Sunday morning

It's exactly a week since I left NL. It always feels so long, when I am home, & the NL fades into a memory. My apartment... making love till the last minute with P. Eating out. The gym (how could I get so flabby so quickly...?). The hospital where I seem to go every other week. Work - a sensitive issue. Work isn't on my mind.

Other things are - it's great. I am working on a huge post for this blog comprised of my correspondence following the 1st month of diagnosis with a man I met on poz.com dating sites. I think I didn't have my profile up for an hour, and he has already written me. We became great penpals. He supported me so much... and vice versa. Nothing would have come out of it romantically, although we teased and flirted occasionally, but more to make ourselves feel good and get ourselves back on track (well, me, but he had in hangups; I won't expose him in any way in this blog though, so they will remain private). He made me feel like a human. Made me laugh at the whole thing even when I was so wired, so distraught, so overwhelmed I could barely even calm down enough to cry. Just reading through the bulk of emails from Jan-Feb 2006 makes me realize how much I have been through this year. It was really the icing on the cake. All the past years have been so turbulent, but so much of that was my own doing.

I watched a documentary late last night titled Willing and Able, it was about severely handicapped people and how they try to pursue sex and relationships, and how some of them succeed. It changed my whole outlook. Some of these people, I admit that when I see someone like that on the street I just look away... yet they are looking for love and sex, and some of them made it. And others make do with what they can get, whether prostitutes (for the first time I find myself justifying it - usually I just focus on the poor people being manhandled into it, forced sex slaves, or people that delude themselves that this is what they want, because they have been conditioned through abuse or whatever - but this isn't the first time that I suddenly wake up and see that every coin has 2 sides), or sex toys (again, all these seemingly ridiculous pumps and "suckers" and silicon "lifelike" dolls that I get advertized in my mailbox suddenly seem awfully important and necessary from this perspective, considering some of these people can't even use their hands to masturbate). This documentary put a whole new spin on my disability as a poz. Gosh, there was a woman there who looked - that's very un-PC but I will go ahead with my impression - just awful, when I saw her I thought of the talking garbage heap from Fragile Rock. But after a while when she was interviewed, you forgot that. Completely forgot how her mouth was deformed and how her body was slumped. And that woman even had breast cancer and one of her breasts hacked off - the most awful thing was, the way she looked it hardly made any difference. Yet that woman had so much confidence and positivity, and she had numerous partners, and she (the documentary revealed that cleverly, as with other people, in on-obvious ways, so that when you "met" someone you didn't know whether they were "getting any" or not, and what exactly they were "getting") had a lifelong partner and 2 biological (healthy) children. Bloody awsome. Admittedly her man wasn't my type... niether was she (think shaved head, dark Gothic lipstic, ripped activist clothes with anarchy symbols etched on them, tattoes - hate my own which is so stupid). But there were some disabled women in that show (as in sitting in wheelchair disabled) with guys I wouldn't have minded dating. Ahh who am I kidding, remember E the poz guy? I always used to call him "fat bastard" in my heart of hearts (he wasn't fatter than you average slumpy Joe). But with E, it was his attitude that I resented, sitting at home, feeling sorry for himself, not coming out neither as bi nor as poz to anyone, having sex with women and not revealing his status. He was such a whinger. Now of course, who the F am I to judge?! But I did pass judgement on poor E. But E could have looked like that Fragile Rock woman, and I would have still associated with him, because she was cool and confident, and her tough attitude shown right out (she kind of spat it out actually). I mean, I had sex with E, I enjoyed sex with E (he was a very competent lover), but I was embarassed to be seen anywhere with him, deeply embarassed. When I got my new place is when I broke it off with him - I knew we'd never be a couple, but I realized that I don't want my new neighbours (who couldn't care less what I do, and whose face I see less that once in a full moon anyway) to see him come into my apartment. I am still wondering why I despised E so much. I don't think poz men are worth anything less than neg men, I am sure of that, but he was such a whinger... his counts were awsome, but he just lay on the couch feeling sorry for himself. But why do I say that, when he lays on the couch less than me and P, and takes care of his impressive house, and jobhunts, and fulfills all his obligations, and was always there for me, and totally reliable (much more than P; E would never disappear without an email for days).

I think it is because he never, ever, ever, made me laugh, which is something I have even with my online poz buddies, or at least some kind of underlining humour.

Who the F am I to be critical of anybody, expecially a model citizen like E? That question - why I absolutely loathed him, and couldn't therefore stand even meeting him casually - although I never let on, and I was sleeping with him, and he thinks it's because I discovered he was secretely bi and because I was mad that he had once lied to a female internet sexual encounter about his poz status, but that has nothing to do with it - that question when answered will tell me a lot about myself. He epitomizes everything I was (and am) afraif of becoming and feeling. A big, fat (though he could've been way fatter, obese even, and still cool) wuss.

When I woke up this morning, wanting to write, the last thing I thought I'd write about was E. I was thinking about that inspiring, moving documentary. I was thinking about continuing to edit my emails out of hints for Ds identity. But there you go, you never know what's under the surface once you start scratching it in front of the little box....