so much stuff

i've wanted to blog about so much stuff - the frequency of seeing batwoman or batman last week (wtf!), the taxonomy of gay comic book superheroes, my (ill-timed) addiction to 24 (shhh! don't give me any spoilers; i'm only on season 4).

but last night i thought my computer had a virus. there was about 2 hours worth of changing all of my passwords; virus scans; internet research for mac viruses and the like. i think i'm all safe & it was a false alarm. still, it was kinda scary.

anyway, the sun is out & the weather is not incredibly hot or humid. it's perfect weather now...to be inside...studying...

i'm exhausted (5 hrs of sleep). all of the sudden I got very nervous last night - which is strange b/c I got back my first NJ essay and for not knowing the law at all, i didn't do that bad. In fact, I did pretty okay.

anyway, my friend kiren and i are going to make a website. any technical help would be nice or graphic designers...actually, here is an open call for all creative people. Kiren & i need to schedule a skype conference call (we were supposed to have one on Friday & I bailed)...so you can be in on that...

and unrelated to Kiren.

My friend (who is around my age and I'm 24) called me last night to get advice on having sex with a 19 year old. He had recently hooked up with a 34 year old. He was worried about the obvious - emotional attachment, not being able to go to bars, etc.

so my (not-so) comedic response as to my twenty-something friend's love life was to discriminate against old people by saying - yeah, go for the "crazy" sophomore in college, the youngin', the impressionable, innocent girl. I brought up STDs. I feel like the older we get the more and more I know people with STDs.

Now that I think through everything, it all seems kinda backwards.

Still, by rumor, or, in another friend's situation - a workplace e-mail that warned about crabs on the communal toilet seat - the older I get the more I hear about stds. Which also obviously means, the older people get, it's more likely that they've been in contact with an std. Personally, I'm std free (I've been tested!!). But, probably due to my anxiety/ocd, this is one of the first things that comes to mind when getting involved with someone new.

So non-age discriminatory advice: I know it's safe (albeit awkward) to ask people if they've had an std before getting involved. But, also, be smart about stds & don't discriminate against people with stds (despite my bad advice above).

one good article that i read recently on a related topic:

AIDS at 25: An Epidemic of Caring

By ABRAHAM VERGHESE

I won't put a link up b/c of the NYTimes login. but here is an excerpt:

I wonder now what I would have done if I had known in 1981 that AIDS would be as huge as it turned out to be. I am ashamed to admit that I might have gone into another field — say cardiology or gastroenterology. Which is why I have such optimism for the future, because I meet so many students and residents now who, knowing the magnitude of the problem, are still going into infectious diseases. They want to do something about global health, and have put their money where their mouth is by volunteering abroad before medical school.

I think perhaps that is the legacy of my patients, the legacy of the nurses and physicians' assistants and social workers who taught me so much, the legacy of people from all walks of life who toiled against AIDS when there was no hope. My students seem to know what we had to so painfully learn: the secret in the care of the patient is caring for the patient.