Bookworm

For any of you who have known me for a significant period of time and also know me pretty well, you would probably agree that "bookish" is not an adjective that would come to mind if you were trying to describe me.  For most of my life, I've read mostly out of need, rarely for pleasure.  There have been exceptions; I've always liked taking a book on a vacation, especially the lay on the beach type of vacation.  I've usually finished 1 or 2 books in these situations.  Otherwise, my reading was mostly for school, for work, or reading magazines and newspapers, and even not that on a consistent basis.  This all changed within the last year.

As best as I can tell, it started about the time that I started really studying A Course in Miracles on a consistent daily basis.  I was putting myself on a regimen where I expected myself to read daily.  My first benefit that I noted was that reading in bed at night is a great cure for insomnia, much the opposite to watching television for me, an activity that can actually keep me up at night.  So excepting very rare  occasions otherwise, the television was staying off at night and I was falling asleep with a book in my hand every night.  Well, that is, unless I was writing, as I'm doing now at bedtime.

The next thing that I noticed was that I was taking BART more and more into the city, and driving far less.  This was for a few reasons:  First, I was not enjoying driving in San Francisco at all.  It never used to bother me when I lived there, or so I thought, but once I didn't have to do it every day, I was finding that when I did have to drive in the City, it was stressful beyond belief.  The aggression of the other drivers, the ill-mannered behavior of pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycle drivers was becoming equally annoying.  I was thinking to myself "wow, it never used to bother me when I lived here", and then, upon further reflection, I realized that it did bother me.  It bothered me greatly.   It made me a road-rager, impatient, unpleasant and sometimes, a downright aggressive driver.  I then looked at how I felt about driving out here in the suburbs, and it seemed completely different to me; less stressed, less hurried, people less aggressive (except on the freeways, but I'll get to that later).  It was just generally a much more pleasant experience.  I love to drive, I always have, but driving in the City had taken on a whole new meaning to me, and not for the better.

My next reason for BARTing more was to avoid commute traffic - well, to be more accurate, to avoid the freeways.  The one part about driving out here that can often bring that same sense of dread that I now feel about driving in SF is freeway driving.  It's just as bad, if not worse, just because it's aggression at much more dangerous speeds.  I live a mile off of a major freeway, I-680, which has to be one of the most notoriously aggressively driven freeways in the Bay Area, and I've driven on every mile of every single freeway in the greater Bay Area in my 25 years of living here.  I would have to say that in my experience, of all the freeways in the Bay Area that I have witnessed a significant amount of aggressive driving on, the top 3 are all in the East Bay:  80, 680 and 880.  In the case of 80 and 880, they are also the most congested roads in the Bay Area, a well known fact.  BART is much less stressful, though it can have its moments.  But in rush hour or off-peak (all hours of operation for that matter), it takes for all intents and purposes the same amount of time for me to get to downtown San Francisco from my closest BART station (Pleasant Hill): approximately 35 minutes, give or take a couple.  To drive, in good traffic, I can do it in an average of about the same amount of time, but in rush hour (6:30-10:00 am and 3:30-7:00 pm), it's an average of 50 minutes, and with the slightest glitch in traffic - an accident, a lane closure, just exceptionally heavy traffic, well, all bets are off.  I've been stuck in traffic for 2 hours in the worst case so far.  Most times when I'm on BART and we're above ground, during rush hour the trains will be whizzing past the gridlocked traffic.  The majority of BART tracks are above ground, except in downtown Oakland and SF, or in the Transbay Tube (underwater in the SF Bay) or in the tunnel through the East Bay hills (between Oakland and Orinda), and when above-ground, the tracks usually run adjacent to a freeway.

Finally, it's a matter of cost.  Between the wear and tear on my car, gas, bridge tolls, etc., it's less expensive to BART, especially for me, since I get a disabled discount pass, which gives me a 66% discount on BART fares (and SF Muni as well).  Round-trip for me, from my station to downtown San Francisco is a round-trip fare of $3.30.  The bridge toll alone is $5.00, and so I'm in the black before I even consider any of the other expenses of driving.  Putting all of this together made it pretty much of a no-brainer.  The other benefit:  I quickly figured out that I could make the time fly on the train by bringing a book.  So this again became a time to read on a regular basis.  I'm in the City once a week, often more than that,  so at a minimum, that is 2 more hours of reading.  I'm also usually going into the City for medical appointments, so since I'm carrying a book, the waiting room gives me another reading opportunity, and I don't have to read the crappy waiting room magazines, which are also probably paper petri dishes.

From all these reading opportunities, I was actually finding that I was looking forward to reading, and taking many other opportunities to do so on a daily basis.  The television has for the most part been idle for months.  I watch a little bit, but not the probably 4 hours a day that I was watching on average before I started reading and writing.  To be honest, I really don't miss it.  I've also noticed that I won't just sit and watch crap out of boredom like I used to.  I'll turn the TV on to watch a specific program, and when it's over, I turn it off and return to reading, writing or whatever other productive activity might be occupying my time.  If I'm "wasting" time any more lately, it's to nap.  To be honest, I think napping is more productive than TV watching.  At least napping is good for me physically, and with my energy level, necessary most of the time.  As I've gotten progressively sicker and weaker this year, reading is one thing that I can do no matter how little energy I have.

Since I turned into a bookworm, I've had 2-3 books going concurrently, and I'm finishing about one every week or week and a half.  I've also found that fiction does not have the draw for me that it used to have.  I still like my occasional jaunt into fiction and have a few favorite authors:  William Styron, Steven King, Sue Miller, Dave Eggers, C.S. Lewis, Truman Capote, but for the most part, my draw lately has been to non-fiction, specifically history and the social sciences.  I'll even read college texts.  Right now, my passion and interest is definitely in reading to learn, and I have to think that this is in part due to the one book that has had the greatest influence in showing me a love for reading, and that is A Course in Miracles.  If you've not ever read any of the book, it's far from a light read.  It's much more difficult to read than the bible or other typical Western religious texts.  It actually reads more like a graduate-level psychology text book, which makes sense, since its scribe (Helen Schuchman) was a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University School of Medicine.  But as I think about it, even in the past, this was always the kind of read that I would much prefer to an easy-read piece of fiction (or non-fiction for that matter).

The last three books that I finished (in the last three weeks) were "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan, and "Promised Land - Thirteen Books that Changed America" by Jay Parini and "Ending Our Resistance to Love" by Kenneth Wapnick.  I currently have 4 books going:  I'm finishing "A Course" (part of it, specifically The Workbook For Students, takes a year to complete - 365 daily lessons).  I'm also reading 2 books of poetry: "The Gifts of God" by Helen Schuchman and an anthology of poetry by probably my all-time favorite poet: the late Denise Levertov.  Additionally, I'm also reading "Outliers - The Story of Success" by Malcolm Caldwell, loaned to me by my friend Van.  This type of self-help book generally doesn't do a lot for me, but I actually like this one quite a bit.

In my queue, I have 3 books waiting:  The first is "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - yes, unbelievably, I somehow made it through school without ever reading this.  Following this is "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac - yes, unbelievably I somehow make it through college and the rest of my 20's without ever reading this one, and finally, "A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies" by Bartolome' de las Casas.

This last book is probably the most interesting of the three.  First published by the author in 1552 (!), this is a very graphic account of the atrocities the original conquistadors committed against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, especially the Caribbean during the early 16th century.  This account of a genocide of unbelievable proportions was surprisingly documented in great detail by a Catholic missionary Fr. de las Casas, based on his eye-witnessed experiences.  He also, by the way, edited the diaries of Christopher Columbus, another rather important source of information about this era in the Americas.  This book was not one of the thirteen books that Parini discussed in "Promised Land", but in the appendix at the end, he lists another 100 books that he considers important enough to merit mention.  This book happened to be the first one on the list, and caught my eye immediately.  After 5 minutes on Amazon and a 2 day wait, it arrived at my door last week and is awaiting its turn in the queue.  I'm pretty sure that it will actually be the next one whose spine I'll break in.

Now after all this, I've also decided that I want to get an e-reader.  I've been thinking about it for months, and was seriously considering getting a Kindle (sold by Amazon, and currently the most popular e-book reader on the market), but about the time that I really got interested, Apple started leaking out pre-release teasers about their new iPad.  The iPad is basically going to be Apple's next step into the device that is portable and will do everything:  It's light (a fraction over a pound), a little bigger than a sheet of paper (9.5 x 7.5"), mostly screen and a mere 1/2" thick.  It's going to have wifi, optional 3G, will operate more like a Mac than an iPhone (many more capabilities), and is, of course, going to have an e-book reader.  It's coming out on April 3, and I, of course, have to have it.  However, I'm going to wait.  Even though Apple is far better than Microsoft and PC makers about not releasing products that are under-tested and riddled with bugs, they still have their problems.  The magic number seems to be the 3rd generation, sometimes the 2nd, which is probably about how long I'll be able to wait, but I'm going to have to have it.  Now THAT is a truly portable device, and one that will probably do most of what I need to do on a computer - other than I'm not so sure if I'll be happy with a touch-screen keyboard to do writing like this.  Web browsing and simple emails, sure, but not this.  Touch screens just aren't the same as a keyboard with keys.  Those mechanical keys give you very important feedback to your fingertips to help them make sure that they are in the right spot.  The iPad is really going to be more of a media interface (web, music, books) and organizational tool than it will be like an acutal PC, which you'll still need to do more complicated computing tasks.  Also, the 1st generation ones are going to only going to have 16, 32 or 64 GB of memory, not nearly as much as even the most basic MacBook or iMac.  I have both, and my smallest memory capacity between the 2 is my MacBook, which has a 150 GB hard drive.

But I'll wait, and do my best to be patient in the meantime - something that although it is not my forte, is something that I'm getting appreciably better at.  There is no hurry, and even if I wait another year, I've still got plenty of books in paper in my house.  What I don't have and want I can either get in a book trade with a friend or go borrow it at the library.  I'm really going to do my best to avoid going out and buying more books for now.  I'm trying to cut my waste of natural resources, and the unnecessary waste of wood products is something that I can help support.  It's the socially responsible thing to do.  On top of that, I also can decrease my personal clutter.  I already have far too many possessions clogging up my life, most of which I can do without and rarely use.  There are few books that I read more than once, so that once read, they become clutter.  That is unless I trade them with friends.

This is one of my other new socially-responsible behaviors, and one which by its very use mentors that same behavior to others.  Trading books is a great way to get more reading material without accumulating more books.  You're saving money, as is the person that you are trading with.  You are saving trees, again, as is the person that you are trading with, and you are avoiding adding yet more clutter into your life and home.  On top of all that, books are dust magnets.  If you don't believe me, go to a book shelf in your house and find a section of books that you haven't touched in awhile.  Now pull out a book, open it and shake it.  Smell the musty paper and watch the clouds of dust blow up.  I think that there are some bibliophiles out there who actually fetish on this.  Actually, I know that for a fact because it's been the fodder of many a writer's tome over the years.  For me, it's more about being a responsible citizen of the planet, and any way that I can decrease waste is a good thing.  That also means decreasing clutter and the complexity of one's life.  Clutter and waste are probably my 2 biggest pet peeves these days.  I don't just find junk mail annoying anymore, I also find it to be incredibly wasteful.  Same goes for the fliers that plaster my windshield at least half the time when I have my car parked out on the street or in a public parking lot.  I have never made a buying decision or decided to go to a nightclub because I got a flier - I either go where I know or do my research.

But back to books here for a minute.  As I stated at the start of this posting, I'm currently reading "Outliers" by Malcolm Caldwell.  Basically it's an analysis of why a few excel at their field of expertise, and more specifically, why a few in every field are outliers - ones who are far more successful than their counterparts - for example, Bill Gates', John Rockefeller, The Beatles, Robert Oppenheimer, Yoyo Ma, etc..  One of Caldwell's primary theories, and one that I'll pretty much take at face value, is that those who he uses as examples have a few traits in common that account for their success, and one of the primary ones is the 10,000 hour rule.  He found that nearly every outlier that he profiled (and he did not screen for this criteria) had by the time that they achieved the pinnacle of their success, logged in at a minimum 10,000 hours of learning their field expertise.  That may not seem like a huge amount of hours until you think about how many years it takes to put in that number of hours, even if it capitalizes one's waking hours, which in the case of most of his outliers it did, and to then focus so much of one's energy on one specific area of study, well, that's astounding.  So far (I'm about halfway through), some of the other traits in common seem to be social advantage, natural talent, and I childhood where learning was actively guided by their parents, all of this much to the disappointment to those who love the romance of a good rags to riches, made it on their own kind of story.  To some degree, helicopter parenting can have its advantages it seems.

But this 10,000 hour thing, it really has caught my attention, because it's not really something that I can say that I'm even close to logging under my belt with anything that interests me.  I've succeeded or excelled at many things I've tried: school, my former nursing profession, cooking, drag, breeding and showing dogs as examples, and though I've gained a pretty respectable degree of proficiency in everything I try (thanks to my perfectionist nature), I've not really gone to that next level with any of them.  My knowledge and skills have managed to survive to at least some degree in every thing I've taken on seriously, even if I let that skill languish for a protracted period of time.  If I've put enough time in, and especially importantly, if I understand the theories behind say, why x works and y doesn't work, and I can then become very proficient at duplicating a desired outcome, then it's likely that proficiency can withstand prolonged periods of neglect.  I might be rusty, and it may take some time to get back to the level of expertise that I had at the pinnacle of my success at whatever it is, but as long as I have enough of the basics (practice and understanding of the area of expertise), then I can quickly leap back up the ladder with some practice.  What usually seems to suffer more then proficiency is efficiency.

I actually have a perfect example.  I have not gotten in drag since the end of June, 2009; a period of almost 9 months where I haven't even put my fingers into my makeup case.  Well yesterday, I decided that it was about time to do it, and I have the perfect reason and venue:  My friend Glendan Hyde (drag name Anna Conda) is running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (SF's equivalent of a city council), and there is a fundraiser tomorrow (Friday) at a club in San Francisco.  Anna is one of my favorite queens.  Not only is she incredibly nice and incredibly genuine, she was most definitely my most supportive booster in making me get over my stage fright (still a work in progress) and get out and perform.  Anna was the MC of a wildly successful drag show in San Francisco (she just closed it down last month), and hers was the first stage I ever got onto in drag.  I've now performed a number of times, and I think I suck bad, but I've gotten some decent feedback (and some that is less than diplomatically given - very common in the drag world).  More importantly, I conquered a fear.  I'm not hungry for the stage; I've never been a big one for the spotlight.  I actually like getting into drag and just being out in a club at a drag show or at a big public event.  When I get in drag, I take it seriously, I don't just put on a wig and a dress, I turn myself into a woman and my personality changes completely.  I put on my character (Cupcake) and Parry disappears.  The last 2 years I've gone to SF Gay Pride in drag, and I have probably had my photo taken at least 1000 times each time, probably many more times to be honest.  I am expected to put on a show in that kind of situation.  It's miserable, uncomfortable and exhausting, but Brian taught me one very important thing early on:  You're not in drag for yourself, or at least that is not what you project out.  You are there for your audience.  If you've gone to that much trouble to be fabulously outlandish, even if you don't get onstage, you're still eye candy.  I've gone to a couple of parties now where I'm the only one in drag (or me and Brian), and when I walked into a room I commanded all of the attention, something that Parry still shudders at but something that Cupcake likes.  Cupcake is a part of me, but she is very much not me. More than anyone, Anna pushed me to use drag as my way to work out my social phobia, a phobia that is quite pernicious and pronounced, especially in large groups and in public.  By doing drag and getting out into these uncomfortable social situations, I have found that I can use my drag persona as a way to have a gregarious personality that is a part of me, but also a separate identity with an entirely different temperament.  In making the decision to go out tonight, I decided that I wanted to have my first time out painted and dolled up be something that I'm doing for Anna Conda - she's been nudging me to get my alter ego's butt back out there, and I want to give her a nod by doing that for her.

Last night I decided last night that I had better try to paint (put on face) at least once before Friday, for 2 main reasons:  First I wanted to make sure that I could still do a decent job of it, and second, I wanted to see how long it would take to put on a full face.  To my great surprise and pleasure, I was not only able to do a really good job of it, I also did it faster than I usually do.  Typically it takes me about 2 hours just to put on face.  It's not like a woman putting on day makeup; it's layered, requires many more products and some completely different and also more complicated technical skills.  It's something that is completely different from day makeup.  2 hours is a long time; most queens do it in 45 minutes to an hour, but even Brian and Mikey, my 2 mentors, take 1.5-2 hours to do it,  and that's because they do it right and take their time.  That philosophy rubbed off on me.  What was funny about last night was that I had it done in a little under an hour and a half, and it was as good as any I've ever done, other than maybe a couple of special events where I really went over the top, and also likely pushed 3 hours to complete it.  I sat back and thought about it after I had put face on and was admiring and critiquing it and realized that there were I think 2 reasons why it went quickly.  That was even with a couple of do-overs because I had forgotten a step and I had to undo something to put something underneath it.  The first reason was because I didn't feel under the gun like I do when I'm getting ready to go out, and I'm feeling a time crunch (something very universal amongst drag queens), and the second was that I adopted a kind of contrived "whatever, I don't care" attitude, that sped me up appreciably because I wasn't second guessing myself, and I was working less deliberately, cautiously and precisely, and instead was working more freely.  That relaxed my hands and made what I did far easier.  The things that I've struggled with the most - liquid eyeliner, lips and false eyelashes - were all things that came out perfectly the first time.  Lack of tension, emotionally and physically, made a huge difference

But getting back to the point, at least for this skill set, I've gained enough proficiency and experience so that I can now feel that I can comfortably pull off a night out in drag, even with a long period of inactivity preceding it, even many months.  I am, however, not even close to that 10,000 hour mark.  Not only do I not have enough years under my belt, even though I was working hard at it for 3 years and have gotten respectably good in the process, but I'm not close to considering myself a master of the craft. At best, I'm still where I left off in June.  This is actually leading to "the big picture", the real point I wanted to make, and that is more about my writing.

I never felt that I could write proficiently until I got into my second year of college, and for the most part I was right.  I was a lazy student for most my my earlier education.  I was smart enough to know what I needed to do to get a decent grade (basically, how to get by), and would do it with the least amount of effort possible.  It wasn't until my third year at Montana State, when I was in the nursing program that I really turned things around.  I already had 2 years under my belt and the U of MT, playing with 2 majors before nursing - education and then theater (costume design and wardrobe) and had finished up enough of my prerequisites for the nursing program so that I only needed to take a few prerequisites when I got to MSU and before I officially entered the nursing program.  I could have done them in one very packed trimester (the schedule at that time), but I decided to leisure it out and take a whole year there.  That allowed me to take some extra courses, and those of course ended up being in 2 things I loved most:  Theater and social sciences, mostly sociology.  For some reason, when I started taking soc. classes, I got this hair up my butt that I needed to learn how to write, and I did.  I did this without reading a book or taking a writing class, instead using my usual MO:  I told myself that I could write well, I just needed to study my subject, open my head and just write from my mind and my heart.  From that point on until I graduated 2 years later, I got A's on most of my papers, and the worst that I ever did was a B+.  To that point, I rarely did any better than a B or worse than a C+, but I unfortunately was in a serious state of apathy, and was just doing enough to get by.  I knew I could do a lot better, but unfortunately, at that point I didn't care.  Luckily, in the long run, the effect of my ennui was minimal, since I had 3 years to redeem my transcript and GPA.  More importantly, I got the feedback I wanted, and that was to hear that I was as good as I knew I could be.

However, that became yet another skill that languished out of disuse, and I mean many years of disuse.  Then 3 years ago my life turned upside down.  I had a lot to process and knew that writing would be a good way to not only process, but also a good way to get a lot of this stuff out of my head, get it expressed and also have a record to look back on.  I took a couple of failed attempts at blogging before this, and by failing I mean that I left the blogs to die from neglect.  Then 9 months ago, another big road bump overturned my apple cart, and I decided to try it again, and really not to just try it, but do it.  Initially, it was just a pressure release valve for me, but as time went along and I got some really positive and constructive feedback, I decided that I wanted to now become what I could legitimately tag myself as a writer.  Out of this experience I've learned many things about myself and actually had a couple of epiphanies.  I've learned that I can still write.  I've also learned that the quickest road to writer's block is to not use the skill on a regular basis.  To be a legitimate writer, one needs to write nearly every day, especially as one is building their proficiency.  The muse is fickle, and if you ignore her, she can disappear in the blink of an eye.  I've been pretty lucky, having never been blocked for more than a day, even if I don't write for say, a week, but I also know that attitude is akin to playing with fire with one's inspiration.

I've decided that I actually want to become a legitimate writer, and what has sparked that is that I've decided that I want to write a book, specifically a memoir, but not a simple memoir, one that is also part historical, specifically about my long history with living with HIV and how that mirrors to some degree the San Francisco history of HIV and its effect on the gay community.  At now over 27 years of living with it, more than half my life, I'm among a very small group of people who are still alive, and I think the history that I have is one that has more than a passing value.  I would love to be published, but even if I'm not, that isn't what this is really about - it's about having a way to process a life that has presented me with a number very unique experiences and challenges, most of them interesting and many of them painful.  It's also about leaving some kind of legacy for those in my live who outlive me, a personal and meaningful keepsake that is also hopefully a touchstone accounting of this very unique experience called my life, and hopefully shedding a bit of understanding into what makes me tick.  But with great accomplishments come great responsibilities and great potential for failure.  One of the easiest ways for me to do what I consider to be a failing effort is to squander this opportunity, not take a chance, or not take the time to learn and do it right.  Even if I can't actually come up with all those hours, I want to at least approach this endeavor with the 10,000 hour attitude and give this effort the time and attention it deserves.  This will, of course, compete with all my other current obsessions for my time and attention:  Cooking, gardening, drag, reading, but I have to, and do look at this as I look at every other seeming impossible challenge or roadblock that I've faced in my life:  nobody ever told me I couldn't do it, so why should I think that way?  It's unlikely that I'll start operating any differently at this point, for better or worse.



Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
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Open Mouth, Insert Keyboard

I was talking to my friend Ray last weekend.  We are, in many ways, simpatico:  He is in a 15 year relationship, Ken's and mine was 16 years.  Ideologically, we're not very far apart.  We've both been living with HIV for a long time; he 15 years and 27 for me (this month actually - Happy Aidsaversary!).  We both held out for a long time before going on antiretroviral therapy (aka The AIDS Cocktail).  There is more, but you get the picture.

It so happens that Ray is also my massage therapist, and has been for nearly 15 years.  In the last few years, he and his partner bought a property out in the desert (Cathedral City, near Palm Springs), and Ray has been spending about half his time out there and half in San Francisco.  That means I need to call him and find out when he is here to schedule my appointments.  Usually our phone calls are quick, just business, but that particular evening, as we were wrapping up, he asked me if I didn't have a Facebook account, since he has used his for updating his travel schedule with his clients.  I do, I told him, but I had been there once in almost a year, and that was to retrieve something specific.  Same thing goes for MySpace (or as I call them, Mybook and FaceSpace, I have a page, but it is neglected, I never go to check it out, or to contact other Space-outs.  I also added, "and I don't tweet" (meaning I don't have a Twitter account) and plan to keep it that way.

Ray chuckled, and then told me that although he had FaceBook and Twitter accounts, he has serious misgivings about both of them.  Once more, it's proven to me that we are indeed simpatico.  He told me that when he first put his FB page up, he was far more into using it, but as of late he was really only using it for business purposes.  "As for Twitter", he tells me "very early on I would read people's updates and think 'I can't believe they are saying that' to myself, and was disenchanted with it pretty quickly on".  Good boy, I think to myself.

I told him, and I've said it from the time that I first heard about Twitter, that most of the time, the "updates" are rants, almost Tourettes-like.  It was my supposition that in the pre-online social networking days, 90% of what people will now put in their "status" message were ideas that probably would have never left their head and come out of their mouths

Note:  All 3 previously mentioned sites have a spot right on the cover page where one can enter their current status.  You'll see everything from  "Sally just took a big dump and feels so much better" to "Rick hates the world and thinks everybody should just die" to downright libelous statements at times: "Larry is a thief and a big stinking bag of shit that likes to steal boyfriends, especially when he's high".  I kid you not here, and even worse, none of these even approach the depravity of the worst ones I've seen.  I'm not going to give examples, because I purposefully blocked them out of my memory (when I was still internetworking and reading them).  Besides, it's bad enough that somebody wrote those things down in the first place, I see no need to give that crap any more attention then it has already had.

But back to the pre-sidebar point I was making with Ray:  It was my belief, I told him, that because of the ability to instantly publish anything you put out onto the web and have it available for millions to admire, that people were frequently posting status updates containing information that should have never left their head.  You've heard of diarrhea of the mouth, I'll call this phenomenon diarrhea of the keyboard.  Typing without thinking is essentially the same as speaking without thinking, in my book.  In the Old School days, where we wrote in our journals and diaries onto paper with a pen, I doubt that even half of that above-mentioned drivel would have ever even made it to the page.  As for what did get written down, that would get locked up and hidden in your room where nobody (hopefully) could find it.   But no more for that; now, one can say the most onerous, libelous or disgusting thoughts that they have and then share these with the whole world.  I can only speak for me, but I have a lot of thoughts that I would never let leave my head; I believe that this is true of just about anybody in the population at large.  The difference between me and the bloggers/spacers that I've described is that I actually don't let these thoughts out, except maybe sometimes to my shrink or best friend, if at all.  It has to be someone that I can trust to not judge.

The whole thing has me really perplexed.  I'm not sure if this is attention-seeking behavior, anger management or somebody sharing what they think are witty observations about themselves - or some combination of the three.  Now I'll admit, there were some that have been very insightful, some which really made me think and/or some that were just downright funny.  But in the case of the latter, it's been my experience that attempting to be funny and succeeding at it are two very different things, and the ability to attain the second goal is more often than not unrealized.

I'll admit that I actually do still have one medium where I post status messages still, and that is with Gmail (Google's email client).  On your personal gmail cover page, you have the ability to post a status message next to your name, along with a picture that anyone who is on your contact list (and invited to Gmail chat, which is also part of Gmail - basically an IM client) can see.  You can change it as often as you want, or you can leave it blank.  Generally, I've kept mine pretty neutral; for weeks, I was putting in a Dave Barry (humorist, satirist, columnist) quote,  and changing it daily.  I've also posted YouTube links to hilarious (to me) videos that I want to share.  In both cases, about the only personal insight that one might glean is how humor reflects one's outlook on life.  I believe that humor can frequently be used as a snapshot into the mind of the person who finds said humor funny, and then you the reader can suppose to yourself what this says about the person.  For me, I would say that if you read between the lines of my humorous updates, what you would probably get is that I find farce in life in general, that I don't suffer fools lightly and that I'm continually amazed by people's lack of common sense.

The other kind of updates I might do are personal insight observations, but these are generally statements that I would also be likely to share in person.  A good example is my current update:  "Sick and tired of bitching about being sick and tired of being sick and tired".  Now this is something that has been a frequent theme in this very blog you're reading, and though I do write in a very stream of consciousness style, there is a big difference here:  I may write it, but I don't publish my writing for at least a day after I finish it, and that means usually I've edited it twice.  This allows me the opportunity to edit out those thoughts that should have stayed in my head, so that they can then locked back up in my head, where they belong.

Over this last year, there have been many times that I have debated with myself as to whether or not I should just delete my FaceSpace and Mybook accounts.  What has been holding me back is that for a few people, that is the only way that they know how to contact me.  Sure, I could make sure everybody has my email address and just do it, but between the two sites, I probably have 500+ (and I use the word loosely) friends.
As most of you know, a friend just means that they are the people that have access to your page.  It means more than that to me, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that I do not have that many friends.  It's a word that I don't bandy about lightly, being a friend actually means someone of great significance in my life, not just people I went to high school and university with, former coworkers and fellow drag queens or fellow dog show hobbyists.

I'm not sure what my final answer is going to be, Regis, the jury is definitely still out, but for now, my pages sit out there, unmaintained for over a year now.  If you want a snapshot of my life back then, that is about all that you will get, if you even get that.  You will definitely find some of my favorite pictures of me Brian and Mikey in drag, and I love that, but if that is the only thing that I really want to share, I should be using my Flickr account, which I do not.

I'm less than 45 days away from my 50th birthday.  Though I'm generally hesitant to read too much into numbers, a day or any span of time that is some sort of anniversary, this marker post in my life, signifying half a century of me walking this planet does seem extraordinary.  I think it's partly because I (and most people who have been in my life for a long time, for that matter) never thought I would make it this far.  I don't know anybody from my early years in San Francisco (1984-86, let's say) who were HIV+ back then that are still alive, besides me.  10-15 years ago it was different.  I would occasionally run into somebody on the street (usually in The Castro) who was in my life during that time so long ago.  It's funny, and most of the time it wasn't said as much as it was implied, but if you read between the lines of what we said, it was something to the effect of  the one speaker saying how glad he was to see that the other person was still alive.  With a couple of people that I knew then, I'll use this guy David as an example,  when we would run into each other, we would stop and play a little catch-up with each others' lives.  In the case of David, and like I said before there were a couple of others, invariably one of us said "every time I see you I have a sigh of relief; both that I'm not the only one out there who is still here, and also that I'm genuinely happy for you, and for your loved ones."  I also have to tell you that it has been at least 5 years since I've seen David.  He is very easy to pick out of a crowd, so unless his look has changed dramatically, I'm left to conclude that either he is no longer in San Francisco, or that he has met his final fate in this life.  I have to sadly admit that at that moment, I tend to think that the latter is the case.

I've tried to figure out for years why I'm still alive, since there are so few from my "generation of infection" that are left.  I remember that when I found out (1987, when I finally had the guts to get tested) one of the first things I thought/asked of the universe was to make it to the new millenium, 2000, both because it was historically significant and also because that was the year I turned 40.  At that time, I was going to be happy if I made it that far.  That said, deep down, I don't think that I ever completely ruled out growing old with HIV still coursing my veins.  Then 40 came and went, and that year I said "if I live to 50, I will be happy and consider it to be a great accomplishment.  Now, with my 50th birthday approaching rapidly, I've ditched that inner dialog and torn those pages out of my inner autobiography.  Now, I just want to live as long as I can, still having enough health to have a decent quality of life, and I don't see why that can't put me well into old age.

As I've said, there was a big part of me that just never believed that HIV was going to kill me.  My usual attitude about obstacles would invariably kick in when I was questioning my longevity and resilience:  I just never thought that it was possible that I couldn't live to old age.  Nobody told me that I couldn't, though there might have been inferences that the likelihood was slim to none.  Now, I've allowed this attitude free reign overy my psyche.  I'm not going to set any number of years for how much longer I can live; if anything, my goal is that I would like to make it into old age, independent and self-reliant, with a degree of health relative to where I was at pre-interferon.  That means that I do have limitations, some pretty big ones at that, but none of them has every stripped me of the ability to enjoy a life of quality and purpose.  My mother was a child of The Great Depression; she instilled in me, and frequently I might add, the notion that you work with what you have to attain what you want.  In other words, you don't reinforce disappointment by setting unrealistic goals, but you also don't undersell what you have.

My obstacles are many:  I have limited energy, mobility that is often limited by pain, and very often, an appetite that is killed by the drugs I have to take, just to name a few.  There are many more.  I need to minimize my exposure to disease-causing organisms, something that was an extra challenge this year, since I couldn't take the flu vaccine, and it was a potentially devastating flu season.   I have to be ever vigilant to make sure that I'm getting proper nourishment.  What energy I do have, I need to prioritize how I spend it.  First, I have to make sure that I have good meals to eat for when I am unable to cook.  This last year, I accomplished that by taking a couple of months to prepare and freeze home-cooked meals.  I made well over 100, and it was not a wasted effort.  In the last 7 or so months, I've probably used 2/3 of the dinners that I originally made.  Additionally, when I now prepare a meal that could potentially feed 5 or 6 people but I'm the only diner, I'll take the leftovers and turn them into dinners.  Each dinner has the following three components every time:  there is a protein (usually animal), a starch and  a fresh vegetable.  They are 100% homemade and the produce and meat are for the most part organically or sustainably farmed and locally produced.

This was a brilliant idea from the outset, if I may take a moment to pat myself on the back.  It is an idea that has worked so well that I plan to continue it indefinitely.  That is the beauty of having a stand-alone freezer, I can store and preserve a lot of food while still having a minimal impact on it's nutritive attributes.  Another benefit (and this wasn't something I had consciously considered at the outset) is that I have decreased my food waste considerably.  It is the exception to the rule for me to have to throw away leftover food.  Any that I still have to do bothers me, and I'm looking for ways to decrease it even more.  But I also make use of the waste - it becomes my compost, except for meat and dairy of course, not good things to compost.  I've also taken to religiously vacuum-sealing any perishables that I can:  Breakfast cereals, nuts, cheeses and baked goods are examples.  I can't remember the last time I had to throw away nuts or cereal that had gone stale.  I can take lunch meat that I can't eat right away and vacuum seal and refrigerate it and it lasts for weeks, or freeze it and have it last months.  I'm not only keeping my conscience clearer by cutting waste, I'm also saving a lot of money.

I don't know if you had heard or not, but our economy is in big trouble, has been for awhile now.  More than anytime in my past I've approached my finances with pretty consistent vigilance and scrutiny to keep myself withing a reasonable budget.  I define reasonable as one that is reasonably attainable (not too stringent and not too generous) while still having the least impact on my reserves.  I'm getting a lot better at this.  After Ken died, even though I was paying a lot more attention to finances (Ken pretty much did that for both of us when he was alive), I really hadn't curbed my spending in any significant manner.  At times I was actually worse that I had been before he died.  The only thing I can say that is good about that time is that I kept myself aware of how much over budget I was going each month.  Though that sounds half-assed, the consistency that I set there was the first step toward living within my means, which I am now much closer to that I've ever been in my adult life.  I've been able to accomplish this without feeling deprived, and that was what I considered to be the ideal outcome when I started the process.

There are a lot of considerations that go into budgeting yourself so that you are living within your means.  The first is to do an inventory of what you have;  as a general rule, the more that you have (children, property, pets, vehicles etc.) the more it will have an impact on your finances and the more money you need to have to maintain it all.  If you own property, you have mortgages.  You also have maintenance and upkeep, insurance, taxes, homeowner's association dues etc..  The more children you have - well, that's a no-brainer, same with pets.  With vehicles,  it depends on what you have.  I have a nice car, a beater and an older RV.  All are paid for, so there is no bank note to pay, but there is insurance, license and registration times three.  Then there are repairs, maintenance and fuel.  Then there are the usual typical monthly obligations: utilities, groceries, medical bills (obviously a big expense for me), entertainment and there are in my case what I call  "mandatory" discretionary monthly maintenance costs - the gardener (only $105/month and he comes every week - a bargain) and also the housekeeper, who comes three times a month.  With all the animals that I have, I need that much cleaning help; this last year, it's been all that I can do to keep up on the basics in between cleanings.  When you feel like crap, cleaning the house is about that last thing that you want to do.

In my budget, entertainment is pretty all-encompassing - dining out, movies, theater, sports, hobbies, vacations pretty much all get categorized under discretionary spending.  Since none of it is mandatory spending, it can logically be bundled up as a package.  That isn't even all of the discretionary spending:  There are clothes, which I haven't shopped for in at least 2 years.  If you know me, or if you were to look in my closet, it would be pretty evident that I really don't care much about fashion.  For me, clothing is pretty much utilitarian.  I do care about how it fits more than anything.  I'm not going to wear clothes that make me look dumpy (unless maybe I'm out gardening and wearing clothes from my "old fat clothes that can get trashed" pile.  I won't just buy some cheap old Mom jeans - fit is my one vanity with clothing.  I have a weird physique (no curves, no hips, just a straight line down from armpit to floor.  In profile, I'm almost 2 dimensional); clothes that fit it aren't always that easy to find.  For example, on a lanky body, low rise pants (esp. jeans) look best.  But if, like me, your waist and hips are pretty much the same circumference, low-rise pants will be down at your ankles in a manner of minutes.  Even with a belt, unless you cinch it so tight that you get welts on your waistline, they're still going to fall.  At 50, I'm just a little old to be showing crack, and walking around hiking up my pants every 5 minutes doesn't look very pretty either.

Then there is the other discretionary spending; for me that is mostly things for the kitchen and the garden.  In my case, this is where I get into the most trouble.  I will drop a couple of hundred at Home Depot or Costco or Target without even batting an eye.  This last year, I put thousands into my landscaping.  It would have been less if I could have done more of the work myself, but that was out of the question.  But I also have a penchant for plants, and always like the priciest ones, of course.  In the kitchen, well, you can ask my friends.  My friend Brian ribs me all the time about all the kitchen gadgets I have.  The smaller list would be the list of gadgets that I don't have.  This is a typical exchange with Brian:
(we're cooking in his kitchen)
Brian - hey Missy (me), will you make the gravy?
Me - of course, give me a pan and a gravy whisk.
Brian - here's the pan, but my whisks are metal and the pans are all non-stick.  Plus I don't think I even have a gravy whisk.
Me - You have all that non-stick and no silicone-coated whisks?  Girl!  I have like 4 silicone whisks, including 2 different kinds of gravy/sauce whisks.
Brian - of course you do (said with a tinge of snide and sass).
Me - Shut up bitch.

I would both shudder and be embarrassed if I estimated what I spent in the kitchen this last year, so I won't even go there, but my spending that I need to curb the most is my spending on my home.  I hardly eat out anymore, and rarely go to a movie or a play.  I took no vacations last year, and this year, I'm going on a cruise in October, but it's a budget cruise.  We (me and my friend Chris) took the cheapest cabin, so it's not much over $1000 for the whole thing.

It's funny, but my life doesn't seem that complicated to me, until I look at something like this, and then it looks impossibly complicated.  This last year it's been exceptionally overwhelming, because I often haven't had the mental energy to deal with it.  After three years, it is just now that I'm finally starting to feel like all of the fallout from Ken's death has settled down - I've moved, sold and bought homes, remodeled the new one, replaced a car (that died in a fiery collision) and settled the estate.  This is just what I can remember off the top of my head, there is certainly more.  And all this complication brings me to what was originally my intended topic of discussion:  Simplifying my life; finally figuring out that if I'm able to make what I want (materially) encompass only what I need, my life will simplify itself exponentially.  In short, I'm trying to figure out how to live more sustainably, more socially responsibly and in a far less consumptive manner.  If there is good to be had from this crappy economy, it's that modest living is the new black.  As to whether these lessons will stick when things turn around, well, I can hope, but history would tell otherwise.  Greed is a hard demon to kill.

The first part of this process is really the most important part to me, and something I've been doing for the last three years:  It's my period of sorting out.  It's making lists, both on paper and in my head.  I'm trying to look at what I think I want, what I think I need, what I already have, and of what I have, what I don't need any longer and can get rid of, in one way or another, preferably by recycling it.  When I was moving out of Diamond Street, I probably got rid of a third of my belongings.  As I've been going through my house the last few weeks, there is easily another third that could go without me really noticing any impact on my life.  In theory, it's an easy thing to do - go through what you have and use the three year rule:  If it's been three years since you last used it or looked at it, why do you still have it?  Let it go.  In theory easy, but at least for me, as soon as I start the process, I'm trying to rationalize keeping nearly everything that I really should be getting rid of.  That is ridiculous, and for me, it's the time when I need to summon my inner bad cop.  I'm just about there right now, since every time that I think about and/or look at everything that I have, I'm overwhelmed, and I haven't even broached the subject of dealing with it.  Not only will my physical space be more manageable with less clutter, it's going to make me a happier and more peaceful person.  I'm hoping that this hypothesis that I have is true;  I postulate that the more that I'm able to let go of, the easier it will be to rid myself of other clutter (both physical and emotional) after that point.

Then there is one more key component to this life-improvement plan, and that is that I need to not let the empty space that I create by getting rid of clutter be filled with new clutter.  I need to spend with a social conscience.  I need to consider the global impact of my spending, environmental and socioeconomic.  The carbon footprint that I'm contributing to by buying unnecessary crap may not be noticeable to society at large, but one has to lead by example.  By encouraging others to decrease waste, and also by leading with example by decreasing my own wastefulness will have a bigger impact.  I'm not much fond of proselytizing, but when it comes to saving our planet, this is one time that I don't mind getting up on a soap box.  Someone has to counter the voices of the global warming deniers; as if global warming was some sinister plot by Al Gore and company to get back at the right for a stolen election.

This brings my back around to the start of a very big circular thread, one that started many essays ago, and that is the big theme of my life:  Letting go.  I've said it many times, and I'll say it again:  Although I didn't like the circumstances that brought me to such an intensive self-examination, one started three years ago, it was in the end a great example of making some good come out of a devastating tragedy.  My lather, rinse and repeat mantra of the last three years could be easily summarized as observe, sort out and let go.  It all sounds so easy, doesn't it?  It's only taken me three years to be able to be able to recognize the problem, break it down and find the most rational way to approach it.  I guess it's not so easy.




Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
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