Category: Uncategorized

$110 round trip to NYC. $200 round trip to Bay area. Not a good weekend to travel, but….

So, I see two major housing options here.

Option number 1 is in wicker park, $600/month, including utils, approx 30 minutes from work, laundry in unit. Problems include: far from , , , , and most of the rest of the people I know in chicago. Also, far from my current (two year commitment) gym. Uncertain about the roommates. They were quite bland when we talked, but I got the sense that maybe they were holding back. Oh, and they’re a hetero couple, actress and designer. Bonuses include: lots of grungy, casual guys, who never bothered growing up. Near the gymnastics location. Pretty close to the city contingent of the northwestern suburban gamers, so I could get rides back pretty easy. Frickin’ cheap. (frickin’ cheap pays for alot of cabs).

Option number 2 is to get a 2 bedroom apartment in lincoln park. Pay for it for a month or so, while I find the “ideal” roommate. Slightly shorter work commute (by bus, and probably more sitting room). Much closer to a branch of the gym I already have a membership with. Still reasonably accessible to the gymnastics facility. Way close to and , closer/more convenient to the andersonville crowd (including and ). Easy access to the lake (not as cool as it sounds given that there’s a highway right next to the lake.) Probably coin-op laundry. Also probably significantly (100+) more expensive per month even with a roommate. Generalizing egregiously, the practical decision would be to live in Wicker Park. The emotional decision (close to friends! Pick my own roommate!) would be to live in Lincoln Park. Hmph.

Yay antibiotics. Sinus plague is gone. Unfortunate digestive side effects will be temporary. My Nintendo DS charger is AWOL (that didn’t take long). I checked out several different places on Sunday for potential livingness. One was with and ‘s son, with special time travel, so that he’s basically my age. He is, of course, cute and gay. And a med student. They’d be so proud. He might be a bit too tidy for me, but it’s moot because his location blows, and he sounds very not attached to the place. Told him about the gymnastics open floor nearby. Maybe I’ll see him and his bf there at some point. The other remarkable place was also out of the way. Cute in the scruffy, unkempt sort of way. I mentioned as much to him, at which point in time, he said he was straight (ah, whoops, I really thought he was one of the homos) but that he was cool with it, and commented on all the gay guys and other assorted queers he hangs out with, including amusing anecdotes. He seems like he’d be a great roommate, but his location blows.

After that one I was late for all I could eat sushi with , and friends. I forgot my ID so no plum wine for me, sad. But good sushi overall, and $12.95 for all you can eat sushi, where you get to pick which sushi (+tempura and miso) hard to turn down.

Weekend also contained much feeling of loss of identity/happiness triggers. I worked out a bit. That was good.

beat down on hellfire ramparts with my peeps. Now level 62.

As it turns out, my insurance company made a little oopsy. I should have been told on tuesday, when I called, that a) I needed to file form xyz123, but b) I could see a dr now, and get my meds now. Bad help drone. Bad, bad, help drone.

My appointment is tomorrow early afternoon.

So, I’ve been reading fantasy novels (or mythology, or fairy tales, or sci fi, or, well, you get the idea) for as long as I can remember reading. First or second grade here. And with the limited selection of books available to me, I got in the habit of re-reading my favorite books and my favorite passages. I go through phases of favorite authors. In my high school years, it was undoubtedly Mercedes Lackey. Vanyel Ashkevron rocked my socks.

Dave Duncan is the next big one I can remember after that. I had one book of his that I never got very far into for several years. Now I’ve read just about everything he’s published, including the book that hit mass market this month (finished it this evening).

But the author who I turn to most often these days for a quick re-read is Lois McMaster Bujold. (I can’t thank enough for introducing me.) I’ve been trying to figure out _why_ I like her so much. So I can find others I would also like. Or maybe I should just ask for recommendations. =)

For those of you not in on the lingo, a bug chaser is an HIV negative dude trying to become HIV positive, because that’s hot. Note, they haven’t just eroticized bareback sex, they’ve eroticized sero-conversion. (That has to be up there with the people who eroticize their own castration.) Gift givers are the hiv positive dudes who help the bug chasers get what they want.

If the givers (and chasers for that matter) never gave hiv to anyone who wasn’t a bug chaser and if the rest of us weren’t paying, literally, to help cover their medical expenses (not to mention the wide variety of other stds that bug chasers incubate and spread around) I suppose it wouldn’t be an ethical problem, anymore than suicide or self-cutting is.

But the reality is, everyone else is paying for the bug-chasers. They are the new welfare queens, except these people really are actively seeking to be a burden society, even if they don’t think about it that way. Assuming they are lucky enough to be having all their medical needs seen to by private health insurance, everyone else with the same insurer is ponying up for their irresponsible behavior in premium and copay hikes. If not, they’re a drain on tax payer resources. AIDS meds aren’t cheap, and we have a system in place to pay for it.

“HIV isn’t really a problem, we have meds now. And if you can’t afford them, you’ll get help paying.” One, last I heard, HIV meds had some nasty side effects. Two, they’re hideously expensive. Three, fuck you and your reliance on the public dole. Most people sensibly want to avoid HIV, but you want to follow this fucked up little fantasy of yours to your own destruction and then ask someone else to bail your idiot ass out? I almost wish we could make an exception. Not to subsidizing your meds, but to letting you have them at all.

So, if you have any questions about it, yes, bug chasing is fucking immoral. And so is gift giving. Pull your selfish head out of your ass, and start using it to think. Maybe take a trip to Zimbabwe with the money you would have spent instead, where you can see what happens when the HIV+ population overwhelms the caregiving capacity of the society that holds them. Or just do everyone a favor and off yourself more quickly, and more definitely.

I blame the shits who can’t see past the end of their dick for the recent accidental seroconversions of a number people I care about. Happy about it, I am not.

So, in September I signed up for health insurance with a high deductible health plan (hdhp), because I’m basically a healthy guy, and if it turns out that I acquire a chronic, expensive condition, I can always switch plans in a year. All well and good. I may or may not have received something from them in the mail among the rain-forest-denuding deluge of credit card offers.

So, I get my current sinus plague. I decided at last that I really can’t tough it out. Mom says I need antibiotics. To be precise, she says I’m going to need _expensive_ antibiotics (over $100 to treat what I have), because the affordable stuff won’t help what I’ve got. I call up my insurance company (which I recently paid a fee to make sure they’d accept me) to find out how I would access my coverage. They say, yup, you have coverage, but that’s odd, your hsa (health savings account, goes with hdhp’s) isn’t showing up. We can’t help you until you get that set up. You should contact chase, who manages that. Chase gives me a very polite “Who the hell are you? We have no idea. Talk to your employer.” Office of Personnel Management (OPM, who manages the federal employee health benefit program) says “talk to your agency’s HR people.” I did that this morning. And two other times today. By the end of today, they seem to finally understand my situation. They’re talking to OPM people to get it straightened out.

Single Payer Universal Health coverage, anyone? =)

Generic nyquil + lots of water seems to have done the trick at last. Next to no green slime, very little coughing, I can breathe through both nostrils. If I don’t overdo the decongestant, my nose isn’t hurty on the inside.

I still need to chase down wtf happened with my insurance. Before my next health crisis.

As far back as age 5, I can recall being rather withdrawn. It got worse through elementary school, and peaked in the middle of high school. Between my junior & senior year, I probably made the biggest change I will ever make in my life, and that was to experiment with turning my defense mechanisms off. Some combination of “I’m real smart” and “nobody understands me” was my #1 defense mechanism. (Rambling asides probably take that cake these days). Powering down the defense grid changed my world.

That was what opened me up to other people. Prior to that I probably had a definite, elitist, people-are-dumb attitude. These days that attitude is nails on a chalkboard to me. I haven’t shed my former #1 defense mechanism. And it took years to reduce its role in my life. But I’m glad I did. I talk to people more these days.

I like to talk about fiction, hypothetical situations, abstract theories, and the future. Always the future. I always have. And those conversations multiplied after I started, well, talking with people. But there’s something especially beautiful to me about getting a group of people (3-8 ideally) together who share a similar joy and know one another then watching/participating in what emerges. No wonder I like discussion classes.

I miss that alot. I had a bit of it with in minneapolis, on a regular basis (usually centered around final fantasy xi). Occasionally with classmates who got together. I had that in spades in pittsburgh, and in the bay area. I’m sort of amazed how little progress I feel I’ve made in that direction in chicago. I have a few such people, but they’re scattered all over the area. (We’ll ignore the scattering of friends across the continent. And the few bright dots elsewhere on the globe). The two guys I saw the most of while in nyc, and inspire a similar sense of comfortable fitting. In very different ways.

is my jewish mother (actually, more like “the jewish mother of my jewish friend” because there was the nurturing without the guilt tripping or nagging) with a beard and piercings. He cooked soup for me, gave me nyquil, and dragged my ass into the kitchen to help him bake a very tasty mango upside down cake. He played video games with me. We chatted, we talked about relationships, we ate out, we did some gymnastics (okay, that last one has no relationship to anyone’s jewish mother that I know of.) It was fun.

On the other hand is incredibly mellow and also quite fun. He was not like I expected him to be. He was far cooler. We chatted comic books, and video games. I overflirted. (Especially considering my sinus plague prohibited any sort of follow through). I didn’t get to hang with him nearly as much. A failure I hope to correct at some point.

In addition to both being fun in their own geeky ways, they’re also both cute, fuzzy guys. Such lucky boyfriends they have… =)

I’ve been defensive about my nerdiness lately. It’s part of trying to hold onto a sense of identity, as I’m changing my life and myself. It’s a little odd, but things need (and needed) to channge.