Ramblings of An Aging Gay Guy

So...I have deleted my Facebook account.  It was time.  It was a waste of time.  I received no benefit from it.  When I caught myself feeling worse and worse about myself every time I logged on then I knew Facebook needed to go away.  I even found myself getting upset when I would get very little likes, comments, or interactions from my posts.  Oh there were always a few of those interactions here and there, but overall I felt invisible.  Worse, I felt bad about myself for feeling invisible.  Then I was mad at myself for feeling that way.  In the end Facebook caused too many negative emotions inside me. It is funny, because it has been 24 hours since I deleted it and nobody has even noticed.  Nobody has reached out.  But that's ok.  Facebook is NOT life.  It is a fantasy, a billboard on which people advertise their half-truths and their bright, beautiful, perfect lives.  Instead, I have chosen to engage i...

I never understood why Mom died.  More specifically, I did not understand why she signed a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order.  I could not understand why she would choose to die while there was still chances that she may live.  "But what if we tried this? What if we tried that?" is what kept going through my mind while it was all happening.  I wonder if I was grasping at straws in order to deny the inevitable, or if she had simply just gave up.  Part of my was so angry when she decided to unplug her life-support machines.  I could not understand why she wouldn't just wait it out a little longer; what if there was hope just around the corner but she never got to it?  But then I realized two things.  These realizations are recent, because it is only with time and distance I can even think about those horrible days.  She was tired.  She had been battling so many things the past few years of her life.  First, and probably the c...

It has been almost 2 weeks since this sickness began and I am still not at 100%.  Isn't it funny how sickness or illness happens in the most inopportune time?  For me, this illness has been a huge setback, both for school and in life.  I have had to take time to rest, in an attempt to hasten recovery. And yet it seems recovery is not happening quickly enough.  I feel like everyone expects me to brush it all off, to jump back into being the same old me, and that is not happening.  I have not been this sick in years.  It has fundamentally changed me.  I feel closer to my mortality, closer to death, than I have ever felt.  Maybe I am a crappy sick person.  Maybe I am a pessimist.  Maybe I am just weak from it all and everything looks like doom and gloom. All I know for sure is that I am exhausted and afraid.  I am afraid of falling behind in school, with only a few more weeks left of the semester.  I am afraid of getting in...

Where is all of the world's water going?  You would think that in a closed system, such as the global climate system of water evaporation and precipitation, there would be a set point of available water.  But we are seeing that is not the case.  Droughts are occurring globally.  Glaciers are melting, the sea level is rising.  The rising of the sea level will cause a contamination of fresh water sources, causing that water to be unusable by humans and wildlife.   The increase in surface area to the oceans will cause a warming of the oceans, further fueling wild and chaotic weather patterns - more hurricanes, more typhoons, bigger hurricanes, a longer hurricane season, etc.  The reduced salinity, caused by the influx of freshwater into the salty ocean water, will affect biodiversity, culminating in an increase in algae blooms and to the death of barrier reefs. Already deep aquifers are running dry globally.  The human population obtains about 3...

Happy Saint Patty's Day!  A day of green, a day of bar crawls (or not!), a day of green beer, and all of that jazz.  Me, I did nothing special to mark the day.  Then again I don't celebrate any holidays, so why be any different today? Anyway, it is Friday!  I made it to the end of the week, minus yesterday.  This is my last weekend of Spring Break and come Monday I will be back in the swing of school again.  I have a dentist appointment tomorrow morning, and then the weekend is all mine.  (I can already tell this blog post will have no overarching meaning or theme or whatnot). Now I am laying here in bed with my Kitty (see below).  I am planning to read on the book I've been reading and then crashing.  Hopefully Kitty won't hack up a hairball in my bed tonight like he did the other night.  Poor thing. And I am outta here, I am yawning so much.  I probably should call it a night.

Today I did not go to work.  I had night sweats all night with a fever, so I stayed home.  I slept all day, only getting up to eat some Fruity Pebbles or go to the bathroom. HIV is a chronic, long-term infection.  It is a presence in the body to which the immune system mounts a constant, persistent battle against, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Even though I am on HIV medication, there still exists reservoirs of the virus inside my body, in places where the medicine does not reach: the brain, the lymphatic system, organs, tissues. You see, HIV medications only impact the virus floating around in your blood stream.  The molecular size of the medicine is too large to reach anywhere else; it simply can not physically reach most places in the body...think of trying to fit a boulder through the holes of a chain-link fence.  It simply can not fit through it. Anyway.  So, for me I have always battled fatigue.  It is a part of my diagnosis that h...

Everyone wants to be liked, at least that is what we are socialized to believe.  To be successful and well-regarded in our society means to be gregarious, to be outgoing, to have sooo many friends, to be universally beloved, to have 4567 friends on Facebook, and thousands of followers on Instagram and/or Twitter.  It means to be always having your life button flipped to the "on" position 24/7.   Or at least that is what we want people to believe anyway.  In short, our society prefers outgoing, friendly people...a "people person". I am not that kind of person.  Nor will I ever be.  I see the big picture of social media and see people forever trying too hard to be noticed, to be liked, to stand out.  It seems terribly exhausting to me.  Do people not ever have a down moment?  Do people not ever have daily calamities that mess with their day?  Do people ever shart themselves when they thought it would just be gas?   ...