Free Socially Awkward by Stephanie Haddad

like being a kid again, watching a really awesome commercial for a toy you just had to have, only to have that commercial fade directly into the five o’clock news or something. Snore.
     
    Still, as I thought this each and every weekday morning, I still managed to choke down an on-the-fly (but healthy) breakfast and go about my daily routine. M ost girls wake up and shower, style their hair, put on some makeup, and get dressed. But for me, mornings look a little bit different.
     
    First of all, my alarm clock is not the typical kind that most people wake up to every day. Mine has a special bed shaking feature that helps me to get up in the morning. Being hearing impaired, I can’t just rely on the irritating beep of the alarm. While that noise grates on me just as much as the next gal, sometimes it isn’t loud enough to hear… especially if I’ve burrowed my way under the covers, as usual. So my alarm buzzes, shakes the bed, and all but shoves me onto the floor.
     
    Sometimes I think I’d be better off trading it in for a “hearing ear” dog, as I call them, who could just lick my face or something. That would at least be more pleasant, if less hygienic.
     
    Anyway, once I’m up, it’s not just coffee that I need to get going. If I want to hear anything at all, I’ve got to wipe down my hearing aids, scrape out the wax from inside those tiny ear holes, and test the batteries. Trust me; it’s worth testing them every morning. There’s nothing worse than having one hearing aid shut off in the middle of a class, while driving, at a movie, or somewhere else inconvenient—which is pretty much everywhere. Well, I guess, having them both shut off is the only thing that would be worse.
     
    See, without my hearing aids, I sometimes feel like I’m in a crowded mall. Everyone is talking around me and it’s noisy, I can hear things, but I can’t quite distinguish any of the wor ds or even the voices . It’s all there, echoing around me, but too far out of my grasp. Or it’s traveling towards my ears, just landing somewhere around them instead of hitting my ear drums. I can hear, but it doesn’t sound very good at all.
     
    So after I stumble out of the shower—the only real time I spend awake without my hearing aids is when I’m in the water—I get to work preparing my communication lifeline to the rest of the world. While o ther girls are stressing over mascara smudges , I’m worr y i ng about why my earwax seems to have doubled in quantity. Then, when I’m ready to go, that’s when I look in the mirror and think to myself, Gee… one of these days I should get up earlier so I have time to wear mascara.
     
    Then I go to class.
     
    Class time those days was, obviously, made better by the use of my iPad to chart my progress online as Olivia Saunders. During one of Dr. Chase’s many lectures that week, I learned that I had officially reached the “friend recommendations” stage of the experiment. Meaning, total strangers who had become my virtual friends on Facebook had begun to suggest “people I may know” among their own friends. They were passing me on and helping me to connect with more and more people, bringing my total up over 3 00.
     
    Flipping back to my own profile, on the other hand, showed that not all Facebook profiles were c reated equal. Of the more than 2 00 ‘blind’ friend requests I had sent out as plain old Jennifer Smith, only 26 had acc epted—mostly normal-looking wome n like myself with regular interests like reading, baking, and playing Monopoly. All of the hot guys who snatched up the opportunity to friend Olivia seemed to be ignoring my real profile’s requests.
     
    W ell, w ho wants to be friends with those guys anyway?
     
    As I scrolled through my notifications for the influx of new friends, however boring they might have been, one name caught my attention above the others. If I hadn’t been in class, I might have slapped myself.
     
    Noah Wayland, trainer