sex and the single scu

Yeah, so I’ve been single since March 16, 2002, no news there. I’ve been gay.com and m4m4sex.com free for at least 8 or 9 months. Well, maybe not totally free, but I haven’t hooked up from either since then. And I’ve spent less than 10 hours total over the past 8 months on gay.com & m4m, so that’s an enormous drop. My mmorpg’ing picked up sharply at that time, but has since declined. My sex life abruptly dropped when I self-diagnosed warts, and I haven’t completely healed since the surgery. That’s bad, and atypical. I need to be taking better care of my butt. More fiber, more ointment, more advil, and more post-dump baths (not exactly practical at work).

But this combines to make for a much less eventful sex life for me. I’ve had maybe 6 partners since november. I’m sure most of my lj acquaintances think that’s pretty high. Consider that only one of those people have I slept with more than once, and with him, I believe it was twice. Maybe that’s still high for most, but not for me.

I’m content with this. I’ve had enough sex partners to last a lifetime really. I suspect I’ll have a few more and that’s cool too. But if I were to find someone suitable, even someone I’ve slept with before, and settle down with them for the remainder of my life, I could be cool with that.

I feel like I was a bit over the top with my drooling over the straight guys at the wedding. My friends are safe, I have established patterns with them, which include joking about buttsex with them, but which safely neutralize any attraction. However, with new people, the ruts are less well worn. And I feel the pull of neat-new-person attraction. And, being me, I don’t shut up about it. And soon, I’m that horny nerd who’ll never get any, because he can’t stop running his mouth about it. *shrug*. It’s a theory.

I’m picky, but also bad at selling myself. And usually, too eager-puppy with guys I am attracted to. *shrug* Another theory.

The reason I picked up so much on gay.com isn’t because I’m uberhot, or because I dazzled them with my wit, but because getting laid through gay.com is more a matter of patience and persistence (and it doesn’t take nearly so much as hetero dating does) than a matter of demonstrating personal worth. Not to say I don’t have a lot going for me, but to say that it wasn’t the bits of myself that I most like that got me laid, it was going to the right environment that got me laid. And being a bit out of character there.

I’ve criticized a number of guys for doing things online that they’d never do in person. Ignoring a hello, leaving a conversation without saying anything, jumping to the worst conclusions about anything anyone says. I did a little of all of that, but my most frequent deviation from real life behavior was my outgoing online nature. I’d say hello to strangers as they entered the room. I wouldn’t let one person’s rejection, no matter how brutal or passive aggressive, stop me from talking to someone else. It reminds me of the king of the hill episode where the kid meets his girlfriend at the shoe store. In person, I get one rejection and I curl up into a fetal ball. (Sometimes literally, but basically never immediately).

I would not hit on guy after guy in a bar until I found one willing to go home with me.

I’ve tried squeezing attraction out of affection, and it hasn’t worked. I’ve tried increasing volume of inductees, in hopes of finding a good one that’ll stick. That didn’t really work either and it certainly wasn’t worth the cost.

Current strategy is to build up a comfortable social circle and either see what comes of it, or see if my carefully built nest draws one in to start a mating dance. And even if the distant goal isn’t achieved, the proximate goal is well worth it.

Nat’s & Krista’s bonds of civil matrimony

So, friday I flew out of Midway to Charlotte (no delays!) to attend ‘s and ‘s (now ) wedding. Nat’s dad picked me up at the airport, and after some initial confusion, I was dropped off at the bachelor party, where I was promptly greeted by such well known figures as , , babailey, Mark Stehlik, and . All with at least one sheet to the wind. I also met new worthies, , , , and . Though I did pour myself generously, I didn’t drink much. Video game and other madness ensued. I largely got my ass kicked as a variety of princesses and puffballs in super smash bros. But in HALO 2, I held my own. Much thanks due to Mitch, my current roommate, and my fellow players’ states of inebriation.

The next day, the big day, , , and I abandoned Ken to sleeping in, hit a nearby mexican fast food joint, then returned to cleanup and go to the wedding. This is when I should have remembered the camera that entrusted me with to take a picture of him as krista entered the place of marriage. I was a dork, and completely forgot it until we were at the wedding site and had no time to turn around & get it. I made enough noise about it, though, that pulled out his camera and did it for me. Not exactly the plan, but so it goes.

The ceremony itself was very tasteful, simple, and well done. Also, pretty god-free as I recall.

Throughout the reception, we were seated next to the buffet, but the last ones given the all clear to make use of this. We made up for this by scamming half the chocolate covered strawberries for our table when dessert came. It was largely the same crowd from the bachelor party, though and Mike Tolan(?) joined us later, having suffered a similar flight experience to what I’d had to sit through earlier in the week.

I was one of the snarky people who didn’t dance and criticized the dj. To be fair, he was pretty crazy. He seemed determined to make a spectacle of the event, and succeeded in being pretty loud, and perhaps rather more attention gathering for himself than is truly appropriate for the dj at a wedding, but enh. A good time was had, regardless.

I stayed til the end of the reception, then it was back to the bat hotel. , babailey and I ended up in babailey’s room playing a card game new to Ken and I. In the end, Bryan beat Ken’s and my combined scores by 1, while Ken beat me by 1 (out of over 100). It’s an interesting 3 player trick taking game. Recommended when only three players are available.

Up in the morning, back to chicago at O’hare. Small delay taking off, but we still landed early. A day with my parents, including the Blind Faith Cafe, a walk along the beach in Evanston, grocery shopping, and a trip out to see my nw suburban aunt, uncle, and cousins (including a hyper little 19 month old, daughter of one of said cousins). Back home and collapse.

movie time with Jhim and Robbie

My 4th of July wasn’t too terribly eventful, but it was pretty fun. Reversing the situation from last week, is in my city of residence for work-related purposes. So, he, and I did something much like what he, , and I did. Hang out, catch a movie (Bewitched, I was rather disappointed, they could have done so much better…) and dinner at the chicago diner. is a great guy, who I would recommend to just about anyone for an evening of around-the-town fun. is also quite cool, and it’s fun (if not difficult) to make him blush, even if it doesn’t show on him.

More travel woes

Today was a 9.5 hour day, just getting from my dc hotel to my chicago home. 5-6 hours of that spent in a plane on the ground, no breaks. I saw Vin Diesel’s the Pacifier. It was okay. Then like 95% of million dollar baby. I missed the last few minutes of that, but a web search provided me with a plot synopsis of the two major events I missed. Depressing movie that. The christian critique of it that I googled up amused me. The critique had no problem with people beating the shit out of one another, but was utterly horrified by assisted suicide for a quadraplegic amputee no longer able to breathe without support. What crap.

Also, by dint of much time on the phone, my student loans are on track for consolidation. Woo! … *collapse* *snore*

HIV and AIDS

reposted an article which is highly critical of the current medical practices and beliefs with respect to AIDS and HIV. My reading is that it’s trying to imply HIV probably doesn’t cause AIDS without saying it. She quotes someone who says that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, but also notes that she isn’t sure that these people are correct, but feels that they need to be heard.

The major claims seem to boil down to a few, paraphrased endlessly.
HIV meds are toxic. This is true. The dissidents claim that this does not get acknowledged by the mainstream medical establishment. This is not true to the best of my ability to discern. Everyone I’ve talked to on meds has shared their experience with the side effects. They say that this is something they are told about before they start a regimen. Standard medical practice for a variety of diseases. We don’t tell people about the side effects of drugs they won’t be taking, because that’s time consuming, and useless. HIV meds are hardly unique in having nasty side effects. Perhaps these side effects should be trumpeted loudly, particularly to the bugchasers, but that’s another story.

The denialists talk about alternate treatments, but give no information on long term survival rates for people provided only such treatments, on expense of these treatments, etc. Nor do they talk about late stage AIDS reversal rates for these treatments. Contrast this to HIV where the experiments to determine the efficacy of AZT were cut short because AZT was showing dramatic benefits and it was judged unethical to allow patients to die when treatment was available. This was probably under active pressure from ActUp and similar organizations. I do kinda wonder what the FDA on this was.

Dissidents, or denialists rarely mention the frequency with which AZT and later, cocktails produced dramatic turn-arounds in AIDS-related declines. They acknowledge that it “helps in some cases”, but never get into anything like hard numbers.

I have my own concerns about entrenched pharmaceutical interests, and I believe in the HIV theory. Assume for a second, if you don’t already, that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Pharma makes big money off of treatments for HIV. If a vaccine and a cure were both developed, such that HIV was a thing of the past and AIDS never occurred, and the profit to be made from selling this innovation were trivial, how possible would it be for makers of current HIV meds to buy off, deny or supress the creation of such? That would be difficult to arrange though. But it’s the pharmaceutical industries that run the trials for new drugs. How often will they pony up for trials of anything promising such benefits?

But, in the first several years of AIDS, the disease was treated in a variety of ways without using Protease Inhibitors or Reverse transcriptase inhibitors (AZT is one or the other I think). Do you have any real evidence that they were anywhere near as effective?

You want research done on nutritive therapy, great. Should be comparatively cheap. If there’s such good reason to doubt, why is there difficulty raising the money? Start up a parallel group to do what you believe is real research. Fundraise, prove the world wrong. I certainly won’t stand in your way. I might even donate a dollar or two.

Sorry, this is not the cohesive, point by point post I’d hoped to make, but I’m not inundated with free time. Maybe I’ll revisit the topic later.

Pissing innsmouth off: Hunters & Gatherers, revisited

Schizophrenia in less developed nations not as much of a problem and An article by the author whose book, guns, germs, and steel, hated without having read. 😉

Since I’m about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through Collapse, by Jared Diamond (the aforementioned author); it was interesting to read the summary article up above.

Note, I’m not denying the frequency of infant mortality among hunters and gatherers, or their other medical deficits. I’m not saying that modern technology does not directly enhance quality of life. I’m asking about the costs.

We’re working longer hours than hunters and gatherers did. We’re less socially connected, and only recently (say, past 100 years?) have any but the absolute most advantaged in the world had a more varied diet, and even that is debatable, given the vast numbers of species humans have destroyed or displaced over the millenia.

And just what do you think quality of life is for the median human on the planet? Consider India, Africa, and Asia. Think about the folks ekeing out a living on pennies per day so that we can have cheap clothes. If I had a choice between being a median hunter-gatherer (who made it to 20) and a median human alive today (in terms of quality of life), I’d probably go with the h-g. This is not a choice I have.

Despite this, I am an optimist. While I don’t believe we’re currently in a situation where the average or median individual is better off, I do believe it is possible for us to produce such a situation, but we can’t trust in universal forces, like “the invisible hand of the market” to take us there. It requires great effort and care to improve QoL on an aggregate basis. I only hope we consciously adopt that goal at some point, and hopefully some point soon.

Regardless, I find Diamond’s closing point with the article very interesting:Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and logest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?

Political thoughts

So, Rove is viciously misrepresenting democrats, and the democratic response is again, what? Oh, right, calling on him to take it back.

Bullies are hard to deal with. They make us mad. There are a few ways to take this anger.

Get steamed at the bully and demand that they take it back. This generally gets one nowhere by itself. Picture the nerdy kid trying to ask the bully if he could talk to him in private or saying, “would you pretty please stop beating me up?” That’s the course the democratic party is by and large taking.

Then there’s “the high road”, or passivity. Rein in the anger, and do nothing. It’s a course I’m well familiar with, and one I don’t generally recommend. It changes nothing. Unless you’re relying on independent witnesses to stop it (schoolyard monitors/an independent media/a skeptical or compassionate population), that won’t change anything either. And even if there is a protective agent, when the cat’s away the mice will play.

In the democratic case, calling for Rove to apologize is like the nerdy kid asking the school bully to apologize without any authority likely to intervene. I’d say, instead of pretending he’s playing a fair game, denouncing him is about the only shot the democrats have for any short term progress. Not calling for an apology, but saying he’s full of shit. That he makes shit up, has nothing backing up his words. Take a position of power. Define him. Call him a bully. Call him a liar. Use strong language (I’m not talking profanity, but ‘asking’ and ‘apology’ are not strong words). Delegitimize him in the public view. Otherwise the dems will keep on losing.

Ties in pretty nicely with the article posted about democrats and dean a few days back. Dean seems to be the most influential person in the party playing this role, and most of the current holders of power are more fearful or rocking the boat than seeing what might result, so they’re directing all their criticism at Dean. Brilliant. *sigh*