tough week

I've been recovering all week from a cold that hung over me like fog in San Francisco. It's mostly gone, though I still have a coughing fit here and there. Bouncing around from work to errands to sleep while in a constant sickly-daze takes a lot out of you, and after work yesterday I came home and went to bed at 3:30 in the afternoon.

I woke up about five hours later and got burritos with my roommate. As we walked back in, my phone rang.

My best friend delivered the news that his ex, Manny, had died the night before. I wish I could say it was a shocking thing, but honestly, it wasn't. Manny had been slowly committing suicide for the past two years.

As a teenager, he developed a rather nasty drug and alcohol habit and essentially tore his insides to shreds. After one night too many in an ER, he pulled himself together and learned about the miracle of moderation. He dropped the hard stuff entirely and learned how to limit himself on the legal stuff. It was quite impressive, considering his chosen career as a sommelier. I met him a few weeks after N started dating him, and instantly liked the guy. As time went by, he became an extension of my best friend -- teaching me all about wine, meeting up for dinner, and being an all-around supportive, caring person.

Shortly after I left town, it started to go downhill. He had left his stable job to work at a posh private club that was just opening. After a disastrous start the club, bleeding money, let Manny go since they couldn't afford his paycheck. And that's where it began. His moderation went out the window. Certain forbidden items suddenly sprang up again.

He returned to some level of stability when he landed a new job, but six months later he was caught stealing from the wine cellar. It just got worse from there, until he was quaffing two liters of vodka a day, bouncing from job to job... including one for Gordon Ramsay. Gordon shoved him out the door after three days.

N couldn't take it anymore. He was paying the rent, the bills, and Manny was doing nothing but slowly self-destructing. Finally, after supporting him for six months like this, N presented an ultimatum... which was not met, and decided to break the lease.

The last time I saw Manny was shortly after this. He had dried blood around his nostrils and white powder in his nose. He was angry at N, and made a clumsy pass at me in his inebriated state. Two weeks later, he left New York and moved back in with his mother in Las Vegas.

Every once in a while we'd hear updates about how he was doing... it was always a roller coaster, and he never quite got it back together. The last two years were punctuated by hospital visits as one by one his internal organs signaled distress until this week when, finally, his liver and kidneys gave out for good. He passed away on Friday night.

I've been dealing with this through stunned silence. Perhaps it is that I have been mourning the loss of my friend for the past two years, and a sense of finality is more of a relief than anything else. I miss my friend a lot though, and I choose to remember the supportive, funny, goofy spirit I met at first rather than the broken and weak man he became.

Goodbye, Manny. I hope you have found peace again.

recommendations

First off, a few blogs I've stumbled on recently that make me laugh:

Cake Wrecks -- professionally made cakes that have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

It's Lovely! I'll Take It! -- culling only the very best from real estate listings on the Internet

Photoshop Disasters -- Photoshop is a fantastic program ... in the right hands. In the wrong ones, it's a cavalcade of deformity!

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And following up on the diplomatic work question... well, it kind of worked itself out. Fay came to town and knocked a lot of the plans we'd made off kilter. I made my concerns known with what we proceeded with, and they were heeded.

I'm finally beginning to shake off this cold, too. Took long enough!

business diplomacy question...

So... how do you gently object to a plan agreed on by the rest of the team that you just know is a terrible, terrible idea?

I don't want to seem like I'm just being contrary, and I don't really even have anything to back up my objections beyond gut instinct... I'd just rather not be associated with this fumble in the making.

tired...

I've shifted over to the morning shift for a little while at work, which means setting an alarm clock for 3:30am. That's some tough stuff, there.

And so far I'm surviving it. I almost feel like I might be a closet morning person, but having to go to bed by 7 or 8 pm can be a little stifling at times. Tomorrow I get to sleep in, relatively, since I don't have to be in until 10am... which means I can go do something fun tonight if I like. It's trivia night and I'd really like to go (I seem to do quite well on Tuesdays... three of the four times I've placed were on Tuesday), but oddly enough I don't feel like I have enough energy to sit still and think for two hours. Lying on the couch, vacating my mind while watching Big Brother and munching on pizza ordered in sounds far, far more appealing at this one moment in time... but that's terribly anti-social of me, isn't it? I'll take a shower and see if that invigorates me.

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I've been meaning to post this but just never found a moment. Gotta give credit where credit is due, and many were quite surprised when George W. Bush signed off on this... read:

US triples AIDS funds for poor countries

"US President George W Bush has signed legislation tripling funds to fight the killer diseases of AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in the world's poorest countries, mainly in Africa.

Congress approved a package earlier this month which lifted funding for the five-year program from $US15 billion ($A15.76 billion), set in 2003, to the $US48 billion ($A50.44 billion) signed into law by Bush.



The new program drops a requirement for one-third of the anti-AIDS funds to be used to promote sexual abstinence and lifts a ban on HIV-positive foreigners entering the United States.

Eric Friedman, the senior global health policy advisor for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), praised the bill for lifting the travel ban on HIV-positive visitors, saying it had "been an embarrassment to this country for many years".

Gay rights group, Human Rights Campaign, also hailed the repeal of the US-entry ban on HIV-positive visitors and immigrants, which has stood since 1987.

"We appreciate the president signing the repeal of this unjust and sweeping policy that deems HIV-positive individuals inadmissible to the United States," said Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese.

"The HIV travel and immigration ban performs no public health service, is unnecessary and ineffective," he added.

There's a hitch, though -- this change only updates the immigration code to excise the ban, which was signed in 1993 by Clinton (interesting backstory on that, too, which I won't get into right now). The original regulatory ban through the Department of Health and Human Services remains in tact, exactly as was enacted by Reagan in 1987, and can still be enforced.

So while this is still only a change made on paper at this point, it's a step in the right direction.

Good work, George.

When was the last time someone said that to ya?