Thought for the day: Courage

     I have tried two seperate times to post about this topic and for some reason it has not worked--maybe it a sign <lol>! Anyway, first some famous thoughts on courage.....

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Mark Twain

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Winston Churchill

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
In my opinion courage has been the one factor that I have felt is lacking and has been lacking my entire life but a very good friend of mine John Fricke, thinks I am out of my mind by saying that.  It is opinion that having lived twenty years with AIDS takes incredible courage as well as surviving some of the out right shit that has happened in my life.

Courage is the ability to stand up and speak honestly, openly, truthfully and yes my readers even brutally if that is what is needed to handle the situation.  Courage is facing the unknown with grace, style, nerves of steel and yes even some hope, what I find amazing is that when it comes to this particular topic about myself this is where I am the hardest on myself.

I have some friends who think overall I am to hard on myself but I know what I want and right now I am not so exactly sure I have it.  I want to be a certain way, look a certain way, live a certain way and dare I say yes even love a certain way and I am not just speaking romantically love either.

It takes courage to admit those things, it has taken courage to face this bitch of a disease that has until the last two years ruled my life and you no something--I say no more!  I can not and will not live another twenty years or more with this disease the way I have lived the last twenty, just not going to happen---period.

I encourage you to find your courage, embrace it, feed it and then my friend use it to face whatever it is that is standing in your way of being who and what you really are at your core.

Thought of the day---- Elie Wiesel" "Night"

I just began reading tonight Elie Wiesel's "Night" and I want to take the time to blog my thoughts here on passages that I find moving, relate-able and just down right terrifying.  I am not sure where this journey talking about this book is going to take us as I am four pages into it and already wanting to talk to an audience that I know will listen, based on the number of readers I have.

" Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness.  I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them.  Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle.  It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language.  But how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy?.... Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now, that his testimony would not be received .  After all it deals with an event that sprang from the darkest zone of man.  Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was.  Others will never know. BUT, wile they understand?

Why this book, why now?  In all honesty it goes back to a question I was asked a little over a month ago by a new friend over lunch.  Why or how do you feel you survived so long?  Meaning of course the upcoming 20 years with AIDS.  I was blown away no one had ever asked me that before, ever.  With that and being asked this week by a new therapist I started to see short term at school.  She asked if I was angry, sad, mad or any other emotional word because I had survived so long?  Again something I had never been asked before.

I am still not exactly sure of either answer, I just know that like Elie Wiesel I feel I HAVE to tell my story of AIDS, I have to tell the overall story of my life---the good , the bad, the ugly, the painful, the beautiful, the lovely, the romantic.  I am not saying it is anywhere near the story or the horrors Mr. Wiesel experienced during World War II and the Holocaust, but in my own life AIDS has been my generations Viral Holocaust and you know something it seems as if NO ONE IS TALKING!  No one is speaking, no one is being the new Paul Monette's or Randy Shilts'.  Why is this?  Is apathy so rampant?  Are we that burnout of thirty years of living with it?  Are there that too few long-term survivors left wanting to speak?  Would anyone listen?  Does AIDS matter to those not living with it?  What will the next thirty years bring? Could there even be survivors then that could recall those early years?  Why isn't seem like anyone is saving our history?Am I the only one who cares?

Thought of the day---More "Losing Julia"

"Happiness to me was lying in bed with at night during a thunderstorm and feeling warm and dry and knowing that my mother was in the next room".

"I used to curl up in bed with my dog and read him stores by candlelight."

"You read your dog stories?"

"He was a smart dog."

She smiled, then kicked away some leaves and sat down.  I sat across from her on a rock.

"Happiness is different for adults, don't you think?" she asked.  "Much too fleeting.  Like something you can't see if you stare right at it"

"I think for a lot of people happiness is just the absence of discomfort", I said

"That's not enough for me", she said".

So for today----What makes you happy?  Are you happy?  If not what would it take to give you happiness?  Is it much too fleeting?  Have you ever really ever been happy?

Thought for the day

"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension." Oliver Wendall Holmes

"I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday." President Abraham Lincoln

So what pearl of wisdom has been the life changing thing that has made you completely different?  Why not share it here so others can learn from where we have been as well?

Thought of the day...Love

From "Losing Julia" by Jonathan Hull.......

"Why does the longing for love have to be so acute, like desperate thirst?  Is it because love is wanting to be saved and we can never really be saved?  Maybe love is born of our fears.  Love is the heart's desire for a pain-killer; a tearful plea for a great big epidural.  Yes that's it: love is the only anesthesia that actually works.  And as people with broken hearts are really those who are just coming to, and if you've ever seen someone out of general anesthesia you know that it looks like the beginning of a broken heart.


But to find it and touch it and hold it!  What a relief, if only briefly, until the love wears off or slips through our hands.  Strange how love--that most fickle of emotions--creates the illusion of permanence right from the start, just as beauty, so fleeting and elusive, can seem timeless and infinite to behold.


If love doesn't triumph, it ought to.  For love is the one thing that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from lives wretched absurdity.  The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions."

So, have you ever deeply loved, as this passage suggest love is and can be?  Can love even conquer death?  As Cher asks "Do you believe in life after love"?  Is this kind of love out there for everyone?

Thought of the day

I am still reading--slowly I might add because of the amount of hmework as the semester comes to an end----"Losing Julia" by Jonathun Hull.  I also have been thinking about World AIDS Awareness day quite a bit here lately too.  What was I going to say, expound one and until I read the following passage I had no idea.  Even though this book is about World War I, I felt that this passage could be about any tragic event.......

"We walked among the rows simple white crosses that guarded a silence so absolute and dense it pressed against my eardrums like water at the bottoms of a very deep pool.  That one there , he was a new father and next to him, the last of three brotherskilled and that one there was to have been a poet and that one there a teacher and over there a great scientist and that one a writer and that one a priest and that one ther, there in the corner, well that one could have been you, oui?

Names, endless names impaled accusingly on endless white crosses. "I always think of their mothers," said Julia, holdiong herself as though she was cold, her arms crossed in front of her.  I remembered teh sound of men calling their mothers; how common it was, so that you cae to expect it. 

"Maybe they should bury everyone in the same cemetary," I said.  "All of them, so that people could visualize the toll.  Can you imagine it, millions and millions of headstones and crosees and Stars of David in row after row, with one war right next to the other?"

Can you simply imagine such a place, the effect it would have on our very planet? Or would it?

Thought for the day

Well today was another one of my crash days.  School, home, bed for 4 hours it just seems to happen everynow and then. I hate Fibromyalgia at times, really I do. Finals week is next week so there seems to be a lot of pressure this week with trying to get everything done, personally I will be gald when it is all over.  I really am going to need the break and spend some time doing something I really want to do.  I have some sewing I want to do, some painting and a room I would like to wallpaper.

Fashion wise its all I think about, all the time, fromt he minute I get up to the minute I fall asleep.  Have really been thinking of changing the utter focus to nothing but fashion, but part of me is worried about losing my Oz/Judy readers.  Than again maybe I have already lost them?  I have added direct links to some of my favorite web sites and some new ones I am finding as I would love this to be one of the places you stop when it comes to fashion and especially fashion with a gay flair.

The exquisite photograph is from an advertisment for Louis Vuitton using one of my favorite fashion idols "Madge", as her friends call her, and Madonna to the rest of us.  Personally the photograph is stunning and Madge never looked better.  Tune in tomorrow for another photograph of our Material Girl for Louis Vuitton.