Sign This

OK, so I’ve been woefully neglecting this blog, yet again.  I didn’t want to get caught up in the political maelstrom of the past several months with ineloquent blog posts.  I’ll be brief by saying that I’m less of a cynic today than I was yesterday.

On to this post.  I’ve been awed by sign language for most of my life.  When I was a kid, we would learn sign language for Sunday school choruses (we had a resident ASL teacher who came to my church) every once in a while.  In elementary school, our big chorus performance one year was “Love in Any Language,” complete with the signing (I was a featured signer).  We had a copy of The Joy of Signing and Beck and I would try to learn ASL in bits and pieces.  Like most childhood fascinations, it was brief.

I did learn the ASL alphabet enough to cobble together the odd sentence now and again.  When I was an anxious teenager, you might have seen me “finger spell” now and then…it was my weird, nervous habit that popped up out of nowhere.  I would rapidly spell out my thoughts to calm myself down, especially in situations where I was really nervous.  Think Thing from the Addams Family.  If you never noticed, I was slicker than I thought.  If you did and never said anything, thanks, you are a true friend.

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping (shocking for someone with anxiety), and waiting for Ambien to kick in I watch youtube videos.  I usually stick to live performances of artists that I really like, or old school music videos.  Somehow tonight, I got sidetracked into a whole youtube subculture.  The awesomeness I stumbled upon is signing to music.  You may not find this particularly interesting, but it provided hours of entertainment for me tonight.*

Below, some of the highlights:

 

*I also spend way too much time watching college a capella groups perform r&b and classic rock songs on youtube…but that’s a whole other post.