strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Feb 17 06: typical frantic running-around
Off to Boskone for the weekend. Most exciting. Have I packed what I need? Have I packed things that I will look at in six hours and say, “What the hell was I thinking here?” No idea. I am leaving a sinkful of dishes at home, because I am a bad husband. And there’s no time to swing by my office and grab my palm pilot off my desk on the way, but that’s probably less fatal than it seems right this instant.
Why the hell am I sitting here typing? I have a train to catch…
Feb 15 06: on threats to western civilization
Today has been tough going. I only just managed to get my fists unclenched; prior to that it was hard to hold a pen to mark up the current pile of (execrable) math manuscript. Why? Because the first thing I heard this morning was the voice of NPR’s Barbara Bradley Haggerty, delivering the early moments of her piece on how queers get to be scapegoats and smokescreens for yet another election cycle. Is your economy doing poorly? Has your party put its decision-making in the hands of clueless cronies, shiftless liars, and shameless con-men? Has your international policy pissed away the goodwill of the world and turned it into censure, resentment, and outright despisal? No problem. You can still get your base to vote your guys back into office if you tell them that their homes/schools/churches will be burned down by the queers otherwise.
Take the state of Virginia, for instance. State law already prohibits gay marriage, domestic partnerships, or any private arrangements that would approximate same. But just to be safe, people like Victoria Cobb, head of the Family Foundation of Virginia, are looking to rewrite the state constitution. As Haggerty said:
For Cobb, who is expecting her first child in July, protecting traditional marriage has gained some urgency. It is, she says, about protecting children.
That was the point where I slapped the radio into silence.
Ms. Cobb, I have a question, one I wish that Ms. Haggerty had thought to ask you. What if that child you’re carrying is a lesbian?
How will you have protected her then?
Feb 6 06: is there a doctor in the house?
As I attempt to retrofit something approximating, oh, a plot to a story I’m working on, I find I have some questions that need answering. I have a few avenues of investigation to check, but I thought that maybe the magic of the internet hive-mind might prove useful here as well. Thus:
- Assume an HIV-positive patient, male, mid-forties, and in good apparent health due to prolonged use of a drug-therapy ‘cocktail’ regimen. As sometimes happens, the cocktail stops working for this patient. How quickly might the patient go from ‘I feel fine’ to ‘I have a potentially life-threatening secondary infection’?
- Assume an HIV-positive male, mid-forties. Due to the failure of a therapeutic drug regimen, and a failure to begin a course of treatment, this patient has become ill with a potentially life-threatening secondary infection. Assume, now, that the HIV infection is eliminated—that the virus is completely removed from the body. How quickly would the patient’s immune system, in the absence of the virus, be able to create something like a standard complement of immune cells, and from there fight off the infection?
Can anybody shed any light here? Or recommend me to somebody who might? I’d be ever so grateful.
Feb 2 06: pins and needles
Well, tonight was my first time on the dissecting tray with the writers’ group. The experience never loses its luster, I tell you. All those things that your beta readers didn’t mention, which as a result you thought weren’t really the big deals you thought they could potentially be but were instead the rantings of your own antimuse?
Right.
Hokay, back to the drawing board, and to bed. Probably not even in that order.