Strange Week

I am officially completely stressed out about finding a job. I basically have the month of May to get back to work or I am totally screwed. I am going to rewrite my cover letters for bartending and management, check over my resume to see where I could make some changes, and make up a brand new completely different resume that makes it look like my bartending experience is more recent. In short, I plan to lie. Whatever, I need to keep a roof over my head.

And my lack of job stress is spilling over into everything else I do. Everyone is frustrating or aggravating the hell out of me right now. If I get behind someone slow or stupid at the drugstore or grocery it's all I can do not to bash their skull in with a can of beans.

I've been dropping in to an HIV+ men's discussion group the last couple of weeks, and I met a guy last week who looked to be about 45 (or more) and he had just tested positive within the last week. By the by, he's also the second person I've met in as many weeks who swears that he became positive with no higher-risk (meaning buttfucking) behavior going on. Meaning both of them swear they got HIV from sucking dick. I have no reason to disbelieve either of them. I also have no evidence that either one of them didn't suck off and swallow some walking bug factory with a big fat active viral load, so there's that as well.

Still, it was fascinating to meet an older, seemingly edumacated white guy, having to navigate the highways, byways and seemingly endless blood tests as well as the flood of questions without easy answers that come with an HIV diagnosis. He really seemed to be at a loss as to what any of it meant, and he was still very much experiencing a mild form of shock. I tried to pass along some of the extremely helpful advice that my friend Anthony (Neo) gave to me. I hope I made him feel a little better.

Turns out the hard drive on my desktop was not the cause of my computer problems after all. By the next day it wouldn't boot up reliably with the new drive either. So now I'm thinking it's the power supply. It's definitely not the fans. I've ordered a power supply from EBay, (open box) and 1/4 of the price at Not Your Best Buy. If it turns out that it's not the problem then I'm pretty sure it's the motherboard and in that case, I will be sans desktop until I'm gainfully employed again. Whenever the fuck that might be.

I spent a couple of these unseasonably warm and sunny afternoons this weekend lounging by the fountain in The All-White Park. For the record: still shockingly White's Only. During the first afternoon there I took my beach chair with me. That is, after I dug it out from behind the couch and removed a winter's worth of dust and dog hair.

When I returned home unevenly tan, I left the chair out in the hall, where it remained overnight. By the end of the second day, the chair had been pilfered. I was considering leaving a note taped to the wall, as I was sure being five flights up that it was more than likely an inside job. I was also willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt and generously assume maybe it was mistaken for trash and up for grabs. I thought a note might get someone feeling guilty enough to anonymously return it.

So you can imagine my surprise when the next morning, without benefit of any note- induced guilt, the perpetrator returned my chair.

Now I'm leaning toward drunken prankster, or someone that was originally raised on a commune. Either way, I have my beach chair back, and I didn't have to bash in anyone's skull with a can of beans.

Just Because

Click on it to embiggen to full lusciousness.

Amen To That

Sunday's almost too hot weather didn't deter me from my plan to finally make it to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. (I know! I left Manhattan!) This after living here for over 20 years. I actually lived near Grand Army Plaza, just a couple of blocks from both the gardens and the Brooklyn Museum for a year or so after I first moved here, but I never found the time to not drink and go.

I took some a-maz-ing photos. So many it will take a day or so to edit and start posting them.

After returning to Manhattan I found enough energy to drop in for a light workout, then home to eat a burrito and walk Riley.

I also installed a new hard drive in my desktop, and it's working fine. Unfortunately, most of my software is bootlegged and the only operating system I can get to install so far is a dusty old copy of Windows 2000. I'll be spending the next couple of days trying to decide if I should break down and pay for an OS or just install the latest RC of Windows 7 and be done with it.

The Denver Principles Project

Welcome to the
Denver Principles Project!

In 1983, a group of people living with AIDS got together in Denver and wrote a manifesto of self empowerment—known as the Denver Principles—for those living with HIV. The Denver Principles demanded that the voices of people living with HIV be heard. It asserted the right of people living with HIV to participate in the decision-making processes—at all levels—that would fundamentally affect their lives. The same people who wrote the Denver Principles then founded the National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA).

Though we've made significant headway in the fight against AIDS, we still have a long way to go before HIV is eradicated. Many people still don't know that they are HIV-positive; many can't afford or access treatment and many don't seek the emotional support, medical care and treatment they deserve for fear of being stigmatized or criminalized for being HIV-positive.

That is why NAPWA and POZ are announcing a bold new initiative called The Denver Principles Project. The Denver Principles Project asks the HIV community to recommit itself to the Denver Principles and dramatically increase NAPWA's membership. With a vastly increased membership, the community and NAPWA will be better able to advocate for effective HIV prevention and care as well as to combat the stigma that surrounds HIV and impedes education, prevention and treatment of HIV.

This is a new era in America, one of great hope. It is vital that the voices and concerns of people living with HIV are heard in Washington, D.C. during these critical first few months of the new administration. The Denver Principles was a historic milestone for the AIDS movement; by joining us today, you will become part of a similarly powerful step forward in the history of the HIV community's fight to stop AIDS.

Justin Timberlake Would Rather Not Have His Ass Eaten

The still dreamy JT appears on Jimmy Kimmel and talks about his new game show and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. The boner-inducing ass-munching discussion occurs around the 4:30 mark.

What. The. Fuck?

Check out this ad for a restaurant GM and explain to me again why I can't get hired. These are the people placing and writing ads and doing interviews.

GENERAL MANAGER FOR SUCCESSFUL RESTAURANT GROUP (Greenwich Village)

Reply to: job-mztcf-1136300068@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Date: 2009-04-23, 11:53AM EDT


****RESUMES MUST BE PLACED IN BODY OF EMAIL; ATTACHED RESUMES WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED****

RESTAURANT GROUP SEEKING GM WITH MANAGERIAL EXPERIENCE AND REFERENCES.


Compensation: COMMISERATE TO EXPERIENCE
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
PostingID: 1136300068

Also (and unrelated)-- I cleaned out and prepared to throw out a filing cabinet I had in my bedroom. I have a lot of condoms and lube. Which would be unremarkable but I haven't had sex with anyone in almost two years. Yet I have baskets and drawers full of supplies as if I was having, or used to have, or was planning on having lots and lots of sex. None of those tenses are true, so why am I loaded up on rubbers and KY?

Hot Stuff - Currently On American Idol

I'm a good gay and I loves me some Glambert, but if you watch the first minute of Miss Iraheta's performance this week and don't come away knowing that this chick is a star, well, there's something seriously wrong with your Gaydar. From the opening pose (IN RED!) reclining on the lit staircase, to the first throaty notes to her first big belt, I just want to wrap her up in a big gay bubble and carry her all the way to the finals. If the judges and the rest of America are paying attention, she'll get there along with the dreamy and cute as a button Kris Allen, and the shoo-in that is Glambert. Personally, I'll be happy if any one of them wins it all.

Want more American Idol videos? Click here.

Commuter Dogs

UK tabloid The Sun ran an article about suburban-based Moscow dogs that have learned to board the subway to urban areas, where scavenging for food is easier and more rewarding:

"Dr. Poiarkov told how the dogs like to play during their daily commute. He said: They jump on the train seconds before the doors shut, risking their tails getting jammed. They do it for fun. And sometimes they fall asleep and get off at the wrong stop.

The dogs have learned to use traffic lights to cross the road safely, said Dr. Poiarkov. And they use cunning tactics to obtain tasty morsels of shawarma, a kebab-like snack popular in Moscow.

They sneak up behind people eating shawarmas — then bark loudly to shock them into dropping their food.

With children the dogs play cute by putting their heads on youngsters’ knees and staring pleadingly into their eyes to win sympathy — and scraps."

At the end of an exhausting day scamming food from city folks, these resourceful mutts get back on the trains and head home to the quieter suburbs. Although I doubt they get drunk and verbally abuse their children.

Not So Lazy Sunday

Woke up today feeling like my right eye wouldn't open completely and with good reason, it was filled with fluid and almost swollen shut. As I looked in the mirror this morning I had a golf ball sized welt right in the middle of my forehead, where I had obviously been bitten by something while I slept. Longtime readers will remember I'm highly allergic to mosquito and spider bites, and between my face and neck, and the two on my arm, we can officially declare bug bite season open. And poor Riley got in a fight a couple of days ago, and has a couple of pretty impressive (but not serious) scratches on his head and cheek. So on the morning walk today we looked like Cracky McCrackhead and his faithful companion.

Turns out I like my desktop PC way more than I thought, and more than I like my laptop. Don't get me wrong, my laptop is fine. It just doesn't have the oomph that sitting at my desktop, furiously posting a semi-crazy rant by e-mail that a desktop provides. There's more gravitas in being a crank from a desktop. The laptop is for browsing want ads in a Dunkin' Donuts and forwarding funny dog pictures to relatives. And porn.

So today even before I found out that Best Buy had hard drives on sale I had already decided to go ahead and charge a new one. It will be months before I can afford a whole new PC, so $60 on a hard drive will keep me going until then. Money (credit) well spent I reckon. Truth be told I also would like to double the memory and I need to replace a faulty DVD drive, but none of that is crucial.

After Best Buy the Homo Depot was on the way back and I wandered around like a high-waisted retiree until I happened upon the Garden Center. They had tons and tons of spring flowers and plants in as well as bulbs and seeds for those that like to grow from scratch. I have been trying to find a place that sells potted tomato plants that you can grow on your patio, and they had scads of them, just in and on sale. I have no idea if I can get a tomato plant to grow on my kitchen windowsill. It seems like it gets enough sunlight all afternoon, but I do know I've been wanting to try. I only bought a single plant, so if it dies the experiment is over.

From there I stopped in to the gym to bang out 1/2 hour of cardio, and that is officially 1/2 hour more exercise than I've managed in about 3 weeks. And from there I ambled down to the East Village for a Gay-A meeting. After which I headed home to walk Riley.

It was on the walk I happened on a treasure trove of discarded furniture. It was an embarrassment of riches really, including a black nightstand/sidetable, a wicker shelving unit, another wooden unit, and a chest of drawers. Since I loathe wicker in all it's forms, I ended up garbage picking the chest of drawers. I had intended to give it to my roommate, who's been in need of some storage in his room, but the chest of drawers was in such good shape I decided (since I lugged the thing half a block and then up five flights of stairs) to keep it for myself. I'll give him the small storage cabinet I've been using.

Finished the day with a dinner of leftover pork chops and fresh Mac N Cheese (with broccoli for health!). My face is no longer swollen. Thank god for gravity.

Daffodil Prison

A Slow And Painful Death

My beloved warhorse of a desktop PC is gasping it's last. The hard drive had begun to fail a few months ago. The machine would shut itself off overnight, and in the morning, it would boot up again s-l-o-w-l-y. I think I extended the life by cleaning out old files, deleting unused programs and trying to keep it lean and mean for as long as possible, but it appears that death has (or will) overtaken it anyway. Fortunately, I sensed the end was coming and managed to copy all of my photography files about a week ago. I will loose some music, but nothing I really care about. Same goes for my beloved porn. I offloaded (load, heh) some of it a while back, and the rest is ... well, porn. Replaceable by more porn.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way I can afford to replace my desktop for now. I technically could charge something on my Best Buy card, but I finally just got the damn thing below $1000 and the payments are a manageable $30 a month and I am loathe to charge it back up. Fortunately, my laptop is running A-OK. If I was off the internets completely and without E-Mail I would be sprinting across 23rd St. to get a new machine.

Meanwhile, Back In My Bloodstream

I had my quarterly blood work done and the results are ...

ridiculously healthy.

My cholesterol numbers are back down in the normal range (thanks Lipitor!), and I am told that I am now "below average risk" for a cardiac event in the next ten years. My anemia has cleared up thanks to the iron supplements and (I assume) the other mega-doses of vitamins I pump down my gullet every day. Liver and kidneys are both doing whatever they do just fine.

I was considering changing my HIV meds as I was worried about the possible triglyceride and other heart-related side effects but it seems things are under control. And besides, since my viral load remained undetectable and my T-Cell count is currently a staggering 1211 (I know, now I'm just making a T-Cell pig of myself) I have decided not to fuck with a good thing.

I don't have too much else that's great happening so I'll take the win and shut up.

More Easter Parade (Final Edition)

Of note: There is an actual human being inside that bunny "sculpture".

Easter Parade 2009 - Fabulous Hats Edition

Also, check out the fabuloso purse she was carrying to match the hat:

Easter Parade NYC (Pt. 2)

Easter Parade, NYC (2009)

Tons of great pictures from 5th Avenue. I finally had to leave when my camera battery died. I was running out of energy as well. Will post more as I get a chance to edit and pick.

Got Some Tail

Not really. But I am heading out in a little while to photograph the "other gay parade". Of course I'm talking about the Easter Parade on 5th Avenue. The sun is shining, although it's a little cold, I expect it to warm up some and provide a beautiful backdrop for some amazingly colorful pictures. More later.

Thank You For Being A Friend

Friend bites man's penis off after argument.

Horrified Marian Milczarek, 53, from Lesna in south west Poland, was attacked following a row with his friend - apparently over borrowing a trailer.

'He began hitting me with a chain and then pulled down my trousers and started biting. It was agony,' he said.

Police and medics could find no trace of Marian's missing genitalia, and believe his attacker Wojciech Sowinski - now facing 10 years in jail - may have eaten it.

I'm not sure if "friend" is the correct way to characterize this relationship.

Riley Has Been Terminated!

You can Terminate yourself (or your dog) right here.

In Case You Missed It Too

The show ran long so my DVR clicked off without recording Glambert's American Idol performance. So of course, he gets himself a standing ovulation from Cowell. I managed to snag the video though and you have to admit, she's an artsy one. Gay, you know. (Fuck you, Bill O'Reilly.)

Also finally getting a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T is young Allison Iraheta, all of 16 years old with a voice and a half coming out of that tiny body. Even if you didn't notice how remarkably poised she is for her age, I'm here to tell you that week in and week out, she is the only singer besides the riveting Glambert that I don't give the Fast Forward heave-ho to. Usually, once I get a sense of whether or not the performance is any good I zip along to the judges, hopefully judiciously avoiding the increasingly stupid "Yo, Check It Dawg" bullshit that passes for English from Randy (thank you for America's Best Dance Crew) Jackson. I get my slurry, drunken, pilled-up Paula Abdul fix and then move on. After it's all over I sometimes will go back and watch an individual performance. Tellingly, I have never been able to get through a single performance from Danny Deadwife.

In any case, the point of this is to acknowledge that yes, Glambert is far and away the best, smartest, most developed, artistically gifted performer of this or arguably any other Idol season, but if you were being technical and thinking of the show as finding and discovering an emerging hidden talent, in my opinion young Ms. Iraheta has all the makings of a serious recording star. It's a shame that the judges spent the last few weeks blindly crawling so far up the (barely) moderately talented Lil Rounds' ass that they missed seeing how good Allison really is. She's going to have a big career.

Gay Men Are Picky

Dr. Abbie Goldberg from Clark University in Massachusetts recently conducted a study of gender preferences in adoption cases and whether or not there were any differences based on the adoptive parents' sexuality.

Here are the results, culled from an article on Gay News Blog:

She explored adoptive parents' child gender preferences in a geographically diverse American sample of 93 heterosexual, 61 lesbian and 48 gay male couples waiting to adopt their first child. The participants were recruited through adoption agencies in the US as well as national gay and lesbian organizations. They were interviewed between 2005 and 2008.

Among those who expressed a preference, gay men were the most likely to have a preference and heterosexual men were the least likely. Couples in heterosexual relationships were less likely to prefer boys than couples in same-gender relationships.

What's more, couples in heterosexual relationships are more likely to prefer girls than people in same-gender relationships.

The most common reason for preferring boys among heterosexual women was an inexplicable desire for a son, whereas heterosexual men's preference for a son reflected patriarchal norms, including keeping the family name going and gender identity considerations i.e. their own masculine interests. When explaining their preference for a boy, lesbians most frequently mentioned their own atypical gender identities, including the fact that their own interests tended to be more masculine and tomboyish, whereas gay men most often highlighted that they felt more confident about their ability to raise and socialize boys.

Sunday In The Park With Bentley

Mr. Bentley found an empty Gatorade bottle that he carried around with him the rest of the morning. I'm told he will not be giving it up to his owner until they are safely back in their own apartment, at which point he won't be the least bit interested in it anymore. Sorry the photo is a little blurry, it's from my cell.

On the Mend

Yesterday was decidedly low energy although I did manage to get Riley walked and took him to a dog run in the evening. Only I just sat on a bench and let him amuse himself. I also made a Gay-A meeting but that doesn't take up more energy than sitting on an uncomfortable chair for an hour. I was queasy all day off an on, but by the afternoon I could get out of the bathroom for more than an hour at a time so things are looking up! Today I woke up after 8 hours of glorious uninterrupted sleep and since it was raining out I rolled over for another hour to doze. Now I'm absolutely ravenous and I will be walking the pup, and then loading up the fridge with some groceries after a nice big breakfast.

I thought I would post some pictures of the plants I'm growing in the windows here in my Castle High Atop Second Avenue. Only because at some point, many of them will mysteriously start to die off. I try to buy the right plants for the right light and heat conditions in the apartment, but eventually, one or two here or there starts to wither and fail.

Here are the plants in my kitchen window. It has a commanding view of the alley between buildings but the building next door is low enough that we get hours of morning sun through it.



And here are the gang green right next to my bed by the window on to Second Avenue. I know the one on the left looks kind of spindly but that because Riley partially ate it. He has since given it a reprieve and down at the soil level there's a big mass of growth bursting back up.



How'd that get in there? Here's the plant destroyer himself. He's holding the remnants of a stuffed lion I gave him a few months ago. There is no stuffing left and his head is missing as is one leg but as you can see, he still manages to find something enjoyable about it.



That's all for today. Need some food in my belly.

Caught A Bug

Got a really bad stomach ache and cramps last night, at first I thought maybe I had witnessed a particularly heinous American Idol performance, but after confirming that the tattooed blond chick was only headache and not nausea inducing, I realized I might be coming down with something. Much queasiness developed as did the chills. As the cramping got worse I took to bed, only to have Riley pester me letting me know he was ready to go out. Repeated face-licking was pushed aside until I managed to rally enough to get him downstairs. It was quick, and then the trip back up 5 flights almost made me faint. After several trips to the toilet *ahem* (Hey! Two poop posts back to back), I finally put an episode of Intervention on the PC and and curled up under the covers. I dozed fitfully, trying to find a comfortable, non-crampy position.

Around 5am I took another trip to the toilet and had just returned to bed when my stomach finally gave up the ghost and let me know I was T-Minus 5 seconds to purge. I flew out of bed and assumed the position. Riley stood right behind me and I swear he offered to hold back my hair. After, I was spent but felt worlds better. Dozed off and on the rest of the morning, multiple trips to the bathroom notwithstanding, and finally passed out for good this morning around 9:30. I only got up around 12:30 because Riley needed a walk and I felt well enough to run down to the drugstore for some Pepto.

So far today I've only had peppermint tea and have felt alternately sleepy and a bit queasy all day. But I am hungry, so I guess I'm on the mend.

One of my roommates moved out today, and she will be replaced next week by a 19 year old ballet dancer, in town for rehearsals for a month. The search is on for a more permanent-(ish) roommate to take the space in May. I believe I've figured out how to keep myself financially afloat for another couple of months, but if I don't get work by then, I'll have bigger problems then a night on the toilet to contend with.