2005 - As it Unfolds!

January

18 people for New Years Eve dinner and I actually cooked the whole thing. The meal went very well but it is just as well that my friends helped out or I would probably still be cleaning up.

Nathan and I headed to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico in mid January for a week of very good food and tequila. Val and Cliff came up from Manzanillo, where they have taken a house for two months. Nathan traded out one of his time share weeks for this awesome hotel suite, which cost us nothing! Woohoo!

Skiing in Breckenridge the first week of February. Val and Cliff gave us a package deal as our Christmas present, so we came back tired and happy from charging down mountains all day.

Feb 14 - like a total idiot, I slipped on some stairs in Columbus and have broken my arm in two places - guess I am gonna be out of commission for a while.

March 31 - took Collin and Duncan to New York for the weekend and to see Spamalot (very funny) and Wicked (totally brilliant).

April 3 - a drunk driver has driven his SUV right through the wall of the office/warehouse - it looks like Beirut in there.

April 13 - So I am sitting in a hotel in Los Angeles reading a Poppy Brite novel; she is a straight female British (I believe) writer who covers sex, AIDS, blood, murder and all sorts of truly disturbing stuff and I started thinking about how, apparently, I am now one of the longest living people in the world with AIDS. This led, inexorably, to the frightening realization, that, for most people, they have no clue what this has really been like. It seems that everyone who actually experienced the horror of the late 1980's and early 1990's is now dead and so there is no one left to actually talk about the life that we led and things that we did to try to stay alive. It seems so archaic now, in light of the world of genetic manipulation et alia, to imagine that we actually did the following to desperately stay alive (this is only some of them that I can remember, there were so many different things that we were frantically trying as we were dropping like flies that even I can't remember a lot of them!):

1. Massive overdoses of vitamin C. Vitamin C was supposed to be an extremely powerful antioxidant and antiviral and the thought was that if you saturated your cells with it you could survive. Of course, the immediate side effect of any amount of Vitamin C is total liquifaction of the bowels so that you lived with explosive diarreah and a raw and bleeding ass, and pain beyond belief for the months we did this.

2. Immune response therapy - this one was another doozy! The theory was that you had to jump start the immune system and one way of doing it was by painting photographic developing fluid on different parts of your body to burn yourself. The burn would then cause the production of white blood cells, which would them promote an anti-viral immune response. What this meant in actuality was that we would, on a daily basis, paint sections of our bodies and burn ourselves to cause an immune response. Imagine painting boiling oil on a different part of your body each day to burn yourself and then you can get an idea of what we did.

3. Blood warming and blood oxygenation therapy - This was another fun one - we would go and get hooked up to machines that sucked the blood out of us, heated it (or sometimes oxygenated it) with the hopes that this would kill the virus, and then have it re-injected into our own bodies. This was extraordinarily dangerous and a number of my friends died as a result of this.

4. Compound Q - aka Chinese cucumber. This had an antiviral effect in vitro - so we made teas of this shit and drank it (some had it injected). At low doses it seemed to work, but if you got it wrong, you ended up with convulsions and grand mal seizures. Again, a couple of friends died as a direct result of this.

5. IL2 therapy and subcutaneous IL2 therapy. Large doses of Interleukin 2, injected in the blood stream caused the T cells to flush out of the lymph nodes and it was hoped that this would kill HIV. It didnt work, of course, but the side effects felt like the worst flu you have ever had in your life and you felt like you wanted to die

6. AZT - the miracle drug. Of course, what was never discussed was the fact that AZT was actually banned as a cancer drug because it was so poisonous. Those of us who were lucky to be in the original trials of this drug were constantly told how fortunate we were, even as the drug itself caused bone marrow depletion, exhaustion to the point of collapse, vomiting and diarreah - fun, fun, fun!

7. Shark cartilidge - Sharks are the only animal that dont get cancer (or something like that) so for months we ate, drank, smoked, shitted and breathed shark cartilidge. This one wasn't dangerous, but damn, it was nasty!

8. Garlic therapy - enough said! Eat enough garlic and you may live, but no one on earth wants to be around you.

Rest of the year - I have been running around and life has been great but all sorts of changes have happened. Nathan and I broke up in the spring - we realized that we were much better as friends and while things were a little tense and difficult for a while, we remain best friends and see each other regularly. (It is so much easier being an adult - less of that 20's angst and drama!)

I did all sorts of redecorating on the house and put in new kitchen counters, the garden looks great and I have been cooking like a madman with all the veggies from the garden. I did a lot of business trips all over the US and spent a lot of time with friends, both here and in DC. In August I went to the UK for my cousin Christian's wedding, did some business in the UK and then headed over to Germany to see Chris and Diana.

In the fall I went to RenFest as always and then started dating a new man, David, in October, who is the Assistant Comptroller of the Human Rights Campaign. Christmas was at home and then I went to Alabama to meet David's family - terrific and friendly folks (in spite of my initial nervousness).

We finished off the year with dinner at The Inn at Little Washington, which was, without a doubt, the most amazing meal I have ever had in my life! (8 foodgasms!)

Happy New Year!