Comparison...

This isn't the blog post I had intended today, but oh well.   I went shopping today & was a little bit surprised.  How does shopping relate to HIV?  $, is how it relates to my illness.  The more I save, the more I can spend other things I need or that I can save for some later need.

Shopping is modern hunting &  I am pretty good at it, shopping, not hunting.  My roomie  has several small, round plastic clothes hampers like this one.

Her's are dying a slow death, so I started looking for more of them.  Online they are just under $2, but shipping something shaped like that would kill the price.  At Wal-Mart they're almost $3.  I opted to wait until I hit Big Lots to check out there prices on these things. I wound up hitting Dollar General before I got to Big Lots.  I figured I'd look for the hampers in there.  Usually they're a little cheaper than Wally World on these type things.

Hah.  Gone are the days of DG being cheaper than Wally World.  Their hampers were nearly $4 & of a lot lower quality.  I started looking around the Dollar General to check some other prices.  DG used to beat Wally's on cleaners, canned goods & oddities.  That was no longer the case.  Item type for type DG was more expensive.  The only thing I wound up getting were things Wal-Mart doesn't carry.  It seemed DG took Walmart's price & rounded it to the next .25¢ mark.

This wasn't what I wanted to see, but now I know it now & can mark this store off the list.  The point here is that you have to keep your eyes open & pay attention.  Just because one store used to be the cheapest, doesn't mean it still is.  When you're poor, especially if you're on a fixed income, you have watch these things.  It's annoying, but that's just how it is.  I doubt a lot of DG shoppers even notice that they're paying more than they would at Walmart.

Cya

Clean Slate...

This is going to be a shorter post.  I just finished the alphabet challenge & I'm glad I undertook it.   It gave me a means to focus my writing on my life with HIV.  I'm considering a couple of other routes for the next jaunt of my writing.  I'll figure it out by tomorrow.

For now, I wanted to say that if you blog & haven't taken the alphabet challenge you might want to consider it.  It allowed me a different approach to my blogging.  I took a lot away from the experience. 

For now, it's a clean slate.  January is almost over.  We are almost an month into 2012.  So far, 2012 hasn't been as rough on us as 2011.  We had a minor bit of plumbing work done, still it cost $170.00.  I could've handled it myself, except the person who plumbed the sink before had really "rigged" it & soldered it to boot.  The plumber literally had to break the connections to get them out from under the sink.  

The weather is a mess.  It can't figure out that it's supposed to be winter.  It'll hit 70 F today & we have little blue flowers with bees flitting around in the front yard.  We'll probably have a blizzard next week.

I am still waiting on word from my dentist on what's happening with my insurance.  I had labs drawn for my upcoming telemedicine appointment.  It was reasonably well.  Looks like I need to start watching my blood pressure closer.

So, far that's about it for my January.  How was yours?

Cya

The Letter Z...

It's here, the end of the alphabet challenge.  "Z" closes us out with Zenith, the highest point or the culmination of something.   This will conclude this particular challenge.  I may do the alphabet challenge again someday, but this round ends today.

Many of us get through life focusing on the zenith of things.  A lot of us never focus on the actual journey to the end of the road, we just want to get there.  That really is a shame, we miss a lot when we approach life in that manner.

Being a Virgo & feeling a need to control things, I've learned some coping techniques to get me through life.  I'm actually very good at getting through stuff in my life as long as I know there is an ending.  I could handle late night classes, even if they were three class periods long.  I just focused on the fact that meant there were 150 minutes in the classroom & each minute that ticked away put me closer to the end of that particular class period. 

I handled long drives the same way as a kid.  I'd watch mile markers & let them be a countdown.   If the distance seemed to big to comprehend, I'd break it down into smaller chunks.  My parents loved to drive.  We had relatives on both coasts.  Hell, is a non-stop car ride from northeastern Oklahoma to mid south Florida.  That's roughly 1,200 miles & 20 hours.  My parents would tag team the drive.  That was too great a distance for my little mind to handle, so I'd break it down.  I'd focus on how far was it to Joplin, then Springfield, then Memphis, etc...  I could manage the ride that way.

That's how I got by.  I broke things down into manageable bits.  Too bad that only works when there's an ending.  What happens when the task, journey or experience before us has no perceivable end?  Answer, I usually don't do very well.  That's the case when you're living with a chronic illness such as HIV.  There is no end.  The only finale is death.

It's very frustrating not to be able to control this aspect of my life, that the only zenith of this situation is terminal.  But, there it is. A point where my organizing & counting, won't help me a bit. I don't deal well with the infinite or unknown.  I don't like it at all.  I want something to measure against or compare to in my life.

Things without endings, like chronic illnesses, can wear on you in a way that nothing else really can.  I know there are good things in life that also seem to be without ending, but it's just an illusion.  Everything has an end, even if we don't know when it's going to conclude.  I like knowing there's a zenith, a point on the horizon that I'm striving to get to. What about you?  Do you want to see the finish line or you happy traveling without any point of terminus?

Cya

The Letter Y...

Year begins with a "Y" & brings a lot of joy to some & sadness to others.  I am referring to the unit of time.  For a child it means being another year older & getting to do more.  For some people, it means being another year older & feeling their life slip away from them.

I don't put all that much stock in years people acquire.  I've known extremely mature children & very childish adults.  Chronological age isn't as important to me as relative maturity.    Some set their expectations of others based on the other person's age.  I'd feel better placing in it how much maturity they've displayed.

Some people "stop" having birthdays at a certain point.  As if their attempts at vanity will cease the passage of time.  I'm not sure if they actually fear growing older or if they fear facing the fact they haven't accomplished everything in life they'd planned.  Either way to fight time is futile, we all age.

I guess I've never given age that much thought.  I've never seen myself in my head as the age I was.  Maybe it's arrested development.  When I was a kid, I saw myself as older, because I had to act that way.  Now in life I tend to envision myself in various points of my life when big things occurred.  Age & my mentality have never really had much in common.

Some people will tell you to put away your toys & grow up.  When did having fun become relegated to our childhood?  When did growing up start meaning you couldn't play games or have toys?  Why the hell would you let someone else tell you how to act based on something so arbitrary as a chronological age?  It's stupid to do that.  It's your life, past taking care of your responsibilities, you should cut loose however you choose.  Your recreational activities shouldn't be based entirely on whether or not your over or under a certain age.

People may say you're too old to play those video games, drive that car, date that person, etc... To hell with them,.  They're most likely just jealous busy-bodies any way.  It's your life, so live it your way.  Don't let how many summers you've seen determine whether you're going to play with your x-box or shuffleboard.

A year is a unit of time.  Other than the fact we physically age, it is meaningless.  It most likely isn't even real.  Consider this, on Earth a year is roughly 365 days,  but on Mercury it only take about 89 days while out on Jupiter it takes 11.8 eight Earth years.  Albeit I am 45 here, on Mercury I would be almost 189 & on Pluto I wouldn't even be a year old yet.  The point is simple, time is relative, age is relative, so why should we allow it to be treated concretely in our lives?

Cya

The Letter X...

I am taking the letter "X" to Xeno, referring to something strange, foreign or different.  Some of us may have xenophobia or even xenophilia, but some of us find that the strange is much more pervasive in our lives.

When you are diagnosed with HIV or some other chronic illness, you may find that your life soon becomes something difficult for you to recognize as your own.    The life I live now is markedly different from the life I lived while I was still healthy before my diagnosis.  I was a club person, who didn't like to even admit there were waking hours before noon.    I was more outgoing, gregarious & well more fit.

I'm not sure if I somehow became a stranger living my life or if I was me living some stranger's life.  Either way, this was not the life I knew &  wasn't the me that I had been before.  It all changed.  My life was foreign to me & I didn't like it one bit.  

I've done my best to come to terms with this new life.  There are still things I miss from my old life. But now, I'd be a stranger in that life.  I wish I could say I didn't ask for this, but most other HIV patients didn't either & in a way I did.  No one forced me to take the actions that led me to being +, so I did make choices.  I just didn't fully recognize the ramifications of those decisions I was making.  Such is life.

How do you deal the strange?  Are you xeno to yourself?  To be strange is to be different, but to be different does not equate to being bad.  Different is just that, different, nothing more or less.  It's OK to be the strange one, we are all at some time or another. 

Cya

The Letter W...

Star Light, Star Bright,

First Star I See Tonight,

I Wish I May, I Wish I Might,

Have The Wish, I Wish Tonight

"W" brings us to Wish, the act of expressing a desire for something.  Often associated with some form of magical action of invocation, like the rhyme above or blowing out birthday cake candles.

I suppose there is nothing intrinsically wrong with wishing.  It's been part of man's world since forever. Still, the act in itself can quite futile & destructive in my opinion.  

Wishing isn't like making plans for your future. It's not even like making plans without limits.  Those plans are dreams & we know it.  Wishing is investing some small part of yourself into something that most likely will never come true.  

My parents were alcoholics.  They were reckless, violent & absolutely the last people who should've ever had children.  Yet, there we were.  I used to watch other families & wonder why I didn't have one like theirs.  I used to hope for things to change or dream that I had a different family.  But those were hopes & dreams & even an eight year old knew they weren't going to come true.

My sister on the other hand was a different story.  She had hopes & wishes tied up into my mother.  She knew if this would just happen or that thing wouldn't happen, we could all live happily ever after.   She wished for this, she did her little magical rituals of crossing fingers, saying rhymes & making bargains with some unseen deity.  Funny, how none of those things ever worked.

With each failed wish, she grew a little dimmer.  She put so much into those wishes, that she never really lived her life as it was.  She never made real plans for her life, she just to took the first escape she could & that turned out to be a disastrous marriage.  To the best of my knowledge, my mother never got any better.  The last time I spoke to her was in my late teens after yet another horrid encounter with her.

Still, my sister's wishes for my mother continued right up until May of 2011.  On Mother's Day of that year, the clock ran out on my sister's wishing, our mother passed.  I felt weirdly numb about the matter.  My sister on the other hand had to deal with the fact, that her mother never really changed & that all those wishes were wasted breathes.

You can hope for something, you can dream for it, you can even start to make plans for it, but don't wish for it.  Wishing won't get you anything.  I'm not saying I don't make my own wishes, we all do. I just usually realize that's what they are, make believe.  Wishes won't change my life.  They won't fix my past.  They won't cure me of HIV.  They'll just take my focus away from the here & now.  They'll stop me from making real choices for change in my life.

Not making wishes is hard.  We do it without thinking. We just can't keep letting ourselves get invested in them though.  Failed wishes are toxic & they take a bit of us with them when they fizzle. Eventually we have very little left of us to do anything with in our lives.  Here's to wants, dreams & plans.

Cya

The Letter V...

"V" may be for vendetta, victory or even valor, but today it is for Villain.  There's a villain in every story.  There has to be, right?  Without a villain, what would the hero do?  What would the hero be?  So there has to be a villain.  This a common approach to writing in our culture & others.  Unfortunately, we tend to let what we read bleed over into real life, even when it isn't necessarily so.

Much of writing has evolved past the common motifs of good versus evil, hero versus villain & the like.  Too bad many people have not.   Many still expect a villain behind all the vileness in life.  Many expect that there will always be a bad guy in every situation.  That isn't always the case.

I am +.  I know that I did not do IV drugs & did not have any medical treatments involving blood, so that leaves me with sex as the means of transmission for my HIV.  Is sex evil?  No. It is an action & can not in itself be evil or any other moral descriptor, it simply is.  I engaged in sex.  Does that make me a bad person?  No.  I contracted HIV via sex.  Now am  I a bad person?  Again, no.

So, a person I had sex with was + & transmitted the virus to me.  Is that person morally questionable?  I don't know.  I am not sure when I contracted the virus, therefore I can't be sure of who transmitted it to me.  Even though I was getting tested, somehow it didn't show.  False negatives do occur.  I have no idea how long I was actually + or if I transmitted the virus to anyone else.  I sincerely hope I didn't.

If I didn't know, maybe the person that transmitted the virus to me was equally unaware of their HIV status.  I can't & won't assume this person did this to me on purpose.  Even if they did , it wouldn't do me any good to focus on it.  It's a done deal.

The point here is simple, when you're sick, especially if you are +, people will look for answers.  You will look for answers.  There must be a villain of the piece.  It feels so very  Little Edie Bouvier Beale to say that.  Sometimes though, there are no villains to be had.  HIV is a disease, not a villain.  Sex is not villainous.  Being gay is not full of villainy.  Being + isn't a matter or morality. Who or what's left to blame?  Who cares?  What good would it do you even if there was a villain?  It wouldn't stop you from being +.

Unless you had some poorly handled medical situation or a criminal encounter, don't waste your time looking for the villains of your HIV story.  It won't help you.  It'll probably just drive you nuts.  If someone wants to villainize you over being +, then don't waste your time on them.  You'll never convince them you aren't the villain.  That leaves you with two choices, walk on by & leave that person out of your life.  Or you  could get a really great black cape, top hat & a cheesy moustache.  Either way, that accusatory person will always think what they were going to think, you can't change that.  Simple fact of life, stupid people will always find a way to be stupid.  There's a villain for you; indulgent, willful stupidity.

Cya