As I live and breath!!

Hi everyone, remember me? I'm that tall goofy, sometimes catty (yes, sometimes) and hopefully often humorous blogger you haven't seen or heard from in quite a while.

I'm back.... ish...

Where have I been you ask? In a word - depressed.


I learned about depression in health care. I worked with depressed people and even walked that fine line between supporting a chronically depressed person who, unknown to them, their depression perpetuated itself, and finding a stern, but supportive way to tell the constantly depressed "yes, life's a bitch, pick yourself up, find a way over and let's move on.

One thing I always wondered when I observed depression in others was how did they get to this point? No one could answer me completely and I couldn't understand why until now. You don't see depression coming. You don't feel it settle in for the long haul making itself comfortable. You just feel one day that it's not there, then suddenly you find days, weeks, maybe even months have passed and you've watched every show TiVo has saved for you two or three times; you're watching a show on why lasagna noodles are wavy on the side vs. uniformly flat (an hour long devoted to this) and the show stays on because while the physical exertion of changing the channel is nothing, the mental stamina needed to actually compare this C-IV level anesthetic of a show to others is just a prospect you don't want to face. So... noodles it is.. how interesting, and yes it is like that sea anemone that undulates through the sea, and on and on and on and on....

So, next question, why was I depressed? It was overall a mixture of actual events, fear for the future, loss of the past and the worry of being a failure. It started in mid-October when after a 3 day weekend to recover from my annual meeting I come in to work to find that I would no longer have work to come to. I won't go into the details because by this point, I don't give a crap. However, when staff was being let go, it was FAC's decision that I should be one of the lucky ones.

What's FAC you ask? Ask away, I'm not saying here in print. However, if you know me and my penchant for foul language blended with names, you may figure it out. If you can't, I'll tell you directly. Here's a hint... the C is the C-WORD that most everyone hates.
Anyway, since FAC had done my job before I came there in addition to her job, apparently her omnipotence could deliver the association through the cataclysmic financial year that was, after all, obviously my fault. So Obama administration, blame Bush on all the money woes the country has, but leave this little section of blame off of Dubya's shoulders... it had to be me.

So, after having fired 2 people since I began, in nice professional adult conversations, FAC apparently decided that while I may be a big pussy pacifist and shy away from arguments let alone physical confrontations, FAC saw fit to have not one, but TWO armed guards be present in her office when I was shown the door. I was so flustered I didn't really ask anything during the informative session, but I did ask about the two gentlemen. "Well, I was told that in this day and age I should be careful." Damn, All this time I could have been planting C4 and plotting against the Hethen Americans... but I didn't grab the chance when I had it. When the gents walked me outside with my stuff waiting for the cab, we ended our conversation smiling and sharing a laugh. Yeah FAC, I think they were probably there more for MY protection than yours. For me to do something like that would actually require me to give a rat's fucking ass about you to get the ire up to actually do harm.

AND HERE'S THE KICKER!!! FAC, God's supreme gift to association management and the self proclaimed paragon of people skills and communication, hid behind the 65+ year old part time accountant/human resources staff member (whom I love to death). This meek little lady who handled the entirety of the conversation with me (the suspected Al Qaida terrorist meeting planner) while FAC sat there. I'm sure FAC was thankful to have that human shield to do her dirty work. This human shield, who also has lung cancer and at the end of 2008 had a biopsy and was out of work off and on for several weeks. My thought, "Poor Mary (not real name) she's had lung cancer, she's dependent on her cane, she's so independent, but now she's having a throat biopsy which will affect how and what she can eat for some time. I hope she'll be OK." What did FAC say? "Well what are we going to do about the audit? Why did she choose to have this done now?"

Many lessons I've learned the hard way in life have been harder because I have to learn them more than once. One thing I HAVE learned in my 43 years is that Karma is kind, Karma is your friend, but Karma can be one MAJOR bitch. And even though I don't get the pure joy of actually seeing it happen, Karma is going to come and teach you a painful lesson FAC. I won't get to see it. I may not even get to hear about it, but the universe is just and I know it's coming. I just truly hope that your lesson doesn't negatively affect those wonderful coworkers I left behind.

Author's note: I truly didn't mean for that rant to come tumbling out the way it did. This is my first writing since mid October and damn if the words and emotions just didn't come flowing out like lava.

So I find myself unemployed
Again
at the end of the year
Again
And looks like I'll have to either skimp or postpone getting my family and friends holiday presents
Again.

Geez... could this get anymore oppressive?
Yes

By now, everyone reading this knows I'm gay. If you didn't.... now you do. This wasn't always the case. I used to call it my Mason Dixon secret. Everyone above the Mason Dixon Line knew... no one below knew... well, no one confirmed that they did. (When I first talked with MaleSib about whether he knew, he said "I'm an artist, I'm a musician, I work in a design firm.... DUH...." )

Having grown up in rural South Carolina where having a gun rack was only a couple of small steps from gay bashing, it was a closely guarded secret I was petrified to let go. Even today I feel a tad uncomfortable talking about this side of my life with loved ones from home. Not that they care, not that I'm discussing.... well.... those things.... but the reflex of secrecy is never far away when it comes to folks from back home.

There was one person who existed in both worlds for me. I met him when I lived in Charleston, SC and he was gay. He was the first gay person I truly, fully knew and he was the first person I was able to look at and say "yes, gay people are just as normal as anyone else" and that's what he wanted me to understand throughout the first years of our friendship. It was a bit skewed because he was one of those people who was drop dead gorgeous, built like a brick shit house, but was completely unaware and/or unaffected by it. He knew me at my heaviest but of the two of us, it was only me seeing me at my heaviest.

There have been very few people in my life that I've been so moved by their personality, ease and demeanor that I sought to emulate them and wish that I could have the ease of self that they had. Andy Bauer was one of these people. He was my halfway house between being straight and being gay. He was one who could make me laugh so hard no number of sit ups would equal the exercise my stomach muscles had just experienced.

Two weeks after I lost my job to FAC, I lost Andy to a car wreck while he was in Germany.
To quote Forrest Gump "That's all I have to say about that"


So here I find myself entering November. I don't have anything to do that doesn't cost. I don't have anywhere to go. I refuse to take loans and I thought I'd be content to catch up on television and couch surfing.

Early November slid into mid November. Mid November slid into late November and my plan to TRULY clean my apartment and take part in NaNoWriMo (where I write 50,000 first draft words on my first novel had stayed right there with me on the couch, not moving; not succeeding, and shutting myself away from my friends, family and even my blog and (gasp) Facebook.

I'm not quite out of the woods yet for feeling blah. But, LeafromSC and her husband resumed their yearly trek to Chicago for Thanksgiving and having faces I love with me made a great energy to start rejoining life. I still haven't written a word on my novel (NaNoWriMo 2010?) but I'm about 60% through my to do list on cleaning, decluttering and preparing to redecorate my apartment with my landlord.

Depression is a discreet, but total asskicker. Don't underestimate it and look for the signs in your loved ones. They may not want to hear it from you, but often just having someone break through that shell of gloom gives a spring of positive if even for a moment. I found myself collecting those as I went through November and I'm starting to see hope. Hope in the form of a probable career change. I'm still looking for a full time job in my industry, but I do start Pharmacy school part time in January. I want to get to that 130+K yearly salary, buy a nice car, travel a little (rebuild my now non-existent 401K) and go by FAC's office, walk up to her and channel Kathy Griffin and tell her to SUCK IT!!!

Love to you all, thank you for the well wishes and concern. It really is knowing you're all out there that makes me smile. And as I always told my Mom; don't worry about me and suicide. I'm too much a chickenshit to do it. :)

just for space

Hi there!

It's been a while since I blogged. There's a good reason which I'll expound on soon. The real reason for this particular blog was to move that horrid Jim Carrey trailer picture down on my blog so I could see my other blog links.

What a waste of space huh?? :)

Blog you soon!

Hello, your 15 minutes are up, thank you, good bye....

Last night I was doing some writing with the TV going in the background and I heard the advertisement for Disney's "A Christmas Carol" with Jim Carrey.

It struck me as I listened to it that even if I had not heard the name Jim Carrey, I would have known it was him simply by the fact that I've heard it all before... again and again and again. He's like Tom Cruise; a good actor, but he's not the character he plays, he is himself AS that character. Jim Carrey is not Ebenezer Scrooge, he's not the Grinch, he's not Ace Ventura, he is Jim Carrey pulling out the same sight and sound gags that he's beaten the dead horse with since he first played Fire Marshal Bill on In Living Color. Don't get me wrong, it was funny... 15 years ago. Since then it's as old and predictable as Cats.

So while griping on FB last night about Jim Carrey, I thought of others that are far extending their time of fame and really do need to step aside or come up with something so new we don't recognize that it's you! Here's the top list of offenders in my humble opinion....

Obviously... Jim Carrey - See rant above

Jack Black

WTF is this fool about anyway? I've never missed a Disney movie in the theaters since Aladdin came on the scene, but I didn't see Kung Fu Panda in the theaters because I just couldn't get past the fact that this idiot was at the helm. I did, ultimately, see the movie and I do like it. Mostly because A) the rest of the cast is fun and Dustin Hoffman is priceless. and B) You don't actually SEE Jack Black. I remember seeing The Holiday and thinking it was a cute story, but was SURE that Kate Winslet's inner monologue was:

"Bloody Hell! Cameron gets to snog on Jude Law and I get.... THAT?!?!?" Where's my agent?"

I guess not since Andy Kaufman has there been someone who continued to be famous just for being an idiot.

Jay Leno

I actually like Jay Leno. Not as a talk show host, but as a stand up comedian he was priceless. I think the reasoning behind his show this fall isn't so much that "Ooohhh... America loves Jay and will revolt and fall into the ocean if we don't have him on TV somehow" it's more "We don't want to have to pay for another series in the 10pm slot so let's just pay one and take him well past his 15 minutes." Still, he could have said no. Did Johnny Carson keep milking that pig? NO... Sorry Jay, time to go.

Twilight & Vampires

Now before Lea in SC throws an aneurysm, let me define this one a little differently. I don't think Twilight's time has come and gone, but we're close if you don't hurry up and launch this damn movie. Was the first movie good? Yeah, it was OK.... if I were a 16 year old girl I may have enjoyed it more as we took incredibly LOOOOOOOONNNNGGGGG boring shots of Kristin Stewart pining inwardly for the vampire boy she wants, but maybe shouldn't have because her hangnail could mean her instant death but her heart will go on blah blah blah.... yeah, young teen love is great, but let's get to more killing.

Anyway, this movie sparked Vampalooza and created so many vampiric spin offs that the market was quickly saturated with a fad that could not last. The first movie was uber-hyped and produced an overall 'meh from much of the world, yet we do want to see the next installment. However, this phenom has hit its apex and Vampire popularity is starting to dwindle. If Twilight wants its moon to stay new, it better launch before we're so tired of Vampires it's not tossed into the same "ho hum" heap that CW's Vampire Diaries was in before it even had a chance to be liked. Twilight, your 15 minutes aren't up, but you're rounding 10 minutes and to reset the clock you need to get going.

Racism is Alive and Well on CTA

Or Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right

I take the X80 Irving Park Bus twice a day five times a week. I also take the Blue Line between Irving Park and Harlem twice a day five times a week. I noticed something about a year ago and since then I've kind of kept a watch on it just out of curiosity and today's incident prompted me to write.

A little back story for the non-Chicagoans. CTA offers an "X" route or eXpress route on some of it's longer and more high traffic routes. Coming from Lakeview's Center of the CTA Bus Universe that is Irving Park Road and the lake, the 80 Irving Park Route is a popular option for getting from my area by the lake to the Blue Line and on to the airport.

The Irving Park 80 route will make approximately 20 stops between Broadway and the Blue Line. The X80 will make approximately 8. So you can see that the X80 is a commuter's best friend! I've been in Chicago long enough that when I first started commuting, there was no X80 as it started in 2004. For the first month or so drivers would stop for people who hadn't quite realized the difference between the 80 and the X80. Then after that they would motor right past them.

Flash forward to the past year. In the mornings I walk to the Broadway stop where there are at least two buses parked at any time. More often than not there is one 80 and one X80. You can easily guess which one I will get on.

Often times you'll see people still at a stop that is not serviced by the X80 and, as they should, the express bus goes right past them. Sometimes, on the rare occasion, the bus WILL stop. I notice these times and I also notice this:

The rider waiting to be picked up is black and the driver is black. OR the rider waiting to be picked up is Hispanic and the driver is Hispanic. I've never seen a driver stop at an undesignated stop for someone of a different racial group. While yes, it's a nice thing to do, two wrongs don't make a right. There are those screaming "Well it's what white people have done for ages!". To those I have two rebuttals; not THIS white person so get off the generalizations, and does that make it right to be done in retaliation?

There are so many things done these days in the name of this "retaliation" that it is clear to me that racism will NEVER fully die. Not as long as it is kept alive by the ones who say they're the victims of it. Once a black woman was making racial slurs toward a white guy. Someone called her a bigot. She said "I'm not a bigot, I'm not white".

I guess it's time for me to go out and persecute and throw rocks and slurs at the straight folks and beat them within an inch of their life so I can tie them to a barbed wire fence to die.

What, that would be wrong??

The Bad Side of Good News

Today it was announced that a major step forward in the prevention of HIV infection occurred. From MSNBC:

BANGKOK - For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible.

The World Health Organization and the U.N. agency UNAIDS said the results “instilled new hope” in the field of HIV vaccine research, although researchers say it likely is many years before a vaccine might be available.

Today on Facebook a friend posted to my home page the question "What are your thoughts?" along with the link to the MSNBC article above. My first thought was "GREAT!" Then, as you would suspect, the rest of my mind kicked in.

Yes, overall, I'm SUPER pleased! It's a very small step. It was only effective in 30% of the cases and it is really only effective on one of the strains in Thailand. BUT that's all more than we had last year.

What made me even consider a dark cloud about this was the line in the article that says it is likely to be "many years before a vaccine might be available".

There's a vaccine for swine flu coming out this fall
and that pig hit the fan last year!

Why am I bitching about that? Because if in the early 1980's HIV had been touted as the cataclysmic, earth shaking bug that Swine Flu is now, we could be enjoying the fruits of HIV research NOW... not YEARS from now. But because it was first called "Gay Cancer" then called "Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease" or GRID the general (i.e. religious republicans...) wouldn't touch it. Many were saying it was God's punishment on the Gays.


It was several years and hundreds (if not thousands) of AIDS related deaths after the discovery before our "beloved" president, who is SUPPOSED to represent EVERY American even said the words HIV and AIDS in public. Until then nothing was being done. People were dying and no one in the establishment gave a rat's ass because who's going to miss a few fags out in San Francisco?

A group called ACTUP decided they'd had enough of seeing their friends die; dropping like flies around them. My guess is that less than 10% of the people reading this post truly know what that is like. ACTUP did just that... They acted up! In the joking words of my faux family back in South Carolina they "Showed ass at....." and fill in the blank where applicable.


I don't want to turn this into a rant the length of the Bible, but if you heard me say anything even minutely negative about the great leap forward in AIDS research that we experienced this week, I wanted you to know why. This is a GREAT DAY!!!! I'm just disappointed it couldn't have been August 8, 2001.

So back to the sunshine that today is! It is a great leap forward and we're that much closer to finding a vaccine to prevent and then hopefully one to cure.

Creeping me since 1979

One of the benefits of being in a small town and being a latch key kid (and also being tall for my age since birth) was that occasionally I got to see movies I wouldn't normally be able to. Specifically horror movies.

Now before you start tsk tsking my mom and her parenting ability, there has actually been a very positive outcome from this. After growing up seeing blood, guts and gore in movies, I was essentially desensitized to gore by the time I started working in the Emergency Rooms of my health care career. Broken bones, blood, guts, brains shot out... nothing bothered me to the point of not being able to handle it. Don't get me wrong. I felt for the people, I felt bad and was impacted by these injuries, but the affect was that to this day I can NOT understand people who say (and do) "I faint at the sight of blood" wuss...

So while I join millions who still enter the planet's oceans fearing either sharks or cellos with their forever known duuuuuuh dum..... duuuuuuuh dum. dum dum dum dum dum dum..... ( it's the Jaws tune... work with me) There is another, much more seemingly benign fear that I have to this day as a 43 year old thanks to a horror movie, and that's the fear of 3:15am.

If you didn't see or read The Amityville Horror, you don't know. Part of the story was that the 'evil' of this house continually woke up George Lutz (played by James Brolin) at 3:15am and all sorts of evil would ensue.

There have been times in my life where I would wake up in the middle of the night and it would be 3:13am... and I'd lie there (under the covers) petrified until the clock read 3:16. I'd often give it until 3:20 because who knows, maybe evil missed the L and was running a little late. But still, from the time I saw this movie until last night when I woke up at 4:00am on the dot needing to go to the bathroom I still at the very least NOTICE the time in the middle of the night.

One of the last times my entire family was together before mom passed, I found out through telling the story that my brother MaleSib ALSO had this 315aphobia. My first reaction was I was glad I wasn't the only one. My second was a sense of relief that he never found out until I was an adult because he didn't need any more ammo to scare the bejeezus out of me as a kid! Being the web based tech geek that he is and loves, he was surfing about and found an online auction of pop culture items and sent me a link to a couple of them. The first was a computer panel from Star Trek: First Contact. The second was this:


It's not only A clock reading 3:15, it's THE clock from the movie.... SEE... if he had known I was afraid of 3:15 as a kid he'd have set his clock every night until I was in a padded room!

Luckily the bidding starts at several hundred dollars and a gag gift isn't worth all that. Although, perhaps if we got it we could have a sledge hammer party and bring closure as he said.

But then the hammers would start to bleed, the flies would come out in the winter and some pig's eyes would appear in the broken glass and turn away suddenly with a OINK!

Don't get those last references? Good, that means you'll be sleeping well tonight. Me, I'll be taking some Tylenol PM and not drinking water after 8pm.

OK, I'm back sooner than I thought...

But for good reason!

I'm starting up again to take part in the Susan G. Komen for the Cure 3Day walk in August.

My mom, who you all know if you've read my blog, passed away in 2005 and I really want to do the walk to honor her. So cough it up! (Lea, you're set) I'll be posting on my Walk For Patsy blog as I get ready and there will be a comedy benefit with me, my fellow blogger Stephen and another of our comedy friends and (hopefully) a surprise REAL get-paid-for-it comedian in Chicago in February so if you're local, get ready!

Meanwhile, get out the credit card and help out!
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Yes I'm shamelss... go give dangit!