condi, condi

while reading vogue i was very surprised (well not very, but i hadn't been expecting) to find an article about madam secretary. can you believe it - i read the whole thing! having taken a gigantic step back from caring about politics (in part due to my realisation of my extreme dislike of politics and the profanity of it), i was able to put aside my biases and gain a respect for her. (and maybe she is just a de facto republican).

i almost screamed though when i read, "but he [our beloved presidente arbusto] expects loyalty from me, and he will get it."



*%$#@!*((&^%$^%$#??????? how could SHE be loyal to HIM when clearly her intellect is of a caliber above and beyond anything he could even dream of?

then i remembered the one thing i'm sure i have in common with madame, we are both ladies (i would say women but i don't like using that word because i'm still a girl!). and if there is anything that smart ladies are capable of in the realm of interpersonal relationships, it is MANIPULATION (come on smart girls, don't say you've never used your smarts to manipulate an unsuspecting man).

so maybe he will get loyalty from her - but loyalty on her own terms. maybe she will manipulate him to the extent that he BELIEVES in her loyalty without knowing that it was really SHE who manipulated his ideas to fit with hers - and since loyalism in my mind is all about sharing the same ideas - she is the one who appears loyal to him.

i must admit, i have not really followed ms condi's appearances in the media (i usually change the channel when she speaks on tv because she always appears to say nothing), so i can't really judge whether this is the case. but i like to believe it is - this way i can still have respect for her.

and i'm learning more about how much i do dislike politics.

maybe bribe them with nitrous oxide?

i have been out of sorts lately. i'm going to blame AAR for switching ms. maddow's show from the morning to 18:00 - i got up at seven to listen to her every day but now... they have these new people on and i just don't get them!

ok not really. but i haven't yet found my fount of morning entertainment/news. the today show is blech - meredith has an inflexible neck and it drives me nuts. i miss katie. not the new katie with the messed up chin (does she look a little different to y'all?) but the one who made watching a "news magazine" tolerable. boyfriend always complains when the tv happens to be on at that hour that "HOW IS THIS NEWS!!!???" and i must explain to him that no, it's a NEWS MAGAZINE (despite what they might call it officially).

so update on my psychological/physiological state: someone get me off this tilt-a-whirl, or at least help me tighten the seatbelt!

so it's not that bad. but i have just been feeling like inexplicable shit this week!
aside: before reading on, if you're a man, please just take a moment to PA-RAAAAISE JEE-SUS that you're a man and your gonads grew out instead of in.

well, it's not entirely inexplicable. with the weeklong migraine and all the drugs i ingested last week, i think my body is trying to revolt. i have been nauseous, dizzy, AND emotional this week. today i cried in the doctor's office but my cervix WAS being scraped with a metal tool so SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT ME BEING A BRAT!

this is what makes me nervous about living in the bible belt. i am afraid of being judged by doctors. i could be imagining it, but their voices always seem to have a self-riteous lilt - like i'm already familiar by what causes a pap to come up abnormal. it isn't 100% my fault. though they make me feel like a whore with that little lilt. i didn't fight enough. i didn't want to be rude. they should teach everyone in the girls' section of sex ed that if a guy renounces any prophylactic measures mid-way (like taking them off) and then assumes he can just continue on his merry way (ie, without your permission for the disregard of said prophylactic measures), you should kick his ass off of you by any means necessary. this would be a great thing to send in to postsecret - as y'all see i'm not being 100% direct about it even in my own blog (again, the fear of being judged)... and with my tendency to be hard on myself and assume all culpability i am not helping matters by thinking about it. but i was never a whore - i just made a few bad decisions a number of times, from which i eventually learned.

so ladies, i cannot emphasize this enough: GET REGULAR PAP SMEARS! my aunt neglected this simple procedure until she had a huge mass on her lymph node down there, caused by cervical cancer that COULD HAVE BEEN CAUGHT EARLY if she had been having regular pap smears (we know that's what it was - she had told my mom that the guy she was with had warts)

which brings me to the title of this post. on my way home from today's greatly unpleasant procedure i thought about the fact that six months ago my pap had come back normal and there i was with the muscles of my uterus in a bind wondering why the false negative, and thinking that instead of paps i should just skip them and go straight to the colposcopy next time. then i thought of the GREAT UNPLEASANTNESS i had just experienced and thought, damn i DO NOT want to go through that again!

but how to entice people to go in the first place? NITROUS OXIDE! you know, laughing gas, the stuff they give you at the dentist's office (or maybe used to give you, i'm not sure)... i would not mind in the least another microscope shoved up my ---------- (ok, i'm not sure they stuck a microscope up there but it sure felt like it) if i were floting on a nitrous oxide cloud.

so then i thought, well maybe people would be less neglectful if they had some incentive to come in. knowing the importance of these exams they still could say, yeah but i don't want some person i don't know sticking that up there! BUT if you were under the influence of nitrous oxide you wouldn't care.

also, i know very well that things aren't so bad (no matter how bad they are) if you can manage to relax. i was unable to do this. which is why i would definitely not mind getting something to help me relax. (i learned this from my last migraine - the pain only gets worse if you fret about it)... of course how many really are able to relax given the above described circumstances?

uh god and i don't think the doctor used lube on the cold metal thing. ***shiver***

i showed my boyfriend the pamphlet that had been mailed to me and he read "do not insert anything in your vagina for a week after the biopsy." ie, no tampons, dildos, vibrators, etc. and he said, "so i guess that means those quarters that you've been sticking up there will have to come out." (i think that was a reference to ass pennies - google it yourself, it's why i don't pick up pennies from the ground anymore.) (yes, his comment was a joke and NO, i do not do things with quarters besides put them in the jar on the window sill.)


and there was a huge ass cockroach in the bathroom! i had just sat down on the toilet when i saw the sucker crawling on the wall. i jumped up off the toilet (i don't think my feet even touched the ground) and screamed as i ran out of the bathroom. i used to mentally make fun of girls who would get all screamy about bugs (like spiders which are a little creepy but spiders are good because they eat mosquitos and stuff) but it's those super long ass antennae that get me (ie, make me scream just by seeing them) every time.

the third cousin

in another of those memorable dinnertime conversations with my mother and sisters, somehow it came up that there is a vaccine now available for HPV - which causes most cervical cancers (or so i understand). it all started when my mom asked us how we would feel if she had a boyfriend. and i'm not sure why i brought the HPV vaccine up.

if i haven't yet mentioned it here, my mom is a twin. my aunt cathy died when i was like 12, of cancer. since then, i had asked very little about her cancer. my mom told me that her doctors thought it was ovarian cancer.

but as i got older and learned what "bastard child" meant in legalese, i got this impression of my harley-riding aunt as somewhat of a "wild child" and perhaps may have been a bit promiscuous (sp?). (hence what we affectionately call our "white trash" side of the family - my two cousins from her have different fathers and cathy was never married). that didn't mean anything; bad things happen to people who behave as well as those who don't behave according to the standards of society. cancer can happen to anyone regardless of their behavior. sure there are things you can do that might make you more or less likely to get it or not get it, but sometimes it just happens.

of course, i didn't really know what HPV was until this fall a pap smear came back irregular. my doctor explained what a "cervical lesion" was and what it meant and that "the most common cause of an irregular pap smear is the HPV virus." i thought about it. after i broke up with my last boyfriend and had gone through the agony of getting tested for aids and all that other stuff (i had been nervous about it for a year before i worked up the courage to just go ahead and give them my blood so they could test it - negative btw) the first pap smear came back negative (eg, OK). that was fall of '04. the one i had taken in fall of '05 had come back abnormal. i don't know how long it takes to infect you (wait, lemme look that up... ok seeing that i can't find a definite answer (like with HIV i was told that you'd need to wait six months before you can get an accurate test) and since there's about 100 different strains, i guess there is no definitive answer. nevermind.) well, anyway. i still blame it on the lawyer, because he was the one person who put me at risk (i insisted on using a forro but he got frustrated and took it off and continued on his merry way).

that aside. back to tonight's conversation.

so with seeing on the news multiple times the interviews with doctors and information about the HPV vaccine, i'd been turning the issue over in my head. i wondered if there was some link between my aunt's cancer and HPV. so fast forward to the point in time where i bring up the vaccine.
that's what i think caused aunt cathy's cancer.
but didn't she get pap tests?
she just ignored them. she kept getting irregular pap smears but she didn't take them seriously. then one night she showed me a lump on her groin (my mom makes a circle with her thumb and forefinger about the size of a tennis ball) and asks, "dianna, do you think i should get this checked out?" she even told me that greg had warts on his penis!

a collective EWWWWWWWWW from all three of us.

but when they found the cancer, was it already too late? how long did she live after that?
it was pretty much too late because it was already in her lymph nodes. then she started chemo and she would have her good days and then be sick and then get better (she makes a wavey motion with her hand). so overall this lasted about three years. i don't know what she was thinking - she was pregnant too at the time. with michael? (my younger cousin) no. with jeff? no.
she was pregnant with greg's child - the guy she was about to marry too - which she had to abort.

i'm not really sure which direction the conversation took after that. all this happened when i was... i don't know, ten or eleven? i've just discovered so much in so little time. it took me a while to process all of this.

but just think how preventable all of this might have been. what sucks is the infected men who may or may not have symptoms continue to infect women, who could possibly experience things far worse. now i will grant that your partner having warts is a clear sign that you should protect yourself. but still i hate that the consequences for women can be so much worse than they are for men.

i think universal HPV vaccination is a good idea. but of course throw the church in who still says abstinence is best, so you get tons of boys and girls that are not infected nor vaccinated who grow up thinking they will be virgins on their wedding nights but then life happens and curiosity might take over, and since they didn't pay attention in sex ed thinking none of this would apply to them, they experiment and through the sexual grapevine they get infected. and in denial about their sexually active-ness they won't go to the gynecologist unless there is a serious problem, which will be when they have a golf-ball sized lymph node in their groin and it will already be too late for them. oh, but the boys get to continue to infect innocent virgins, and since their sexual encounters are generally few and far-between any outward signs of HPV will be cleared up before the next virgin gets infected.

sorry for that diatribe, i just thought one long run-on sentence would be the best way to get my point across - that sticking your head up your ass to hide from reality is stupid!