Just a day in the life: MHCC integrated media student Jerimy Hammer

MHCC integrated media student Jerimy Hammer talks about his upcoming project, creating his own record label and living with blindness.

“It’s mostly about informing people on people who are blind and the kind of technology and the kind of barriers we have to deal with on an everyday basis,” said Mt. Hood student Jerimy Hammer on his final Integrated Media project this term.

Hammer, is just like the rest of the students in the radio broadcast program, except he just can’t see, after a single-car driving accident blinded him 13 years ago.

His “dream job” is to start his own record label, he said. “I would love to take people’s music, and make it nicer cleaner, neater, more professional.”

He’s currently organizing interviews and compiling content for his project to be aired over KMHD2, the MHCC campus radio platform.

“I love when my stuff gets to play on-air,” said Hammer. He plans on having a friend also affected by blindness on air, whose message is, “Don’t shy away from us – we’re no different than you are; we just can’t see.”

Of course, working in such an integrated field as media means meeting a lot of new people, and for Jerimy, running into some common misconceptions about vision-impaired individuals.

“A lot of people are really shocked when I’m able to use the computer… It’s just a voice-over, all Macs have them, it’s just a quick key to turn them on,” he said. “I can still use my computer; you can’t, but I can.” Which is a nice perk when you want to get some homework done in class, he added.

There’s more: “Most people don’t understand that we can use phones just like you do to. We can send text messages just like you do.

“…Now picture messages, that’s a little difficult,” Hammer said.

Yes that was a joke – his sense of humor is definitely still intact.

“I crack jokes at being blind all the time. It makes it easier to deal with the fact” – for himself, and the people Hammer communicates with, he means. This habit is a bit off-putting at first, they might wonder if they’re supposed to laugh. To clarify, they definitely are.

Hammer says navigating the Mt. Hood campus isn’t terribly hard, apart from the large open areas near the bookstore and Visual Arts Gallery. A more concerning obstacle is when he can tell that people see him, but won’t move out of the way, he said. “You think common sense would be to move (aside), right?”

When he’s not working on broadcasting homework, Jerimy enjoys listening to movies, and listed “Bad Grandpa” and the Wayans Brothers’ films as some of his favorites.