Now, I can’t speak about the aging process for women, they have their own set of aging issues. But for men there are things that happen that seem particular to men, like our hair falling off our heads and suddenly growing out our ears.
I’ll never forget the day I realized my hair was thinning. I was in the Air Force and liked to keep my hair cut to perfect military specifications. To keep a clean cut I used a razor to swipe off the little hairs that grow on the back of my neck. Well, one day I decided to ensure my quick swipes were doing the job right, so I pulled out a small mirror. Turning my back to the large bathroom mirror and gazing through the small one so I could get a good look at the back of my neck I suddenly saw the top of my head, and there it was. On the crown of my skull there was a bald spot. A BALD SPOT!?!?! I stood transfixed by the hairless hole on my head and screamed like I had just seen a spider. What, I hate spiders. They’re creepy. Judge me.
Now, I’ve always thought it pretty heinous that so many women feel they have to slather themselves with makeup or shove big implants into their breasts or workout 80 hours a week to stay thin in order to look good for men. But as much as women think that’s what men want, men also think women want certain things in a man too. Men believe women want tall, dark, handsome men with chiseled features who look like they could kill a Stegosaurus with their bare hands while singing like Justin Timberlake and saving a puppy from drowning. They like a full, thick head of hair and perfect features like they belong on the cover of GQ or in a Twilight movie. These guys exist, you know them, you try to talk to them and they say, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.” Unfortunately the rest of us have to work at it, and when a normal man starts to blow his feathers it’s traumatizing.
I spent a lot of years working on Air Force flight lines. The thing about military flight lines is they’re full of military planes. Big, noisy military planes. The first part of my career was spent on the island of Okinawa working around F-15 fighter jets. Unless you’ve experienced it, you can’t imagine the high-pitched scream these things make when they taxi out of their revetments. You feel like you’re at a concert standing right in front of a couple bagillionwatt speakers with Aerosmith, Motely Crew, KISS, Mötorhead, AC/DC, and Led Zepplin all playing at the same time with the volume on 1,000. It’s loud.
So after years of this my hearing started to diminish. Not catastrophically, just the higher frequency range. It happened slowly and I didn’t realize it until I went to the doctor at the behest of my wife who said I couldn’t ever hear her. I told the doc that I had problems hearing people right in front of me if I was in a restaurant or bar with a large crowd of people generating a lot of background noise. He tested my hearing and informed me that I needed hearing aids. HEARING AIDS!?!?! AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!! What, I saw a spider again.
So I was given a pair of hearing aids which were small and fit behind my ears. Practically invisible, right? But then my male ego kicked in and whispered in my ear “Pssst, what’s wrong with you? You’re not 80, you’re 45! You’re too young to be wearing hearing aids and people are going to laugh at you!” Well, that’s what he would have said if I could’ve heard him, but I didn’t because I need HEARING AIDS!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! Damn spiders.
So I never wore my hearing aids except when I knew I’d be in a loud environment. I’d decided I would rather take the chance of people seeing the hearing aids than sit there all night squinting at the person right in front me trying to read their lips.
But then something cool happened. I good friend brought his new girlfriend to a get-together one day and it turned out she is an Audiologist. I told her about my hearing aids, which I wasn’t wearing at the time, and she told me to make an appointment to see her. I did, and she gave me a thorough ear exam to confirm just how crappy my hearing was. She told me what the range of frequencies were that my hearing had lost and I responded “Funny, that’s the exact same range as my wife’s voice.” Mystery solved.
Anyway, she ended up giving me new hearing aids. These aren’t just any hearing aids though, they’re magic hearing aids! They have cool technology that does cool stuff, like when I answer my iPhone the audio beams straight into both ears via a Bluetooth connection with my hearing aids! And when my wife goes to bed and tells me to turn down the TV, I simply mute the set and the audio streams directly into my ears in perfect stereo. And of course, it wouldn’t be modern technology without an app! So now as I walk into different sound environments I pull out my smartphone and adjust my hearing aids to suite the place I’m at, and I can also save the settings for where I’m at so when I return the app detects it and asks me if I would like for it to adjust the hearing aids to the settings I used the last time I was there.
Its nerd nirvana for the hearing impaired I tell you!
I was really blown away by how cool these things are, and now I wear them all the time just so I can show people how cool they are! I honestly don’t mind telling people I wear hearing aids now because I have “6 Million Dollar Man” ears and I want people to know about it.
It took technology to sooth my male ego, and that’s something that shouldn’t be overlooked. Technology changed me from an eye-squinting-because-I’m-trying-to-read-your-lips buffoon to a confident man who can hear the conversations around him.
Thank God for technology and what it’s doing for our lives, especially for men who are afraid their diminished capacities will undermine their inner Schwarzenegger, and they won’t be able to impress women by saving the planet from evil aliens.
So until my next post, good friends, the answer is yes… I can hear you now.
