A Little Food for Thought

Well, that was interesting. I sat down here to make my Friday night entry, got two paragraphs written and all the power in the neighborhood went out. I guess I wasn't supposed to publish what I was going to. That's OK, I begin again.

I went to the Columbus Health Department on Wednesday. It's been five years or so since I've had the whole battery of STD tests. Needless to say, it took a little while. Let's just say I'll be fine. I'm no news anchor getting tested for HIV on national television, but the message is just the same. Know your status. I know I'm HIV-, but you never know until the results come back. Do it for yourself.

Dana and I had this discussion once and it came up again tonight with someone else. I thought I would share because, well, I can. Once upon a time, I was in a situation. There was a guy who had a boyfriend, but he would stop at my house on the way home from work. Because this is a family show, you can imagine the rest. Dana suggested that I may have very little self-respect, because who wants to be in a situation where you're the guy on the side? My response to her was that self-respect is by the very description, self-defined, right? While you may think that being the person on the side may belittle you, I may not. I was just talking to someone tonight who is very young. Eighteen to be exact. Let's call him Justin because that's his name. He asked me how many people I had been with. When I gave him the honest answer, he said "Have some respect for your body." My question remains, how does he know I don't respect my body? Does the sheer number of people one has been with determine whether or not he respects himself? I say, Nay! And how can someone else determine whether you respect your own body? Certainly, self-destructive behaviors can be evident, but that's different than self-respect.

As a follow up to last week, Dustin and I are cool. We talked and everything seems to be OK. I was supposed to go to Illinois to meet Chris for his birthday this weekend, but yet again, that has been postponed. (The meeting, not his birthday.) When I do finally meet him, it will be after more than a year of talking, planning, hoping, disappointment, and antici-Pa-tion. (I really hope someone gets that reference.)

Instead, it will be another weekend of overtime for me along with work on Monday. A lot of people I know have to work on Monday, myself included. That begs the question-Has Martin Luther King Day run its course? Hmm. Maybe I can talk about that next week. Or next year.