Clinging to My [Personal] Pessimism

When I was diagnosed almost 18 years ago with a CD4+ count of 4, I didn’t really expect to be around this many years later. Oh yes, my doctor said all the right things about living as long as my friends (yes, even then!), but inside myself I didn’t really believe him. After all, I was kind of starting on the precipice and I’m not all that nimble.

I’ve done my part along the way, missing a handful of doses of my original Crixivan/d4T/3TC regimen — that’s three times a day fasting on that Crixivan and for more than 7 years, folks. As I started to develop my hump, signifier of my particular experience of lipodystrophy (all accumulation and moving around, no sign of the fat loss that might have calmed me), I made my first switch, to Sustiva/Tenofovir/3TC. On that simpler regimen, I think, oddly, that I missed a few more doses, but mostly I missed sleeping properly. My intolerance of that treatment lasted me about another 2½ years (I’m a bit conservative on abandoning the things that are keeping my viral load in check) and I switched again, to Intelence/Tenofovir/3TC, which I’ve been taking ever since.

The so-called “pill burden” has never been all that important to me, as I take a handful of things all at once, and have three times per day for dosing: before and after breakfast and after supper. Only six of my fifteen pills each day are for HIV, but I have that all under control. Viral load quite under control, too, CD4+ count not going up or down anytime soon (it hovers in the mid-to-high 200s). This last thing is what helps me maintain my personal pessimism.

I should really say that my pessimism doesn’t extend to anyone else. If there is a good time to have HIV, it is probably now — easy to take treatments, good news on taking treatment early and on the preventive impact of an undetectable viral load, even effectiveness of PrEP for our negative friends. I even heard a doctor speculating that people with HIV today might even live longer than our friends without HIV! The secret? We see our doctors three or four times a year and most of our friends don’t have that kind of health monitoring. Someone needs to tell the insurance companies about that increased longevity, I think.

So back to me. When I was diagnosed, I was working in a relatively poorly-paid community organization job and the issue of retirement savings was not really on my radar, or at least not in the realm of my possibilities. The diagnosis, despite my doctor’s kind words, gave me a reason to revisit any concerns I might have had about living beyond retirement. As I changed jobs and started to have more disposable income (what a term!), I made decisions to prioritize living now, with a little commitment to charitable giving on the side.

I don’t shy away from indulging myself, and even that might be an understatement. After all, why would I sacrifice and scrape by now when I’m still not expecting to reach the age of eligibility for Old Age Security? (We can thank the government for putting that just a little further out of my reach by raising the minimum age to 67.) Not I! Eat, drink and be merry! Go to the circus as often as possible, the opera four times a year and a movie every Friday evening that I can! Sponsor my friends in the AIDS Walk! Save nothing…

Well here I am, all these years later, showing no sign of sliding toward my early demise and I’m now only ten years away from the magic date…twelve if you go by the government’s calendar. All this good news on HIV treatment has thrown a real monkey wrench into my retirement plan. I might have no choice but to sue those evil pharma companies for stealing my pessimism and making me live too long, but I suspect that might not make it past a judge. Wish me luck!

Ugh! Telemarketing

I have a new reason to not answer my phone when I see one of those unfamiliar long-distance numbers on the display. I’m sure we all dislike having our lives interrupted by the call, trying to sell us something that we probably don’t need. How about the now-too-common proactive customer service call — you are already our customer, but how much better could your service be if only you bundled a bunch of services together?

My Dad has his way of dealing with those calls. Every call a screened call, unless he happens to be next to the phone and it’s a number he recognizes. It gets easier over time to resist the urge to answer that ring, I suppose, but I’m someone who only recently stopped rushing dripping from the shower to answer the insistent ring of my phone, so that urge runs deeply in me.

My strategy has been relatively simple and two-pronged. First, an unlisted number. That eliminates the unsophisticated random calls working from lists. Second, I have registered my numbers (home and mobile) on the federal “do not call” list (Canada • USA), so there are negative consequences for telemarketers calling me if I don’t already have a relationship with them or if they don’t fit into the various exceptions (notably charities, not bound by this list).

The gaping hole in my strategy is not so much what it is for my Dad. He gets TONS of calls from charities, which I avoid by giving largely to organizations I know really well that will not trade their lists with others. I’m also armed with my answer to those requests that generally frightens them away: “I give most of my money to AIDS charities because I have it.” That really shuts them up. No, my strategy fails more on the people I have business relations with. Telecommunications and TV: everyone wants to be my sole supplier, while I resist that for the simple reason that I don’t want everything to fail at once! (I deliberately got my mobile phone from a different company when I was having trouble with my home phone line.)

So what’s my new reason to not answer the phone when an apparent telemarketing call is incoming? It’s me. I don’t like what I turn into on the phone with these people. I might be in a relatively good mood, but the call transforms me into a short-tempered rude person who interrupts and eventually hangs up when the poor underpaid telemarketing person fails to depart from the script to answer my “get to the point” questions.

I’m writing this because it just happened and I’m not feeling very proud of my behaviour. I don’t see any prospect of becoming any more tolerant, so I think I’ll just have to avoid answering from now on.

Admission

It's a good thing I long ago stopped expecting that a Hollywood movie would tell a tale that I could believe. Or do anything that I could believe. Oh, except for the part where Paul Rudd is just waiting to sweep me into his arms because he can't live without me…that I believe. Oddly, I seem to believe the same thing about a number of other younger-than-I actors on the scene. Quelle coïncidence.

Back to the stuff we don't believe, like that a character who never really wanted children can be turned around in the space of a couple of days to become a doting mother wannabe. Or that a footloose do-gooder, yet nasty soccer coach, could be made to grow roots by his worst soccer player. Those things, not so believable and yet they are the premise of this movie.

There were definitely good things about it, so I ought to name some of them. There was that Paul Rudd presence part (see above and sigh). It is also a pleasure – albeit a different kind of pleasure – to see Tina Fey and Lily Tomlin. Might I just add that Lily Tomlin seems to just get better with time, and Tina Fey has such excellent timing that she made me believe her in her role, up to the faux doting mother wannabe part, at least.

I did enjoy the characters. Tina Fey's cold and by-the-book admissions officer, her relationship with a very unconventional mother (Tomlin), her reaction to being left by her wishy-washy unfaithful live-in boyfriend, in the middle of a house party for his faculty friends. All very amusing and entertaining. You don't want to be at the wrong end of her giant chicken-serving fork, let me tell you.

We meet Lily Tomlin's character while she is busy constructing a bicycle, and only later discover her colourful and interesting past as a feminist writer and commuter train tryster. I have always loved her voice and I also love that I can believe her in a role and not be left feeling that she always plays that role. That must be acting. There should be more of that in the movies.

I think I felt that about of a few of the characters, including Paul Rudd's and Tina Fey's (with the exceptions of those unbelievable aspects I mentioned at the outset), and I kind of liked the young characters, too, although it might be a little early for me to say whether they were playing roles or playing themselves. Nat Wolff plays the hopeful applicant to Princeton, a knowledge-focused dweeb you might want to avoid at a party, unless suffering from insomnia, and Travaris Spears, who doesn't make the first page of the cast on IMDB, play Paul Rudd's adopted child and eventual anchor.

Oh, did I mention Paul Rudd again?

After all, for all the Hollywood happy ending qualities, I did kind of enjoy it. Maybe that's the admission part.

Hoodie

We were in meetings for two days in Pantin. On the ground floor. While listening to the discussion and contributing where appropriate, certain images still draw one's attention.

For me it was the lanky youth hovering around in the alley – more of a lane really – between the office tower on whose ground floor we were meeting and what seems like a social housing project of some sort next door. The next door building has nets suspended above the sidewalk like the anti-suicide nets of a Chinese factory, apparently because there have been problems in the past with people in the building throwing things onto the sidewalk below. This always gives me pause when I walk there.

The lanky youth. Sometimes sauntering, looking around frequently, sometimes actually running, but away from or toward…impossible to say. I was intrigued and compelled to construct a whole story that revolved around some kind of gang activity or drug dealing. Funny how a mind can wander into that territory.

Cut to a late evening finding something to eat in the near vicinity. Waking up from an overly long nap can be troublesome and challenging. The little empty neighbourhood pizza and sandwich place I find will do. And while I'm waiting for my pizza and my Coke Zero (had to repeat that, as I didn't call it a "coca" like the locals), who should pop into the restaurant but Mr. Hoodie and another young guy. They didn't actually come all the way in, just inside the door, and gave a few coins to the guy behind the counter, as if repaying a small loan or making good on a promise to pay later for food consumed earlier. And then they were gone.

I'm finished with my pizza and my coca and I continue to be puzzled by the culture of tipping in Paris, so I deposit my change in the collection box for the muslim school that is at the cash (that's worth a chuckle). Outside, I stop at a little bakery that is still open this late for a couple of little treats: chocolatine and a cone-shaped nut filled dessert that hearkens to one middle eastern culture or another. (Epilogue: these were lovely.) Walk back to the hotel, past the building, under the nets.

I see them ahead of me and my mind starts racing. Hoodie is looking into some car window and I don't know whether there was anyone in the car or not. I was focused on being aware of where everyone else was. Hoodie's friend was on the steps of the building. My mind has now gone to the place where I get accosted or worse, thinking how naïve I am to believe that there really aren't dangerous places to walk around here, at least not for a man my size.

As I proceed down the sidewalk, stride unbroken, Hoodie heads back from the car toward his friend on the steps and we almost run into each other. He looks at me sheepishly and mumbles a "Bonsoir" in the voice of a teen, steeped in innocence.

I have to laugh at the myriad of assumptions and possibilities I had managed to assemble in my head and how they can be so quickly undone in a word and a tone.

Elitist

A horrible realization today as I was waiting for the bus to go home from work. I have become the person I would have accused of insensitivity just a few short years ago.

Yes, it has only been a few years since I got myself a cell phone. This in reaction to having some problems with my land line, which would be too complicated to explain in this short entry. I couldn't be without the means to contact emergency services, and couldn't necessarily count on being able to get to the pay phone up the street.

This is really a story about the pay phone, and how this once ubiquitous creature is disappearing quickly from our urban landscape. Everyone, it seems, has a cell phone and doesn't need a pay phone. This, or course, is the insensitive statement that doesn't take into consideration those in our society who don't have the means to maintain their own cell phones, especially in this land of overpriced telecommunications.

And today I waited in the bus shelter because of the ongoing snowstorm and because I didn't want to be in the wrong place just outside the bus shelter when the accumulated snow would slide of the roof. I wanted to be able to anticipate the arrival of the bus without those snow-filled risks and what do I see?

A rotten phone booth blocking the view! Why is it there? Nobody needs those anymore!

What a horrible person I turned out to be: lost all my concern for the marginalized because of a little snow.

Damned. Lucky.

I was on a crazy consumer high, trying to make sure that I got all of my shopping out of the way before tomorrow, which is Buy Nothing Day. (Yes, I know that Canada and Québec are to be found in North America, but there's that crazy Canadian thing about differentiating ourselves from our closest neighbours, so I'm pretty sure it's scheduled for tomorrow here.)

My plans were set. Go spend that gift card I received and a little more of my own money on something else, go to the bank machine to deposit and pay bills, then take out some cash for the rest of my shopping plans tonight. I dutifully left the bank machine quickly, as there was someone waiting, went to load my transit card with my December fare, and moved on for more.

The next plan I had to revise, as I was going to go spend another gift certificate I received as a lovely parting gift from my former job, but I realized part way there that the gift certificate was still in my apartment. Drat! Would I have to spend that tomorrow? Maybe Sunday...

Still more shopping. Yogurt and a couple of impulse items at the fruit store. I got to the cash and — surprise! Something was missing:

Yes, as I repeated in my head "Stupid, stupid, stupid...", I realised that I had beaten such a hasty retreat from the bank machine that I had left my card inside for the person who was in line behind me.

I rushed back with as much poise and dignity as I could muster. I broke out the other bank card I have in my wallet to open the door (the magnetic stripe opens the door) and went inside with great trepidation. Would I have to call the bank to explain my stupidity and then wait who knows how long for a new card? Would I discover that the person behind me had conducted a few transactions?

There, atop the machine, was a card. Grab. Insert. Enter PIN. Yes, it was mine. Next test: ask for printout of recent transactions. Only the ones I had done. My trust in my fellow humans has once again been confirmed to a degree that only Pollyanna might expect.

Damned. Lucky.

Epilogue: Karma or Poetic Injustice?

This morning, when it was safe for me to go outside and not get guilt-tripped into helping my neighbour shovel out her car, I ventured forth to remove the snow from my stairs. Oh, I was very ready to leave a little patch of snow in front of the door of the neighbours I have been so annoyed with for not taking their turn at shovelling. My cackles of guilty delight (some penance that turned out to be!) soon dissolved into sobs as my evil plot was undone by physics: something about the configuration of my tiny shared front porch incites the wind to remove snow from in front of my neighbours' door and to deposit it in drifts up against mine.

Foiled!

Snow and Etiquette

As we creep closer and closer to the apparent all-time record of snowfall (at least since we stole the continent and started writing these things down), I am seized by the need both to vent and to confess. Venting is way more fun, so I'll start with that.

I, like many others in Montréal, have an outdoor staircase leading to my front door which staircase I share with my upstairs neighbours. Now, it won't make a lot of sense for those who come from elsewhere that this is a city of long winding outdoor staircases, given our winter experiences, but this is apparently a product of a time when the Catholic Church was much more in control of our society. It seems that the Church thought that if staircases leading to different dwellings in this urban setting were indoors, there might be hanky-panky out of the watchful eyes of the neighbours. Keeping the staircases outside mad it much more possible for the neighbours to see, and presumably denounce, anything untoward that might be unfolding in their neighbourhoods.

For several years now, I have noticed that the parade of younger people who have occupied the apartment upstairs from me (who share my staircase) have had the unfortunate inability to wield a shovel and take their turn at clearing the snow and ice from our staircase. That delightful duty, albeit one that generally takes a maximum of 15 minutes in the very worst of conditions, keeps falling to me. They see content to walk on the snowy stairs, compressing our fluffy precipitation into hard-pack and eventually ice, while I, ever concerned about my own welfare and that of our letter-carrier, have to drag myself outside to clear the snow, chip away at the ice and deposit salt to melt what cannot be chipped away.

Now, like I said, this is not a multi-hour task, and it is probably good for me. After many years, however, I start to resent that it is the middle-aged guy with AIDS and arthritis in his hands and feet who has to clear the snow while the younger and more sprightly neighbours reap the benefits. Of course, it would be I and not they who is in greater danger of falling and breaking a hip!

Imagine my delight to arrive home the other day, after a small snowfall, to find that they seemed to have cleared the snow off the stairs, probably with their feet, judging from the quality of the snow removal (being an expert I do get fussy about these things). My delight dissolved into outrage as I reached the top of the stairs: they had cleared the snow from the stairs and from the space immediately in front of their own door, but left several centimetres of snow in front of my door! If I hadn't dutifully cleared snow from in front of their door for EVERY OTHER SNOWFALL this year, I might not have felt so outraged. What's with that?!!

Here I let my rage go and drift into the confession part of this post.

The thing that most amuses me about snowfalls in this city is what it does to personal motor vehicles. That's probably because I don't own one and don't think, in general, that people should own cars in a city with a pretty decent public transit system. Here is my neighbour's car late last night, snowstorm raging and illumination courtesy of the orangey streetlights:

Here's what it looked like this morning, with better light, but more hours of snow and wind and multiple snowplow passages on the street- and sidewalk sides of it:

You will notice that these photos were taken from the same vantage point — safely inside my apartment, looking down on the street scene outside. It seems (here comes the confession) that I can't bring myself to offer to help my neighbour (different neighbour, on the other side) to dig her car out of the snow. I even went so far, a few weeks ago, as to stay inside when I noticed that she was out there digging away to liberate her personal pollution device from the hardened snow that had been plowed up against it. And I must say that she was out there for hours while I guiltily skulked around inside, revising my plans for the day to the point where I cancelled them altogether. (There was no going outside without having to pass by the tired neighbour plugging away at her endless task.)

So why did I do that? Of course, I could justify my (in)action by the aforementioned political point of view that cars do not belong in the city. I could cave and confess that I am just lazy. I could explore my feelings for this neighbour, who has lived here since before I moved in (yikes! 15 years ago!) and had been quite pleasant with me, until I started resenting her feeling comfortable commenting about my weight gain in recent years. ("Does she think she's doing me a service, pointing out something I might not have seen, or is she just trying to make me feel good? Screw her: she can shovel her own car out!") In fact, it is probably a mixture of all of those elements.

And now, like the good Catholic that I was very briefly during the confusion of my coming-out process, I have wiped the slate clean by confessing and can start all over again. (Yeah, I am more familiar with the theology than to believe that that's how the confession thing works.)