Down

There’s been a lot going on in my head of late. The SAD has hit me harder than it has in years, and I’d tried to take the advice of someone else (for once) and keep myself busy this year. Well, that’s been a fuck-up of epic proportions. I’d thought it might be better to be busy, to be out and about rather than inside and in the throes of an SAD blot. How wrong could I be?

The thing is, I’m now in a position where I don’t really know how to break the circle. Not exactly a situation I’m used to, and definitely not one I’m comfortable with. I wish I were – it would make life a shitload easier than it currently is. Instead, my brain keeps racing at 200mph round a figure-of-eight racetrack, never quite coming off the track, but coming close.

One thing that’s not helping is the onset of the true Festering Season™. I’ve got friends staying here for it – and in all honesty that’s a first. I’ve absolutely no clue even where to start when it comes to the general Christmas Day thing, because it’s not something I bother with. I’m still not going to go over the top – but these are friends whose opinions I care about, so yes, the entire concept is preying on my mind. And yes, I feel like a twat for letting it get to me – but it is, so there’s not much I can do.

This Too Will Pass

Do you ever have days where there’s just nothing working right, and even if it were working, you still wouldn’t have the words to describe it?

Today is one of those days for me. I can’t think what to write, nor even how to string words together in an interesting way. So we’ll call this a one-day hiatus, a brief interlude, and keep quiet about it ’til tomorrow. At which point I’ll have hopefully managed to get some sleep, and not feel like utter, utter shit.

Calling a Spade a Manual Digging Implement

According to the BBC, Donald Rumsfeld has been given an award for speaking complete bollocks. I love the Plain English Campaign‘s annual awards – there’s normally something funny within them – particularly for the “Foot in Mouth” award (which is the one Rumsfeld received) for people who make absolutely no sense. The “Golden Bull” ones are quite stunning too.

A World Aids Day Christmas Carol

Today, it just seems somehow apt to bring you this utterly utterly non-work-safe link – I don’t know if it has sound (my work computer doesn’t have sound, so I’ve no idea ’til I get home) so be careful. via Green Fairy…

The 12 STDs of Christmas.

A Moral reminder for the Festering Season.

Current thoughts

Looking at the article in the Guardian, I have to say that I don’t find it surprising to know that hetersexual HIV infections now outnumber homosexual ones. What happened to the HIV/AIDS adverts of the 80s and 90s? They’ve all disappeared, sucked up into the air of apathy and “it won’t happen to me” that seems to abound.

When HIV first came out as “the new threat”, condom adverts and so on were everywhere. Everyone knew that condoms meant safety from HIV, as well as a range of other transmitted diseases. Now, if you ask teenagers – or even a whole load of adults – they don’t know, or more damningly, they don’t bother. Yes, we need a better programme of sex education – not just for schoolchildren, but for everyone.

The British HIV Association aims to improve education and knowledge about HIV – as does the National Aids Trust. But what the entire AIDS industry (if you’ll pardon the expression – I simply can’t think of a better word for it) needs is a vociferous spokesperson, a media-savvy entity that can push for the education, the advertising, the knowledge.

In March of this year, NAT started the “Are you HIV prejudiced?” campaign. Had you even heard of it? Have you seen anything about it, anywhere? Me either.

There are enough HIV information sites out there – now we just need to find a way to make them more visible, to put the knowledge out and force an apathetic and complacent public to take note.

It’s not just me

I’ve just had to laugh at the story from today’s Manchester Evening News about the christmas obsessive who’s had her Santa Claus kidnapped. People after my own heart.

Personally, I don’t have a particular problem with people who insist on doing up their houses in all forms of cheap nasty tacky decorations for the Festering Season. Well OK, I might take the piss, and despair a bit – but at the end of the day, it’s their property, they can do with it what they want.

However, when people put their external christmas decorations up on Bonfire Night, (5th November, for non-UK readers) that’s taking the piss. I can’t blame people for taking Santa hostage in order to make sure that (as detailed in the story) she turns off all the external lights etc. at midnight, rather than leaving them on all night. Seems reasonable to me…

World AIDS Day

Well, December 1 rolls round again. World Aids Day – and still there’s so far to go. A new policy has been announced to ensure another 3 million people get treatment for AIDS by the end of 2005 More information about it is available at the UNAids site. But at the end of the day, that isn’t likely to even cover the number of new infections over the next two years. Currently, there are about 42 million people in the world who are HIV positive – and the number is growing, regardless of initiatives, plans, policies, and charities.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has a whole repository of information about HIV on a global scale. Even Weasel-Boy Blair has thrown in his ten penceworth of soundbite bullshit today. Not that he appears to give a stuff about HIV and AIDS at any other time of the year.

And that – as with many other special “days” – is the crux of the problem. HIV isn’t just something tobe talked about and thought about on one day a year. For 42 million people it’s there day in, day out – a constant reminder of mortality. For millions more it’s a reality, a life measured in six-month segments as they get regular tests, waiting for their own red-blood-cell lottery to come up, hoping it’ll beat the odds, expecting that one day it won’t. HIV is here to stay, and in common with every other virus in the world, we’ve no idea how to even begin curing it.