Category: Uncategorized

Weekend

Friday

1st day on temp job. Replacing Admin type person for internet group (donna donovan type position for those from computing services) though my duties will just be answering phones, scheduling a couple of conference rooms, and printing out and filing web pages (brilliant, eh?) I think at the end of the week I’ll be more than ready for the research assistantship thing I signed up for, but I’d feel tremendously bad about agreeing to cover and then not doing, besides which, I could certainly use the money _now_.

BART home, immediately make pasta, immediately chow down on it, walk to training, oh look, I’m a few minutes late. Stupid San Leandro job. Sit down and voicemail goes off, I turn it off. Class on non-std dermatology. Interesting, relevant, collaborative atmosphere, expert instructor, responded well to questions. Woo!

Afterwards, Rohan grabs food. I join, we chat, he walks back to my place, we continue to chat. We drop stuffs off, and continue to walk and chat. He clarifies that he is not using job offer as a back door to a romantic relationship, which fits with the available evidence. I tell him I’m slightly disappointed, but agree we wouldn’t be great as a couple. Desire to touch/snuggle without implications is expressed. This is all against a back drop of ‘armchair’ sociological analysis and sharing of many similar (disturbingly parallel!) thought processes. We come back, he picks up stuff, we walk to BART, and say byebye. I go home, am tempted by warcraft, but resist, and sleep.

Saturday

Early morning bike ride with Joshua (see the anonymous poster from a few back on the 12 step subject) on the iron horse trail from the pleasant hill bart station to the pleasanton/dublin bart station. 23ish miles, 1.75ish hours. bout 13 mph on average, not bad considering the significant stretch where we walked our bikes, blah, blah, blah.

Yay significant exercise. Not mega, but significant. Must do more often. Longer distances. Woo!

Burrito lunch at the place right next to the “Best Burrito in the East Bay”. This place has significantly better burritos 😉 Go. I lost the first game (13×13) with a two stone handicap (in my favor) against Jeremy. Won the second, a 19×19 against Matt. Again with the two stone handicap. It was very close. Important principles, territory not stones, think ahead, don’t be afraid to sacrifice in one area to gain more in another, remember the big picture, don’t make stupid little mistakes. Donate stones to widows and orphans. Back home, resting, shopping (yay crunchy vegan bread), cooking (yay lentil soup), munching, go strategy consultations.

wc3. Consistent losing streak against the computer. Go us?

Sunday more gmhc training followed by a gmhc shift, will probably get home around 11 or midnight, taking some soup, and remains of crunchy bread with. Have to do the cooking thing for GMHC peoples at some time. Also must make apple pie soon.

um, whee.

Movie

So, saturday evening there was a dinner party at my place, but Aaron (with Andrew’s assistance) did most of the cooking. How bizarre. =) I made some impromptu zuchinni/mushroom/spinach saute thing. Though I think the dill weed was a little odd to toss in there, I think it came out pretty well. I left for an aids ride fund raising party (where I donated nothing, same as last year, I think. I feel kinda bad about that). Meanwhile the other partiers rented a movie. Which I just watched. Requiem for a Dream.

It’s a compelling movie. Very well done. Very sad. Scary, too. Not big bad monsters gonna eat me style scary, unless your own nature counts as a big bad monster. Over the top, certainly. In more than a few ways. But I could see just about all of it happening.

But it reminded me of a point that was made in yesterday’s abstinence presentation. Hitting bottom. I don’t believe in hitting bottom. I think the only floor you reach is death. And you don’t bounce off that one. While you’re breathing, you can always “sink lower” or “climb higher”.

But it isn’t really about sinking or climbing. Yeah, those are useful analogies, and they work for the people that they work for. Go them. It does crap for me.

From birth on, we’re working to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Constantly organizing and incorporating information, action, planning, reason, experience, perception, intuition, etc. We build our sense of self, our view of the world, our behaviors and habits (with a little help from mom, dad, siblings, friends, random strangers we see pissing on the street, etc).

Drugs, at least the ones we care about, (I have yet to see someone’s life ruined by chamomile tea) are powerful, intense experiences, with psychological and often physiological ramifications which can really fuck your shit up.

If someone spends their saturday evenings watching tv and sundays helping grannies across the street, and then discovers the weekend E scene, and start rolling every saturday night, crashing on sundays, leaving the grannies to risk the roads alone or on someone else’s arm, then they’ve made a decision regarding drugs, and changed their habits based on the E. We can replace E with just about anything you like and the point remains. It changes your life. Maybe in little ways, maybe in giant reworkings, but change isn’t always along a linear scale. Life comes in grays. Dark grays, light grays, sure, but precious little, if anything, is unsullied white or black. Not all pleasure seeking behaviors are self-destructive. And all self-destructive behaviors are not created equal.

Stupid rambling, there was a profound point about the way the human mind works, and failure of the falling down, hitting bottom, and climbing out model to address that. And its failure to make evident that even from self-destructive behavior there are useful/positive lessons to learn. So long as you stay alive to put them into practice.

In one of Niven’s Ringworld books, a major character of the series becomes a wirehead (directly stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain through electricity. Funfun. And in Niven’s world, this is an addictive behavior.) and then pulls his ass out of it. And later he is incredibly tempted by a biological imperative to do something completely suicidal. And he resists “as only an ex-wirehead could”.

Someone else’s profundity, but there it is.

12-steppin it to harm reduction

I’m 99.9% abstinent on non-nutritive/non-medical/non-sexual injesting/inhaling/injecting of shit into my body. And even that I’m restrictive on. Only occasional chocolate or alcohol (maybe 10 drinks spread out over the course of a year (on average, and it’s probably fewer. I had my first drink at age 23, and the frequency hasn’t been increasing), and the occasional green or oolong tea. No crystal, no cocaine, no heroin, no E, K, or G, no LSD, no shrooms, no weed, no tobacco, no aspirin, little caffeine, (also no meat, rare dairy, rare eggs, and I don’t even consume much honey anymore, but that’s kind of secondary). My only drug problem is a partially irrational phobia about them fucking up my life, which is kinda odd given that they’re completely inanimate. This should hardly be news to any of you, but it’s relevant to what I’m about to say.

harm reduction

GMHC

GMHC

So, I didn’t make it to the GMHC volunteer training on time two weeks ago (morning after the party on the peninsula) I was like an hour and a half late, and missed much of the intro to the facilities. “Here are the water heaters, and this is the lock code” kind of stuff. And annoyed people (though I haven’t been nearly as late since then).

thoughts on GMHC

conformity

made another little post

So, in some sense, we can totally neuter the concepts of both conformity and nonconformity with the simple concepts that we all put our pants on one leg at a time (if we wear pants, that is, but the truly universal examples are more biological) and that we’re all separate, unique individuals, like it or lump it.

But…