yeah, i'm up for anything.

Possibly infected needles?

or probably?

I think I'd scrape them into a box, then seal the box in a cube of lucite, and drop it into a mineshaft.

Have a good time up there.

i guess

i like doing it because there's a certain level of riskiness about it, and because i do it with this chick from the medical section who i really get along with. we always have a good time together.

thanks for the directions, miss d

i was gonna ask, but you beat me to it. i'll see ya sometime tuesday afternoon. don't feel pressure to keep me entertained 24/7-- i'll just be glad to get away from the mess that is my life.

spent the afternoon doing the thing i enjoy the most at the bfc-- sorting through dirty needles that are collected from the needle exchange. the junkies drop 'em off in every imaginable container and condition; sometimes they're wrapped in old socks, in cereal boxes, whatever. and you never know what kind of other crap is mixed in with 'em.

that's the problem...

...with trusting people. With depending on people to keep their word.

Well, ... hang in there, I guess.

So, med school ? How likely is it that you'll do it? I think you'd be sensational at it.

Marc found a studio apartment

that he can afford and he likes way the hell out by the beach. Our agreement was that if i got into medical school, he would need to find a new place to live starting June 1st, and if i didn't get into medical school, he still needed to find a place by June 1st, as I'm tired of living way up here on the hill, and want to go back to having my own place. The main point being June 1st, which is when I'd know for sure what i was doing. and he agreed. but then 4 weeks ago he tells me there's an apartment in the building where his friend lives that's for rent and he's out of here by March 1st. Gee, thanks, Marc!

what did i miss?

why is your roomate moving out?

the only hitch in my travel plans

is finding coverage for the Saturday shift drawing blood for HIV tests at the bfc. because i can never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever plan a trip where some obligation or condition or disaster or disease doesn't somehow get in my way. in a moment of warm gushy collective-oid altruism i said i'd be responsible for making sure that notoriously difficult shift to cover always gets covered (ie, i'm the default phlebby). but hey, i still have a couple days to plead and beg and whine, something i've been doing all my professional life. such as it is. fuck it.

see, diane, that's why i'm ultimately a loser and a bottom feeder. you shook off the distasteful onus of phlebotomy like, i dunno, your first year out of school. i've never been able to shake it. heck, my roomie's a fuckin' phlebotomist...

i mean about to be ex-roomie. he's just about moved out. leaving me in the inconvenient position of paying $1600 rent on a 2 bedroom apartment with uncertain plans 3 months in the future. kinda hard finding a replacement roomie under those circumstances. oh well.

in the "bout time you developed some funking backbone you loser" department, i gave my boss the ultimatum that if she doesn't get the other techs in rotation for the Fri and Sat graveyard shifts i've been pulling for god knows how long, i'm going to upper management and make a big flunking stink. stay tuned.

i like circle tours

i'm supposed to home today. at least that's where winston thinks i am. i got a whopper of a migraine yeaterday, and i couldn't head it off, because my knapsack got stolen 2 weeks ago and it contained my stash of imitrex. it was the last refill on my scrip, so i had to get my doc to rewrite a new one, then get it processed through Caremark (the mail-order pharmacy that my HMO requires members to use), so while i'm patiently waiting for my sanity-saving drug to arrive in the mail, a real screamer plants itself in my forebrain. ultimately, i had to have winston drive me to the ER where they shot me up with demerol and vistiril. when the pain went away, they gave me six vicodin, a scrip for imitrex, and sent me home. i slept all night and felt sorta well enough to go in to work this morning, but i've had 2 viking dan's so far today, and am pretty googely right now. i'm so tired of everything right now.

i have

all these thoughts jumbling around but no clear thoughts i can deposit here.

maybe i'm just tired.

abm went to l.a. this weekend, and i have had the kids.

so that's always tiring.

i forget the stuff in cat's cradle. add it to the pile of books i have to re-read. as if i don't have enough books that i haven't read the first time, i am quickly forgetting about the books i "have" read.

Towards the end of work things were a little quiet, so i harnessed the internet and put together a tentative Circle Tour of Lake Superior plan. I think it can be done in 16 days from Cincy, and that it wouldn't be toooo rushed. Still. There's a lot to potentially do.

Not sure when or if we will do it. But I think it'd be fun.

i'm sure

there are quite a few straight folks in the class; ther could be a bunch of motivations for taking the class, other than wanting to get in touch with one's "roots." mine of course being that i adore mr. kennedy. but the focus of the class is the entire LGBTQQI spectrum (if not sexuality in general), so i guess it's to shine the bright light of inquiry on "my people" too. It's just that there are some unmistakenly queer folks in class, either by their personal cues or open statements ("well, as a gay man i feel..."). Lilian I guess would be in the Questioning category, although i'm not sure what she would do if she found herself in bed with another woman. i would would like to find myself in bed with her, but that's probably not going to happen (yet she always moonbing over our dykey friend Ty, and I think, "what am i, chopped meat?") i have an open invitation to her to come with me on a weekend vacation to New Mexico to go mountain biking and visit dive bars, just to see her in an totally free, new, funb, uninhibited environment, and she says she wants to, but in the end i don't think the crack head will let her go. i just want someone to go somewhere fun with who actually wants to hang out with me (usually it's like pulling teeth).

I always liked Vonnegut's

idea of carass more than granfalloons. I always thought you and Scott were in my carass and when we reconnected late in life that seemed to confirm that for me.

So what do the

straight people in the anthropology class write about? There must be at least one; there always is.

That is a position that I've been in on occasion, or heard about, and which has always facinated me -the only white person in a black history course, the only man in a feminist seminar, the only -what ever - some where - that you aren't supposd to be.. The way you feel, the way they want you feel, the way you ruin all their fun or just fuck things up by your very presence. The way, the way, the way. The way we are so different, but not quite enough. Oh, alright, you big weirdo, You can stay. But Behave, okay?

valentine's day

VT's v-day gift to me was a box of Godiva chocolates. Since I have problem with chocolate (I like it too much), I passed the candy out to my classmates this evening, which they seemed to appreciate. My gift to him was a cell phone, his first, and I signed us up for the plan where we can talk infinitely without regard for minutes.

Oh, in my homoAnthro class, one of the concepts we're being tested on is the 'granfaloon' from Cat's Cradle (you know, Vonnegut). Although I'm not sure how it came up...

talk about baring one's soul...

as an extra credit assignment for my anthropology of homosexualities class, we were asked to write short autobiographical sketches of ourselves. Just about everyone turned one in, including yours truly. Mine was actually a completed, souped-up version of something I was going to blog, but lost momentum on... remember the exercise of encapsulating the years of one's life by some pithy title? Scott went ahead and did it for the last 20 years of his life. Well, I did it for all the years of my life, but expanded the pithy titles to pithy paragraphs, so it was like 4 pages long. Prof. K handed 'em back tonight, and prefaced it by expositing on how he was truly impressed by the amount of struggle and adversity members of the class had gone through. The class is composed of some interesting people, with a strong, I'm-not-taking-any-shit queer streak, and I'm sure there are some great stories from their lives.
I persuaded my little friend Lilian from work to take the class, which I think is really expanding her consciousness. She's stuck in a crappy marriage with a crack smoking jerk, and she has a lot of unrealized urges for sexual experimentation. On many occasions she's expressed the desire to be intimate with women, but it's probably just limited to fantasy. At any rate, I'm tickled that she decided to take the class with me.

Went ice fishing Sunday

on the bay. We put a hole in on our side and then rode across the bay on the snow mobile to the Indian side and made a hole there. You make the whole with an auger that has a small gas motor.
I always feel funny walking around out there, even though I know the ice is 2 feet thick and people drive trucks on it. Still the idea of there being 100 feet of water down there in the middle of the lake unnerves me a little, the way so people must feel about flying in an airplane - I know, logically, scientifically, and even from past experience that it's perfectly safe, but some part of my brain still isn't entirely conivinced.

The ice is a translucent blue black color in some places, and milky white or green in others. It's not perfectly smooth, but has ripples and ridges, as if small waves had frozen before they stopped moving. There are patches of snow, but the wind blows most of it off onto the land. It makes strange sounds - like a gunshot in the distance or a bass drum. You can't tell which direction the sound is coming from. There was on spot with lots of wolf prints and some blood and fur embedded where it looked like wolves had chased a deer out on to the ice and taken it down. Deer's hooves slip on the ice and once they run out there, their fate is sealed.
Didn't get any fish. Someone else who had been out there caught a big white fish. It was a bright sunny day, but the wind was raw, so we didn't stay out very long.

medical science

is often voodoo and a lot of guess work. We really do need that machine that can shrink a submarine down to the size where we can inject it into the bloodstream, you know, like in Fantastic Voyage.

The boy's named Keegan? I always think of Bob Keegan, TV's Captain Kangaroo.

Remember in 9th grade when we had that hour in the middle of the day that was like homeroom but was supposed to be something more, but in reality wasn't, that contained lunch? And it was called "TA" for some reason, I think it stood for "teacher advisory?" Remember "Alternative Ed?" what was that all about? It would have been nice if any of these '70's educational experiments actually worked.

email I got recently from the author of "The Plotted Course:

'Thanks for the reply. I'm sure you keeping well. I'll wait for response to the book. Evidently, it is going to be a very thoughtful one.

 take care

                                                                        thayalan'

Diane, here's your assignment when I come to visit in, my god, two weeks!-- you get to read "The Plotted Course" and write a thoughtful but snarky response. I'm not really interested in it, but I liked the guy and feel I owe him an answer. I just couldn't finish the book. I'm all addle-minded lately. And depressed.

Indie fest was great, even though I only saw like 8 films. But it was cool being a pass-holder, I got to go to the front of the line, the people in charge had my face memorized, always asked me how I was enjoying the fest. I woulda seen more films if it weren't for damn work. I signed up to be a volunteer for it next year, but I prolly won't be around then.

Just say the word and we can go back to "Lamb." public, not public, doesn't really matter to me.

Old Blog

The Simple Solution



...is to go back to the old blog, which was not public.

I like the concept of being public, but the reality is that some things are better left amongst one's co-conspirators.

***

Keegan has not died, Diane. But obviously that is a very real, even statistically probable, possibility.

He has been accepted to that surgeon's own clinical trial that he has been running. So, he on the cutting edge of research. Surely that must help.

The other interesting thing is they ran another MRI on him and the cancer cells on his spine have seemingly disappeared. So, now they want to re-do it, because they're not sure if they mis-identified the cells on the first one, or if somehow they missed them on the second. But that would be very good if it turns out that it hadn't begun to spread significantly yet. It would mean it hadn't advanced as far as they thought. So, we're crossing our fingers. They also said that so far they are not seeing signs of cancer cells again in his head.

excuse me?

I don't know what it's like living in a small town? First of all, Tehkummah sounds like a veritable metropolis compared to T or C. Let me see... 5 years in T or C, 2 years in Magdalena/Socorro (most of Magdalena's streets weren't paved, and I mean "downtown" streets; also, there was no mail delivery, your options were get a PO box or just periodically ask the postmistress for your letters), 2 years in Williamsburg (Ohio), out near Bethel (where Skip lives?), 17 months in Salisbury (a medium-sized town). But I was never an upstanding citizen in any of the small towns I lived in, just a weirdo living on the fringes.

Anyway, the answer to the blog problem is just to not have it hosted. Which means I can't post pictures anymore (I think). Or we could just have an email thread going, you know, listserv. I like that our blog's public, I've given a few people access to previous ones (Glen for one). Steve tracked me down through the blog via google, He's read it. I recognize your sensitive situation, and I'd rather have have you stay candid, so I guess we should abandon ol' Braddy Boy. Sorry about any discomfort it's caused.

I'm tickled your docs like the calendar. Yay renegade public health! Sorry to say, it's prolly just a one-off, it's doubtful there'll be a HoHR 2006 calendar.

ya know,

I woulda been on that calendar if I didn't have to go to work graves on the evening we shot it. We were setting up the screen, getting the props together, Russel was putting on his false eyelashes, and I was like "uh, it's getting kinda late, could someone drive me to the BART station?" Which is what I'm looking at tonight, as the Cal campus graveyard tech called in sick. Sorry, gang, I've been having a bad week on so many levels. Gotta go to class.

I'm so sorry, Scott

It's hard enough to lose a baby that has just been nudging you with his elbow, kicking you in the side. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to lose a baby you've seen and held and loved for that long, one already experiencing the world and becoming a little person, and not the promise of one. That is so awful. I'm really sorry. I just hope the mom can find other women who have suffered a similar loss to talk to, because no matter how sympathetic or supportive other people are, for some reason, that is the most helpful. And it's strange - at first you ONLY want to talk to women who lost a baby for the EXACT same medical reason and the EXACT same age, and then as time passes it doesn't matter what the reason was, or when they lost their baby, and then as even more time passes you feel a connection with anyone suffering for any reason - some woman with breast cancer, some old guy going losing his eyesight. You feel comforted by them and want to comfort. It's a funny kind of thing. But there doesn't seem to be anyone who can help but another sufferer.

I've been approached by Perinatal Berievement Services to work as a counselor, but I'm afraid I can do it; I'm afraid I'm not suffering enough at the moment, that I've lost that grace. And it is a kind of grace - a hypersensitivity to the beauty and fragitlity of everything you only understand at certain peak times of sorrow or happiness.

I remember one day in the spring when we found out there was something wrong with the baby but didn't know for sure, I came home work, and I pulled in the drive way.
It was a beautiful spring day, and the apple trees around the farm house were all in bloom and the wind was blowing pink petals onto the grass, and it was so stunningly beautiful. I knew in a few weeks the blossums would be gone, like the baby in my body, and there was nothing I could do about any of it. And yet it was all so beautiful that I wouldn't take any of it back. To me that is what is grace is - when no matter how sad something makes you, or how painful it is, you wouldn't take any of it back.

More

the weather here has also been ... inconsistent. cold. warm. it's supposed to be in the mid 50's this weekend.

i remember one of Jim's songs. He wrote

"All plans interrupted
we are the humans
blessed with mortality
cursed with death."

********************

The pathology report came back, and he has a very rare form of cancer.

The survival rate is apparently 10%.

So... things aren't too good.

Disease Information
Brain Tumor: Atypical Teratoid / Rhabdoid Tumor (ATRT)

Alternative Names: ATRT
Definition

This rare, high-grade tumor occurs most commonly in children younger than 2. It is generally found in the cerebellum, which is the lower, back part of the brain that controls balance. These tumors tend to be aggressive and frequently spread through the central nervous system.
Incidence

This diagnosis has been classified only in the last three to five years; the tumor is a subset of medulloblastomas. They occur in about 1-2 percent of children with brain tumors.
Survival Rates

Even after surgery and chemotherapy treatment, the survival rate for children younger than 3 at diagnosis is less than 10 percent. It appears that older children, when treated with chemotherapy and radiation therapy after surgery, do somewhat better long-term, nearing 70 percent.
Treatment Strategies

Treatment generally involves surgical removal of the tumor followed by chemotherapy. Radiation therapy may be considered depending on the age of the child and whether the tumor has recurred.
Current Research

*
Researchers are investigating new, more effective methods of treating brain tumors of infants and young children. High doses of radiation can’t be used because it may cause permanent problems with thinking, learning, and growing when given to very young children. It has been standard therapy to administer chemotherapy in an attempt to delay giving radiation therapy until the child is older and thus giving the brain more time to develop. However, chemotherapy alone has not been effective in fighting brain tumors.
*
New radiation techniques that minimize damage to healthy tissue that surrounds brain tumor tissue are under investigation.
*
Stem cell transplantation as a part of treatment continues to be under study.
*
Scientists continue to study chromosomal abnormalities, genes, and proteins that may have a role in the development and metastasis (spread to other parts of the central nervous system) of pediatric brain tumors.
*
Clinical trials are underway to develop chemotherapy drugs effective against this tumor.

that's Moby

singin' the "We're all made of stars" song.
Sorry, I promise to blog for real this weekend. Right now I'm all clogged up with inspection stuff (tomorrow), school work, bfc stuff (I narrowly escaped being appointed a Funding Committee coordinator last night), plus... it's film festival season! I went crazy and bought a festival pass to Indiefest, which just started tonight. Indiefest is the independent film festival, the real edgy stuff. The pass entitles me entrance to all films at all venues, which is great because with my whacky schedule, I'll probably be able to see a film I'm interested in when I have free time, since they all rotate through the 3 venues the movies are showing at (The Roxie and The Women's Building down in the Mission, and EgoPark in Oakland; for example, when I get off shift at the bfc I can just pedal down the street a couple miles to Oakland to catch a screening. Sweet.) Tonight I went to see "Sons of Provo," a mockumentary about a Mormon boy band called "Everclean." When I showed up to pick up my pass, they couldn't find the right one, so the guy who finally found it, feeling guilty about how disorganized they were, slipped me an extra pass. So now I can get Sticky (or whoever else I can persuade to go with me) in to all the flicks for free.

So I'm planning to spend all my free time for the next two weeks at the movies.

I wonder what is causing

all these waves of hot and cold. We go from -35 to +35 week after week. It's bizarre. I'm afraid Dana will get here and all the snow will be melted and it will look just like southern Ohio. I want to do fun winter activities.

Carolyn is a little better today. Fever is down and she was acting silly. Sure sign of health. She has never slept so much as she has with this virus, and finally ate something today.

Immortality

I was watching a show the other night on the documentary channel about genetic engineering, and one scientist said that he thought by 2073 we would have the biological technology to create the first immortal person. This is based on reserch on chemical signals that determine how many times various cells in the body can divide. I'm skeptical, because there's still random and environmentally induced mutations, so I don't know how they get around that. I'm also skeptical because if we were that far along in our knowledge, we should be able to regrow broken spinal cords and new kidneys.
Never-the-less, the idea presents all sorts of interesting philosophical and ethical questions.

First of all - would you want to be immortal?

If the decision could only be made at the stage of a developing embryo, would you choose immortality for your child?

Who should be granted immortality - people with really good health insurance? Important people? Or would it be a fundemental right?

What would society look like during the transition, where some people were still mortal and others weren't. Could you discriminate against a job applicant who was not immortal?

How old would some guys be when they stopped living in their parent's basement if they were immortal? 39? 62? 485?

It would make a neat sci-fi novel if nothing else.

Carolyn's ear

is a little better but she was up barfing last night and has a fever. I think she's actually managed to get two different things at once. She has a fever. Her face is flushed. Getting her to take Tylenol or anything is next to impossible. Almost as difficult as giving the cat medicine, not that I sit on her and pry her mouth open - I try to disguise it in various food or drinks but she always knows. She is on the convertible sofa watching cartoons. In my day (said in a cranky grandpa voice) there weren't cartoons on daytime television. When we stayed home sick, we had to watch Monty Hall on Let's Make a Deal or Password or the Dinah Shore show, bad black and white westerns or movies with actors like David Nivens.

I heard that Yoshima robot song on the CBC today. Who did the one that was on my CD about being made of stars?

my excuse

is school and bfc and getting ready for our CAP insection Friday. And oddly tired-- lead pipe syndrome has made a reappearance. I've got lots of things to say, just no patience or energy to say them.

I got identity thefted a couple of weeks ago. Lost maybe $400, trying to get it recovered (it's from my check card, which is not so easy to get reimbursed as a credit card).

Gee, I don't remember being bundled up in a snowsuit by my mom when I was a kid. I remember always getting snow in my pants. I don't think my mom knew about the range of cold weather gear available when we were young.

This last week or so

hasn't been too great for me blogging, wise. There was the exam, and then post-exam house messiness, and then the weather turned nice and mild so I went skiing Friday afternoon and all Saturday, and I went to the metropolis of Espanola on Sunday to my favorite store, Canadian Tire, and bought various house hold goods and a new skidoo suit on sale. A skidoo suit is basically a thick snow suit, not unlike the kind your mom would bundle you up in when you where a kid and played outside in the winter, only here adults where them too, and they are usaully black, navy, or zippy florescent colors, not pastel pink or powder blue or ducky yellow. Still, sometimes, when I'm zipping up my padded suit, I have these flashbacks of being bundled up and sent off to sled by my mom. But one thing you learn about surviving in Canada - it's all about having the appropriate clothing for the elements. Winter can be fun if yer dressed right, honest.

Crosscountry skiing is the oddest sport. It is gentle - you feel so cushioned, warm and swishy, and the scenery is so distracting, that you don't realize how it utilizes completely different muscles than walking and running and the things you normally do, and that you may roll out bed painfully sore the next day. Cross country skiing uses strange unidentifiable muscles in the groin, the insides of your legs, the backs of your upper arms, all sorts of weird oblique muscles, muscles on the surface of your upper toes! Muscles you would use for almost nothing else except unusual sex acts or dancing. It's taken me two days but I think I've recovered.

Carolyn stayed home today; she woke up in the middle of the night with an earache.This morning she didn't have a fever and said it hurt "only medium" and would go if I thought she should, but I'm glad I didn't make her, because she slept like five hours this afternoon, something she never does; so something must be brewing. My mom used to make us go to school unless we had raging fevers or were projectile vomiting. Sometimes I think kids miss less school and get over it faster if you put them to bed the first or second day and just give into it. It was like a Puritan work ethic thing with my mom; we had to go. I wasn't even a big faker; I liked school. My brother once blew up a thermomter by holding it too close to the bedside lamp.

The Tehkummah Historical society is creating a community cookbook. It's a common fund raiser in small towns, and they solicit recipes. They wanted "family" or "historical" recipes. So my contribution was my Cincinnati Chili recipe which I developed as a homesick immigrant. I loved being able to use the phrases "Chili parlor" and "five way" in a sentence. It sounds vaguely derelect.