Fahreheit 451 (Judith Levine)

A huge number of people have put an almost unfathomable amount of effort into trying to prevent you from being able to read this book. I suggest that this should get your attention, and that at the very least, you can certainly spare a few minutes to read the interview with the author.

An excellent excerpt:

"Sex has changed because of AIDS. But the question is: What are we going to do about that? A good example is to look at the gay, middle-class urban communities during the height of the AIDS epidemic during the '80s. Their strategy was to use a sexually open culture, a culture of enormous sexual creativity, and lots of public discussion about sex (and even public sex!) [to combat AIDS].

A sexually open community was able, through that very openness, to stem the tide of the infection. Now when we see who is getting HIV, it's people who live in communities that are often repressive about sex, certainly repressive about homosexuality, where people are outside of the institutions where they might be able to get good sexual information."

Thanks to pomobarney for the link.

Job Searches, Home Searches, and the Tragic Deaths of Computer Mice

My computer mouse died today, quite suddenly and quite young. I'm very sad. We had an extremely close relationship throughout the six months that we knew each other; I held hands with it for hours every single day.

However, I had a spare on hand and quickly replaced it.

Joxn made a queer by choice post. That made me happy.

Nothing much else is happening lately.

I've decided to limit my job search exclusively to the area of New York, in the hopes that even if I don't get hired by really cool people like Routledge I can at least hang around the area and reapply to work for them without having to move again. I really hate moving. I've only actually moved once in my life, but I really don't want to do it ever again. Since I'm in an apartment in the middle of nowhere I obviously have to do it again, but since I have to, I want to at least do a really good job of it so that afterwards I won't have to do it yet again for a long long time to come. And see, if I move anywhere other than New York I'll probably just end up wanting to move to New York again later, so I'm just going to skip that.

In my mind, this has been decided. I'm definitely moving to New York. I don't know exactly how I'm going to arrange that, but it's going to happen. Like, before 2003 arrives, with any kind of luck.

The logistics of moving everything I own over there are pretty scary, though. It cost me $2,000 to move across town into this apartment. I own twice as much stuff now and am wanting to move it 6 zillion times as far. I think I'll leave my bed and my brick & board bookshelf behind though, because they're ugly and broken and need to be gotten rid of anyway. That will narrow down the problem some. The rest could fit into a pretty small van. Except for my car. My car is ugly and ancient but it's still pretty energetic and I have no great desire to get rid of it so that means I'd have to transport it. Maybe I'll just drive to New York. Anyone around here happen to live on a convenient straight line between Sacramento and New York who'd like to let me camp out on your floor for the night on my cross-country trek at an indeterminate time in the future?

Anyway.

55 years ago today, in a small town just north of San Francisco, my mother was born. Tomorrow I'm going over to dinner to wish her happy birthday and say goodbye to the house I grew up in for the last time. My parents succeeded in buying the new house that they wanted, with the deer that wander through the backyard. I haven't seen it and I have no idea when I'm going to see it. I've never driven outside of Sacramento and would very likely get lost on the obscure mountain roads that lead to their new home.