy running the party. And who didn't have a whole lot of time to talk to me.

The party split up into two rooms, one of which was very, very loud, and the other which was amazingly, deathly QUIET. Usually I would have avoided the loud room, with the brassy Puerto Rican wives yelling at their husbands in Spanish while the teenagers played Wii and yelled at each other, but I was even more intimidated by the quiet room. I've never seen a room have that many people in it and be so, SO quiet. One time I went in and signed 'good cake', but everybody just looked confused so I ran away fast. I ran away to the hallway where everything came to a head when a friendly uncle accosted me there. He was speaking too loudly, and not enunciating normally, but I couldn't tell if it was because he was deaf or because he didn't speak English. I thought he'd asked me my name, so in English I replied, "my name is Carrie," but he clearly didn't understand me. Now what?! If he was deaf and I started speaking Spanish to him, I'd look like an idiot. If he really spoke Spanish and I started signing... well, no better. Worse actually. I settled for speaking Spanish really loudly and slowly (because if he spoke Spanish he must be an idiot?) while flailing my hands around wildly in front of me. Somehow this made him go away.

So I ended up in the loud room, watching Mario Wii and grinning like an idiot in an attempt to look like a friendly person who knows what's going on around them. I think they thought I was kind of odd. Claire would have hated it.