I could be wrong-ga, I could be right.

I find it odd that so much of the U.S. coverage of the devastation in South Asia--countries inhabited exclusively by non-caucasian people--focuses on heartwarming tales of the white survivors. Now I may be terribly, terribly wrong, but why do I assume of the now over 100,000 dead, people of Northern European decent are the vast minority? A percentage of a percent, I'd wager. Yet if you go by our news outlets alone, you'd think a handful of white tourists were the only to survive, to be reunited with loved ones. I am left to conclude: (a) Caucasians, particularly Northern Europeans, are simply more buoyant, and therefore more apt to survive a tsunami, or (b) The United States, as per usual, really doesn't give a shit about your fate if you're brown and poor.

I'm open to any and all alternate suggestions.

In the meantime, after two days of deliberation, G and I finally decided Oxfam would receive our relief donation. Who did you donate to?

Bereft

Yep. I got nothin'. What's the death toll now? 70,000?

But I'll try... So the president sure sucks, huh? Oh, and one of my neighbors was mean to my dog, and how bout the MTA raising the rates again?

Yeah. I got nothing.

Nothing.

Fun with forwards from Canadians:

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't you just give them yours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked pretty well for over two hundred years and Hell, you're not using it anymore.

Entry #363: 100% guaranteed to offend someone.

There's a school for the mentally retarded in my neighborhood. I see the students and their chaperones now and then during their weather-permitting walks, hand in hand with an 'outing buddy' en route to the park or their once-a-month lunch date at the nearby diner. When I was a teacher's assistant at a school for the mentally and physically disabled, this group would have been labled 'low-functioning', ranging from moderate to severe disability. In layman's terms, sans my less-than-expert opinion: these folks have been dealt a monumentally shitty hand.

I saw the students this morning while out walking the dog. You couldn't miss them. Because some brilliant do-gooder thought it would be really fun! and festive! to dress them in oversized, ill-fitting, cheesy red and white Santa-type suits, accompanied by large floppy green hats. The reasoning, I'm guessing, is being stared at and ridiculed the rest of the year is simply not enough. No, you need to be a part of an army of happy elves who have snot freezing on their faux fur, who are tripping over their pant legs and wondering why the fuck every passerby has a face like they just saw a dead kitten in the road. You need to be snickered at by cruel teenagers who cannot wait to release their peals of laughter until you pass. And even though your ability to comprehend or understand a centuries-old Germanic fairy tale is on par with Bush's ability to write a dissertation on Nicomachaen Ethics, you will participate dammit! Get into the spirit of the season! Have fun.

Their chaperones herded the group toward the diner. A waitress, out for a smoke, forced a cheery, "Why look at all the Santas!" as they approached. She was greeted with the reply, "Pancakes" from one of the Santas in the center of the line. They tugged at their garments and filed into the restaurant, delighted, I'm sure.

The dilemma: Chucky version

My grandmother (who died of an inoperable brain tumor two Christmas's ago) was very crafty. Not like steal your man crafty. More like Mrs. macrame plant-hanger, sew your own clothes, paint your own figurines, two foot long wiener-dog made out of pantyhose you use to stop the drafts from leaking under the front door crafty. But her trademark craft project was her clowns, which she produced in such alarming excess that we (by 'we' I mean every human being she had ever met) received one for each special occasion of the year, and now and again just "because." Grandma was nothing if not thoughtful.

The clowns are a foam ball attached to a block of wood (head, body) which are then dressed in a little handmade jumpsuit and pointy hat, finished with stuffed felt boots and hands sewn on in the appropriate places. The block-of-wood body makes it so they "sit" nicely on a bookshelf or table, where they stare out of their creepy vacant google-eyes and plan to murder you in the night--universally agreed to be the number one nocturnal activity of scary clown dolls.

Which is sad. Because none of them start out brain sucking demons. Grandma's clowns--the idea alone, the pattern she created, et-cetera--aren't so awful of themselves, they could be adorable in some way, if not for the fact that my grandmother was horribly, cripplingly colorblind. Mix that with a garage-full of fabric remnants from the seventies...

Now you'd think that something that garish could turn the corner. The whole so very ugly and awful that it's kinda kitsch and fun phenomenon. No. Seriously. No.

So here's my problem. I've recently become reunited with a few boxes of Christmas decorations which had been rotting in my father's basement. At the bottom of one particularly mold-encrusted box lay a special, one-of-a-kind theme clown of Grandmas: A Christmas clown. No colorblind problem here...she stuck to the traditional red and green alright. It's covered with mold, not what you'd call washing machine safe, hideous (and potentially murderous)... and the very last thing my beloved Grandma made for me before she died.

Toss it? Or take the chance that either it, or the mold, will kill us all in the night? Wait, perhaps this will help you (help me) decide.

Friday Caption Contest

Don't be such a Dick, Wolf.

Look Law & Order, I know you’re a big important television franchise. And I’m sure many would be of the opinion the shows you produce are much, much more important than the commercials and independent films produced by the company I work for. Just look at how many people you employ, for goodness sakes. Why because of you every schlock nimrod actor in New York has had extras work, at least once! We simply do not measure up, Law & Order.

And when you’re as important as you are, you gotta shut down streets and take over sidewalks and tow parked cars and commandeer whole restaurants and businesses. You have to hang up building-blocking scrims to get the lighting just right, so Ice T will look his very best. I agree Ice T should look his very best. And I understand it is occasionally necessary to put craft service in the middle of the fucking road, encircled by a few of New York’s (actual) finest, so the hoi polli can’t get too near the supremely hot Mariska Hargitay, or so a stray homeless person won’t try to steal a bagel or something. I know you have to do that.

But Law & Order? May I remind you that there are other people in New York who also make the filmy-type thingies, and who also need to get their, albeit less glamorous, job done? And that just because our front door happens to be in the middle of your set at the moment, it does not, for instance, give YOUR PAs the right to turn away the cube truck MY PAs need to load with the camera and light kits for OUR SHOOT THIS MORNING, or to intercept MY FUCKING FILM TRANSFERS FROM TECHNICOLOR, thus leaving me, here, in the office above your set, with the impression that these people simply never showed up, and thus causing me to make several phone calls to numerous innocents and proceed to rip them a whole new category of asshole…

It may be a shock, Law & Order, to learn this tid-bit; but the city of New York was not erected for the sole purpose of being a super-nifty gritty backdrop for your mediocre cop dramas. Sour grapes you say? Fuck off.

Unless you’re hiring coordinators.

victim of the bad apple

The guy ahead of me in line (middle aged, business suit, smells of soap) pays for his coffee, and turns to leave. I pay for mine, and turn to leave. He reaches the door, pushes it open, steps through, and holds his arm out to stop the door from closing again. He looks in at me, I look out at him. Long pause. He smiles, so I smile back. Long pause. He adjusts his bags, and lifts his eyebrows as if to say “So?” and I answer with a face that says, “So…” That (un)said, we continue to stand there. Two strangers on a crisp day sharing a smile through an open grocery door; or whatever it is we’re doing. Long pause. I start to wonder, what the hell are we doing anyway? Long pause. Man smiles. I mean, what is the thinking? Why is he just standing there in front of me, holding the door open like that…

Nostaliga breeds.

My box of stuff fell apart. Wait, backup.

I have (had) a box of stuff-- letters and cards and documents and all the thoughts I used to put down on paper before I had this here online diary thing-- that I carried around with me for the last twenty-odd years; and the box disintegrated.

You know what you have laying on the floor when your box of stuff falls apart? Well for one, really bad poetry. Dear God the worst fucking poetry...worse still when you check the dates and do the math and realize you were not, as the hackneyed illusions would suggest, seven years old. And pictures of bands you used to manage, old scripts from theater troupes you used to work with, one's first crack at third person narrative *shudder*. There are postcards from girlfriends on vacation with lovers they haven't spoken to in ten years. You find amazing (even now) artwork given as gifts from people who didn't then, and do not currently, consider themselves 'artists'; and who are wrong, on both counts. You find birth announcements, a picture of your best friend in the ninth grade, ticket stubs, and a recipe for something you've been making blindfolded for fifteen years buried underneath a lighting script for a show that lasted a single day. An ode to River Phoenix, a mixed tape you never sent to a boy you had a crush on whose name you cannot remember, Christmas cards from now-dead grandmothers, and nude photographs of yourself.

At this moment I cannot, honestly cannot say if my life has been more full than I perceived it to be; or has been more empty than I have been willing to admit. Either way, moral is: put your shit in a really, really sturdy box.

I don't like Mondays.

To the complete fucking moron who called my house NINE TIMES this morning looking for a transportation service, who was told, repeatedly, by me, he had reached a wrong number, and who, when I stopped answering the phone, left five messages for said transportation service on the voice mail, even though our message--"Hello, you've reached the home of ______and______. Please leave us a message and we'll call you back."--clearly states you have reached the HOME of two people whose names do not include, even fucking rhyme with the words "transportation" or "service"... May I suggest, for your edification, my so very, very dim witted mouth breathing disturber of blessed sleep, you read the formerly published Phone Ettiquette: A guide for the masses. Pay particular attention to the last two lines. Have a nice day.

Full time drunk, part time sex therapist.

The background story:
While running errands for G's birthday three weeks ago, I stopped into my neighborhood liquor store. To free my hands up to shop, I set my packages on the counter, one of which was a large bouquet of flowers. The young girl working that day looked at them and said, "Oh how pretty! Did your boyfriend give you these?"

"No," I answered, "It's his birthday, I bought them for him."

"NO! You're giving HIM flowers?" She said, honestly shocked.

"Sure... Don't tell me you've never given a man flowers before."

"Well NO!" She said giggling. "Give a guy flowers? If I gave my boyfriend flowers...he'd think it was, I don't know, weird or something."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He just would."

"Is he allergic? Insecure about his manhood? Does he have an innate fear of beauty?"

"NO!" More giggling.

"Then why would he think it was weird?"

"I don't know."

"Give your guy a little credit. I bet he'd be delighted."

She shook her head and laughed. As if the very notion was the most scandalous, ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

So fast forward to last night, I stop in to the same liquor store, same girl is behind the counter. She smiled, pointed to another shopper, and held her finger up in the universal 'wait a sec' gesture--I was to stick around until the customer ahead of me left so she could tell me something. When the person left she leaned over the counter a bit, and pulled the cowl of her turtle-neck down to reveal a constellation of hickeys which ran a line down her throat, where they, I assume, continued that downward path. Then she smiled again.

"Flowers?" I asked.

"Yep." she smiled.

"Told you."

How much money would we spend if it were England and France instead of Africa and Peru?

Today is world AIDS day. If you're not familiar with the severity of this pandemic, or why the continued spread of this disease is a disgrace to all human-kind, go read Dana's post. Get caught up.

Before I left for Amsterdam in 1987, AIDS wasn't yet an epidemic the states. It wasn't even a leading news story. A few sailors in San Francisco had caught an unknown virus that shut down their immune system and caused them to die of normally treatable illnesses, like pneumonia, nearly overnight. Nobody knew what it was. They assumed it was a rare, tropical viral strain someone picked up on a tour of duty and unwittingly brought here. When it started to spread through the gay male community, and appeared to be restricted to the gay male community, the bigoted and fearful called it "The Gay Cancer," breathed a long, Christian, heterosexual sigh of relief, and did nothing.

When I arrived in Holland, a single trip to the Dam Square proved it sure as Hell wasn't any Gay Cancer. Adults, teens, male, female, straight, gay, black, white, asian; people were dying. Lots of people. Too many people. Heroin addicts and the prostitutes who chose to work outside of legal sex shops first, and then those they shared a needle with or had unprotected sex with after, and then whoever THEY slept with after that. But unlike here in the states, the Netherlands didn't wait until it became an epidemic. During my short six months in the country, I watched the creation of a country-wide education effort--literature in five languages sent to every home, PSA's on nightly television, and outreach volunteers sent to the areas frequented by the most at-risk. I saw the expansion (they had already existed) of free condom distribution and needle exchange programs. And thanks to socialized medicine, whole departments created in hospitals designated specifically for those battling the disease. People were mobilized, determined--at the very least--to contain the spread of the virus, and care for its victims. Even me, someone who was not fluent in Dutch, was made to clearly understand how the virus is contracted, how it is spread, how you can eliminate the risks, and where to go for more information, testing, and if need be, counseling and treatment.

When I got home, I was ready to enlist my help in the battle...but there wasn't an army assembled. We're talking Reagan era here. So some disease was killing the queers and prostitutes and drug addicts, so what? God's wrath. Serves them right. Or in Reagan's own words, "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."

See here in America, according to our leaders, our decision makers... the people who deserved it were dying. It was then I knew, and predicted, that until famous movie stars, and innocent children, and the daughters of rich white men came traipsing home HIV positive, it wouldn't be an epidemic, it wouldn't even be an issue in this country--and not a fucking penny would be spent on education or research. (Not an amount of pennies that would matter, anyway). I'm ashamed and disgusted that my country proved me right.

So here we are, twenty years later--same nimrod, different day. All of the common sense post-Reagan education and prevention programs that succeeded, inarguably, to dramatically reduce (and by the mid-nineties nearly eliminate in America) the rise of HIV transmission and AIDS related disease, are to be replaced with a bible and a condemnation...worldwide.

``The Bush Administration is spending millions of dollars on abstinence-only programs that mislead people at risk of HIV/AIDS about the effectiveness of condoms,'' said Rebecca Schleifer, another Human Rights Watch researcher. ``Exporting these programs to countries facing even more serious epidemics will only make the situation worse.''...

Tony Jewell, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the U.S. government does fund condom distribution through some of its HIV/AIDS programs, but he defended the philosophy behind other programs which espouse the abstinence-only approach. ``It's a scientific fact that you will not get a sexually transmitted disease if you do not have sex,'' he said.

It's also a scientific fact that if you do not leave your house, you will never be injured outdoors. So let's talk about reducing the risk of injury for the six billion of us who leave the house, hmmm?

The world has come to us asking for help. Obviously we cannot expect a nationally based assistance program from an administration only interested in helping non-sinners (in their opinion) or anyone whose culture or lifestyle falls outside of a clear Christian construct. We will never get them to understand that it is not the wrath of God but a lack of education, information, and outreach that has caused this pandemic to spread so wide, and take the lives so many, and that this disease affects ALL OF US--so we've got to do it ourselves. Which you can do here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or through your church, your synagogue, your library, on line, on the phone, in person, or with one...damn...dollar.