I Don't Know, It's Some TV Show.

I just this moment realized that for years I've been confusing Arrested Development with Curb Your Enthusiasm. When people would ask me if I'd seen Arrested Development, I'd say I had watched part of one episode and had to turn it off because a man and a woman were shouting at each other for like 10 minutes straight and I couldn't take any more.

But that was Curb Your Enthusiasm. I had never actually seen Arrested Development, until very recently. A couple friends insisted insistently that J and I watch it because they love it and thought we would love it too. We rented the first season on DVD and watched the first two episodes. I sort of wondered while watching when the yelling was going to start, but I figured it must have been a later episode I'd seen.



So Arrested Development wasn't the unbearable yelling show after all, but it was boring and forced, and we didn't watch more than the first two episodes.

Amazing.

Can't Get Off My Joni Jag.

To Have Survived.

I learned yesterday that a dear friend, who is in his mid-thirties, recently became HIV+. A man I am seeing (also in his mid-thirties), on our first date when we were having the "HIV conversation," expressed real surprise when I told him I was negative, as if that is rare and shocking. I don't know the numbers, but I guess it must be uncommon to be a homosexual man over 40 and not have contracted HIV. I'm surprised myself. I was surprised when I had my first HIV test at 30, and I think I have been surprised every time since.

They used to say that we had survived, that we who had managed to avoid HIV infection were survivors. But since the mid-nineties people with HIV survive. Their lives are changed dramatically, but, in some very meaningful way, most of them do survive. So what are we now? Escapees? Fugitives?