Pig Penn – warped perspectives in the Penn State scandal

Very puzzling, but markedly less infuriating than the sexual abuse and cover-up scandal shrouding Penn State University, is the thoughtless, pigskin-headed response last night by student mobs to the sackings of the university president and, much more of an issue, the football coach. Now that’s an improvement! Watching a news conference held by the university’s [...]

Thank you “LPN to RN Bridge”

I know I’ve been on worse lists! Top 50 Blogs About HIV and AIDS

Writing about being written about

I was quick to post this link to Facebook yesterday from a website in Princeton which featured an interview-by-email with me on the subject of blogging about HIV/AIDS. Shruti Kalra, the writer of the piece, first contacted me early in the year, wondering a few things about me and this blog, and I wasn’t long agreeing [...]

Updated (with link to video): John Marks reminds me of my struggles with faith – and that we don’t have to be right

Here’s a recent video of author John Marks being interviewed on The Bully Pulpit. It’s a great way (if you’ll take the 45 minutes or so to watch) to get a sense of where he’s coming from in his book and why I was so fascinated by it. The Bully! Pulpit Show: John Marks from [...]

The richness of life with friends

It was, as I said on my facebook page, an amazing night of remembering, crying and healing at the 25th Annual Candlelight AIDS Vigil. A true sign of the richness of my life is that I didn’t get the chance to hug everybody that I knew there. Maybe it was the fact that it was [...]

The Ride Home

I may add more to this story as details come back to me. As I told a friend tonight, these rides home all seemed alike to me so it’s difficult to recall specific details of any one ride. It just boils down to a large chunk of bad memories during, as adults called them, “the [...]

Colours of Spring

“Still Here: A Post-Cocktail AIDS Anthology” released in Toronto

While I was in Montreal last week the anthology containing two of my stories was released in Toronto and can be purchased here.  

Craig’s death – one year later (updated May 15, 2008)

Friday It was one year ago today (May 9), while my sister Lynn and Craig’s partner Claude slipped out for a bite of lunch, that Craig took his leave from us in his Montreal hospital room. This has been an amazing week for Mom, Claude and me as the inaugural presentation of the Chaplin Memorial [...]

Shaking my fist at diabetes

The point was driven home today that diabetes is a bigger threat to me right now than nineteen years of HIV/AIDS. I’ve heard it before and frankly, despite taking blood glucose-lowering medications, I just haven’t managed to get the crucial numbers under control.  Things went off the rails this time last year, with Craig’s accident [...]

An annoying dog, yes, but surely the most patient of cats

Friends indeed! (from the cuteness files) Site Meter

This is hypomania at the very least

Pardon me if I piss and moan… It seems to have started with a headache, a mild migraine I think, which – although not as painful as some I’ve experienced – my vision was quite bad for a couple of days. Pardon the sentence construction. No, back up. It started when, seemingly out of the blue, I [...]

Feeling well

I’ll be seeing my HIV specialist at the middle of next week and, regardless of what may be reported from my latest lab work, I am feeling better than I have for a long time. I fully expect that my viral load will have grown some more, perhaps my CD-4 will have dropped some, and [...]

I b’n memed

I don’t encourage my being memed (it seems like a modern-day chain letter and is, at the very least, work!) but, when a friend reaches out to me from the heat of California on a day like today, I kind of melt! Now Mame (as in “She’ll coax the blues right out of your heart!“) [...]

The view from my balcony

A close-up of neighbourhood rooftops during today’s storm