doubting thom

Very little creeps me out, but this Reuters story is the sort of thing that can.

A 13-year-old Indian boy has begun producing winged beetles in his urine after hatching the eggs in his body…. Doctor Chittaranjan Maity, Medical Education Director of West Bengal state where the boy is from, said doctors found the beetles while examining him for pain in the groin area.

“Doctors were really surprised to see the beetles,” he told Reuters. “There are eggs of the beetle in a fistula in his body and he is getting medical treatment to try to kill the eggs,” Maity said.

The boy had been taken to hospital Sunday after complaining of pain while urinating.

The beetles–more than half a centimeter in length–belong to the Staphylinidae rove beetle family of insects. Most types are predators but some feed on fungi, algae and decaying plant matter.

During my early teenage years, I was stroking the family cat, when I noticed a soft swelling on her side. I called my dad in, and he determined that she had a warble–the name for both the larva of the parasitical warble fly and the swelling that it creates under the skin of an animal as it grows. Warble flies usually lay their eggs on the skins of large mammals like cattle, horses and deer; when the eggs hatch, the larvae burrow under the skin where they migrate beneath the muscle, usually to the esophagus or spinal canal where they remain dormant during the winter; in spring they migrate back closer to the surface of the skin where they mature. This was already a mature larva under our cat’s skin; while I held the cat, my dad punctured the swelling with a needle, and abruptly and startlingly the worm-like larva popped right out. It was one of the most frightening and disturbing things I’d ever witnessed to that point.

Since then, the idea of being infested by something that eats its way out of my body has been one of–not “fear,” precisely, since I don’t think of such an event as being terrifically likely to the point of giving it much conscious thought–discomfort, but with a simultaneous, perverse interest when reading of such cases or similar medical oddities, like bezoars and fetus in fetu (parasitic twin).

The past two years have been very disappointing for me in terms of vacation and travel. During the period between October, 2001 and August, 2002, during which I was unemployed, I theoretically had plenty of time to travel, but was reticent to spend the money to do so, to ensure that I continued to be able to make my mortgage and car payments. After Dad became very ill in the spring of 2002, I travelled home and later to Richmond to visit him in the hospital there. And, once I did start working again last August, I was expending almost immediately what little annual leave and sick leave I was earning, travelling back to Richmond for my own medical examinations as I was being evaluated as a potential kidney donor. Then, in January, when a cadaveric donor was located and the transplant took place, I again spent several days with Dad and Mom at the hospital. More recently, I’d had to take annual leave to take Alex, my cat, to the vet; the specialist he had to see earlier this month, and who wants to see him again in July, only sees patients in this area on Mondays, so I can’t schedule a weekend visit in order to protect my leave.

I did take two days of leave the end of this past April to visit Roger and Raymond over a four-day weekend in Tucson, but that’s the only trip I’ve taken for myself–with the exception last summer of a one-day flight up to Niagara Falls to meet Kent, spend a few hours sightseeing, and then fly back home that evening–since my trip to Vancouver in the spring of 2001 for the annual gay and lesbian squaredance convention.

And even now I have only three days of annual leave, so I can’t even look forward to taking a week off and getting away this entire summer. After having had to forego last year’s convention in Toronto, I had hoped to be able to attend this year’s in San Diego, but the lack of sufficient annual leave means I won’t be going next month, a particular disappointment since I’ve never been to San Diego.

My friend Peg, though, now has asked if she might come to Arlington and spend a few days with me the week following her own attendance at convention, so while I won’t be able to see all my squaredance friends, I will at least have a social visit from her.

And, now that I have the temporary use of my friend Craig’s car, which is more reliable than my own, I’ve also been planning to take a trip back home to visit my family, whom I haven’t seen since shortly after Dad returned home from his kidney transplant in February. I had originally thought to drive there over the long weekend of Independence Day, but most of my family–including Mom and Dad, my sister and her family, and my aunt, uncle and cousins–are leaving early that Saturday morning for their family vacation in North Carolina. So I contacted Sheldon and Lisa to find out their plans for that weekend, and they’ve invited me to come spend it with them at their new home in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia.

I may go to see my parents as early as this weekend, then, or I may wait until the third weekend of July. Either way, it looks like there will be three weekends in a row before the end of next month that I’ll either be away or hosting visitors of my own. Feast or famine.

And while it will be very nice to see Peg, Sheldon and Lisa, and my family, I’m still frustrated and a little depressed that it likely will be winter or even into next year before I’m able to take a significant vacation of my own. And I’m struggling with whether to use the few hours of leave I do have to at least take some long weekends away–maybe a trip to New York, for example–but thereby postponing even further the accumulation of enough additional leave to provide for at least a week off, while also leaving enough hours for emergencies or other necessary time off, like Alex’s veterinary appointments.

Sometimes it really sucks being a (reasonably) responsible adult and holding down a job.

Even at 40, it’s possible to have truly new experiences. Last night I heard one drag queen sing a love song–in Yiddish–and another perform a paean to herpes, to the tune of The Way We Were: “Can it be that it was herpes simplex then?”, when Jeff and I went to see Winnie, Trixie, Rachel and Trampolina, otherwise known as The Kinsey Sicks, “America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet,” at the Birchmere, and I had a blast.

It was a wonderfully funny show, with clever lyrics, tight harmonies and terrific performances, and with vocal and stylistic ranges as broad as Rachel’s hips. The four divas in their over-the-top drag performed for a solid two hours, starting with “You’re Scaring Us,” a song about aging queens, sung to the tune of “Age of Aquarius.” The only vocal break was provided by their sick and bizarre (and therefore hilariously popular) audience participation game, Choices, which began with such questions as “Would you rather have your face epoxied to a urinal, or be tit-clamped to Martha Stewart for a week?” and proceeded through “Would you rather have sex with Mr. Rogers, or Mr. Ed?” which generated some discussion–and changing audience opinions–based on whether they meant alive or dead.

Now, the interesting thing I just learned today is that the man behind Rachel, who also serves as the group’s lyricist and manager, is Ben Schatz, former executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, and the president of my college’s Lesbian and Gay student group when he and I were undergraduates together 20-odd years ago. I wish I’d known this last night; I’d have stuck around after the performance at least to say hello.

Oh, and Jeff’s hair looked fabulous. I think I need to make an appointment to be coiffed and pampered at the Grooming Lounge.

On Tuesday, I wrote about my thoughts about trying to reconnect with a guy I’d been dating earlier this year. After we stopped dating, he had suggested that we get together sometime for lunch, but we never arranged anything. Since then, we hadn’t been in contact at all.

So, right after I posted that entry, I sent him an email saying hello and asking if he wanted to try again for that lunch, and to catch up on each other’s lives.

His first response was a curt and non-committal, though not overtly impolite, one sentence. Yesterday, though, I received a longer, more vituperative email, suggesting that he’d only gone out with me in January and February because he was “very vulnerable and depressed,” and his “clarity wasn’t the best.” Now, though, “in a much better place” and “much more sure” of himself, he knows “whom [he] would like to spend [his] time with socially,” and apparently that doesn’t mean me. He went on to decline the invitation but said he preferred not to discuss the rationale or his feelings about it.

Ok, ouch. But at least there’s a sense of closure, which is probably what I needed more than I needed to actually see or speak with him again. As time goes by, I have a strong tendency to smooth over rough edges and bad memories, often creating a nostalgia for false or selective memories of only the best times and most positive features. His response, though, and the subsequent chorus of “I told you so” from friends, jarred me back into a set of more balanced memories–including his racist conversation on the phone with a co-worker, about another co-worker; the night I treated him to dinner and a flamenco concert for his birthday, which started with him accusing me of being unfaithful (when I noted en passant in the record store that a poster of Julio Iglesias was “attractive”), and ended with him crying and screaming at me on the sidewalk after the show; the suggestion, the first time we tried to sleep together, that I might consider getting rid of my cat, since he was allergic–leaving me bewildered now why I’d even have wanted to reconnect. I think it really was just a reaction to the sentimentality and some degree of loneliness I’ve been feeling after watching Daddy & Papa, All Over the Guy, and Big Eden, among others, rather than an honest appraisal of what and whom are most suitable for inclusion in my life. But given that my thoughts even at the end of All Over the Guy were shock and dismay that those two incompatible guys could continue to try to create a relationship together, I really should have known better than to start to make that same mistake–again–in my own life. For an allegedly smart guy, though, sometimes I’m awfully dumb.

Yesterday morning, in the first of a number of incidents that made it a Bad Wish-I’d-Stayed-in-Bed Day, the database files for my MovableType installation were, for some reason, not working. This resulted in being unable to log in; to use the search engine; or to post new entries, comments or trackbacks. Some research in the MovableType manual and on the support boards suggested that it was most probable that my ISP had made changes either to their version of the Berkely DB Library or of Perl, such that the current version couldn’t read the database files created by an older version.

After a number of messages back and forth with my ISP throughout the day, around 11:00 last night they were able to update my database files and resolve the problem, and I didn’t lose any data. So, for better or worse, I’m back in business with barely a stutter.

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My TiVo has been recording a lot of gay-themed programming, especially from the Pride Month lineup on Sundance. Last night, for example, I finally saw the gay-themed All Over the Guy, written by and starring Dan Bucatinsky, and also starring Richard Ruccolo (one of the two cute guys from the TV series Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place).

Nearly a day later, I’m still not sure what I think about the movie, whether I “liked” it or not. There were times I was really angry and frustrated with both characters, even though I know they were intentional caricatures of patterns of behavior in and out of relationships for the sake of the story, wondering why the hell two people like them would continue to put up with one another. What probably has left me most ambivalent, though, was that I saw myself and some of my own self-destructive relationship-sabotaging behaviors not in either character alone–though I did identify with Eli much more–but to some degree in both, as I’ve also been guilty of Tom’s push-pull, “any guy who would want me must not be worth having” philosophy. Despite the romantic comic tone of the film, it was rather sobering to see myself so clearly at times in the dysfunctional relationship portrayed on the screen.

The timing also was interesting in that over the past couple of weeks I’ve often found myself thinking about the last guy I dated, for a month or so at the beginning of the year, and how the interactions and relationship between Eli and Tom offered some parallels to my own experience. At the time, I had been truly convinced that the timing was completely wrong, that he needed more separation from his dissolved marriage before embarking on a new relationship with me and more acknowledgement of his frequent and unmerited feelings of jealousy and anger, that we both also first needed to deal with our individual struggles with depression and anxiety, and that for these reasons we really were better off breaking up; but I also see now the ways in which I obviously was hurtful and intransigent and distant, though back then I focused mostly–though not solely–on his own sabotaging and contributory words and deeds. I was sorry then that it ended the way it did, but I think I’m even more regretful now; I’ve stayed on good terms with my other former boyfriends, usually remaining very close, in fact, yet in this case–with someone who may have been the best fit to my physical, intellectual and spiritual ideals–we spoke only once or twice after breaking up, and not at all after a couple of weeks had gone by.

So I’ve been thinking about attempting to reconnect, trying to re-establish the friendship. On the other hand, I also wonder if maybe this is more just a sentimentality born of my feelings of solitude, which recently have seemed more prevalent than usual; relationship envy, as more and more of my friends–even the ones I thought were confirmed bachelors–pair off; or maybe even just a form of spring fever compounded from not even going out and getting myself laid in lieu of finding love and commitment. But rather than continuing the second-guessing and assuming the grapes are sour, I may as well take the risk and give him a ring.

On the way home from work today, I stopped by the Safeway across the street to pick up some catfood and Diet Dr. Pepper. As I was checking out, a very cute guy joined the express lane next to mine, carrying only a jar of hot fudge. Another clerk came and opened a new lane, and I moved over to it; a few seconds later, he appeared behind me in that lane. He definitely pinged my gaydar, but I was concentrating so on completing my transaction and getting out of the store that I didn’t think to smile or say hi.

When I got to the car a few minutes later, the car parked next to mine, which hadn’t been there when I arrived, had two rainbow stickers and an HRC sticker. Not necessarily his, of course, but the parking lot and the store both were pretty empty, so I think the odds were pretty good.

If I were Faustus, I’d be covered in chocolate syrup right now rather than sitting here alone posting this entry.

As though it weren’t bad enough that easily one-half to two-thirds or more of the email I receive is spam, in the past week some spammer has used one of my email addresses as the alleged sender and reply-to addresses for a couple of series of spam mailings, so my mailbox has been flooded with undeliverable messages; today this occurred again. I sent a message to my email provider after the first incident last week letting them know, because I was concerned that people might start making (unfounded) complaints that I was spamming them; I’ve heard stories of ISPs cutting off email accounts of accused spammers without attempting to resolve the situation. An examination of the headers shows that the emails didn’t actually come from my mail server, but I don’t trust my email provider to take the care necessary to confirm that. And, sadly, but much as I expected, their response didn’t hearten me, given that they completely misunderstood my message, interpreting it oppositely as a complaint that I had been spammed by one of their users and letting me know where to report it.

Each time I speak with my parents, they invariably ask me to give my maternal grandfather a call sometime, and to try to call him regularly. I’m usually hesitant to do so. Despite my very close relationships with my parents and the rest of my family, that with my grandfather has been far less comfortable or mutually respectful. Everyone agrees that he’s a difficult man–stern, close-minded, selfish and controlling, and more and more often demonstrably angry and bitter. Yet all of the family who live still in my home town are afraid to question or cross him; we’ve all been “cut out of the will” at least once or twice for failing to meet his exacting standards or whims, a tactic that fails to impress or affect me, but which seems to terrify the rest of the family, as they seemingly buy into his equation of money and land to love. My mother and aunt crave his regard and praise, yet in their entire lives he’s never once told my mother that he loved her, or my aunt that he was proud of her.

For years, my grandmother worked a full-time job; raised their two children (though admittedly my mother ended up doing a lot of the housework as well as providing much of the care for her sister, twelve years her junior); worked beside my grandfather building fences, planting, cutting and baling hay; and cared for her own mother who moved in with them after suffering a stroke, while still being expected to take care of my grandfather’s exacting needs. Yet now that she needs his support–as over most of the past decade Alzheimer’s has regressed her to the mind and memories of her childhood and an increasing level of physical struggle against her caretakers–he is largely unable or unwilling to step up to the plate. Rather, he demands that my mother, aunt and sister alone care for my grandmother while steadfastly refusing to allow anyone even to suggest that other arrangements might be necessary or provide better quality of life for everyone. It’s not uncommon for him to just leave home for a week or more at a time, often with only a few hours’ notice, to retreat to his hunting cabin in the woods, leaving the rest of the family to handle all the responsibilities at home.

On the other hand, when I was a child and even a young adult, he most often seemed very proud, loving and giving. He doted on my sister and me when we were children, as he does on his great-grandchidren now, more or less: he has a very special relationship with one of my nephews who shares his love of hunting and fishing, but is less involved with or supportive of the other two nephews, who have different interests or who are challenging in other ways, as with my youngest nephew, whose speech impediment frustrates my grandfather who, with his own diminution of hearing, is unable to communicate successfully with him. And my parents tell me that he asks about me every day, part of a growing preoccupation with matters of family and mortality.

Our conversations often are stilted: we share little in common, and my life is a mystery to him. When we do speak on the phone, our conversations are formulaic and safe: we speak of the weather, he makes a political joke, I ask about his health, he asks about my car and when I’m coming home to visit. My phone call to him this past Saturday followed that pattern, though I have to admit that it felt different to me this time, as though he and I were relatively at peace with each other. I didn’t hear–or elected not to hear–value judgments or criticisms, and in turn I didn’t hurry to end the conversation, but let him drive the amount of time we remained, to the degree possible, connected. Every activity, for him, seems now to be colored by the question, perhaps unspoken by him though occasionally voiced to me by others in the family, of whether this will be the last time: will this be his last trip to the beach? his last summer baling hay? our last phone call?

And while I can never forget the pain he’s often caused my mother, especially, and the rest of my family, nor can I summon up an unquestioned respect for someone who has been capable of such cruelty and unconsidered stubbornness, I can–and do–forgive him, just as I must learn to forgive myself for such of these behaviors and patterns of thought as I discover mirrored within me.