“It’s got lil tyke v-d, of the dentata variety, some killer eggs ready to devour some sperm, and a really cute girl praising the virtues of sex — while stealing a glance at a boy who makes more than just her heart go ‘pitter patter.’”

“Writers, for all their bleeding insecurity, can have raging egos, and it’s important for all of us to remember that, at the end of the day, sometimes the best thing we can do is hunker down on the floor, open our mail, and try our best to recycle.”

Yesterday I went out for dim sum with friends in Inner Richmond. It was my first dim sum experience, and it was awesome. I’m still recovering. After the meal the six of us decided to carpool back to the Mission for coffee. Since the Prius we came in only seats 5 (we met 2 people at the restaurant), one person was going to be left out. So, we decided the smallest of us, my friend Kathryn (who also happens to be deaf), would ride in the trunk.

I was concerned about the trunk trip, but apparently she has made the ride back there before. Her boyfriend opened the back and she crawled right in and curled up, like it was old hat. Her boyfriend assures us it’s fine, but to tell her to keep her head down so the cops don’t see. I knew the trunk of the Prius opened like a hatchback so that there was no barrier between her and the rest of us, and I couldn’t figure out why he wanted us to tell her. Couldn’t he tell her?

“What, can she not hear us?,” I asked.

“No, she’s deaf,” her boyfriend told me. And I felt like the biggest idiot in the world.

Later he told me that is how you know you have become comfortable around your disabled friends - you forget about their disability. Kathryn makes it easy for those of us who hear to be around her; she does all the work by reading lips. She’s so good at it, that it can be hard to forget not to talk to her when she is walking ahead of me. Sometimes, she says, even she forgets she’s deaf.

Anyway, it’s not every day I ask if a deaf person can hear me, so I thought I would share.