If you don’t know by now, I am a Sign Language Interpreter for a ninth grader at a local middle school. Technically he’s a high schooler - but the high school here is too small so they keep their ninth graders in the two middle schools. Thursday - of last week - in Health class they watched Super Size Me as an introduction to what eating junk food can do to your body. The teacher (an awesome teacher btw) popped in the DVD and hit play - forgetting about the whole captions thing we need for my student. So, like I usually have to do, I went up to him and requested the captions be turned on. He said sure and handed me the remote control, gesturing that he had no idea what to do. I told him it should be simple, just hit the subtitles button and voila! Nothing. Crap, now I had to stop the movie, go to the menu and try and turn on the English subtitles that way. The only problem now was there wasn’t an option for English subtitles - only Spanish. What the eff was wrong here?! So, I gave up the battle and turned the movie back on for the rest of the class. They didn’t finish watching the movie on Thursday and so on Friday I went in early to see what I could do - the teacher even brought in his 15 year-old son to try to figure it out - no luck. What I wasn’t getting was the very simple fact that the damn DVD does not have English subtitles. DVD’s do not talk to the TV the way VHS tapes communicate with the TV to turn on captioning. Captioning and Subtitles are two different technologies - one is built into the TV (captioning) and the other is built into the DVD player (subtitles). It’s hella complicated to try and figure it all out - and if you really want to know you can go ask the Computer-Vet, he knows. I just could not wrap my mind around this DVD not having captions - er oops, sorry, I mean subtitles - so I went out over the weekend and rented the damn thing! (It was a free rental - I had a coupon. I didn’t care wasting it since we have joined Netflix.) So, in the end I realized the stupid thing is not equipped with English subtitles, and therefore my Deaf student cannot watch the film and will be unable to enjoy the movie like his entire class of hearing kids got to - how fucking messed up is that?! I am so pissed off at assholes who won’t fork over the extra dough it takes to put the god-damn subtitles onto a DVD so that all of effing America can enjoy their films! It broke my heart today when I had to tell him that he wasn’t going to be able to watch it because it did not have the English subtitles. He looked sad, said it was okay, but I could see that he was disappointed. He really wanted to see the documentary - and because people are cheap he couldn’t! It’s 2006 and the hearing world is still shutting out the Deaf community - how jacked up is that?!

Please - let me know what you think about this. I want to write a letter to the filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, and I would like to include any and all comments I get. My husband (Scott) is also posting this on his site and I hope to get many angry people commenting (on our behalf). This should not be an issue in today’s world - we’ve come too far from the days of segregation - this is still a form of segreation, we are still keeping them out. If you could have seen the look on my student’s face when I told him he couldn’t watch it - it would have broken your heart too.

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