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LiveJournal Supports AIDS Awareness
In honor of AIDS Awareness month, LJ has added a charitable vgift to the Gift Shop. This is a wonderful way to send a gift that keeps on giving. For each red ribbon you purchase for $3.99, LJ will donate 100 percent of gross proceeds (LJ will cover the processing fees) to amfAR (the Foundation for AIDS Research), dedicated to ending the global AIDS epidemic through innovative research.
LJ thanks you for helping make a difference.
Today, Wednesday, December 1, is the twenty-third annual recognition of World AIDS Day. World AIDS Day began in 1988 as a means of raising money and awareness about HIV and AIDS, fighting prejudice against those who are HIV positive or who have AIDS, and improving HIV and AIDS education.
This year’s theme is Universal Access and Human Rights. Leaders around the globe acknowledge as fundamental human rights access to HIV and AIDS treatment, prevention, and care. Violations of these rights put marginalized groups at greater risk of contracting HIV and being discriminated against for being HIV-positive or having AIDS.
Although there has been promising news recently about potential preventative medication, it’s important to recognize that AIDS hasn’t gone away. According to UNAIDS, approximately 33.3 million people are living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. In 2009, as many as 2.6 million people became infected with the virus, and approximately 1.8 million people died from illness and complications related to AIDS.
You can learn more by visiting the World AIDS Campaign page.
What else can you do? Help raise awareness by wearing a red ribbon in memory of the more than 25 million people lost to AIDS since the epidemic began, and in recognition of those living today with HIV. Find activities in your area, including candlelight vigils, art shows, marches, and religious services.
In honor of my late father’s birthday today, I posted five new paintings to the One Word Art gallery.
And in honor of Gary’s participation in Nashville AIDS Walk, fifty percent of any One Word Art painting sold between now and September 30 will be donated to his team. You can do good and own art–or gift it to a friend!
The heat: It is draining me.
Yesterday, we found out we lost a friend, who died unexpectedly. Not long after we moved to Houston, we had the good luck to meet a group of terrific people who I worked with at the bookstore. Through them, we met Don. During many of our early years of friendship, he was finishing his doctoral work and writing his dissertation, and his acknowledgments when it was published included Tom and me in that little group who Don had dubbed “the Disgruntled Liberals Club.” Don and the other “club” members were part of my support system when I lost friends to AIDS, and they were among the most enthusiastic of our friends when the Tims, Jim, and I began publishing books. It’s hard to believe that when we get together in the future, Don’s big laugh and many stories won’t be heard around the table. I feel this acutely for his best friend Robin, maybe a little more today because it’s the eighteenth anniversary of Steve R’s death, which just doesn’t seem possible. Clichéd though it may sound, time does heal, but it doesn’t ever diminish the magic and memories of a profound friendship. I’m thankful for all the ones I’ve known and still celebrate.
The heat, the mood–they both made me grateful when Tim suggested we catch a matinee of Sex and the City 2. Considering the less than stellar reviews, I figured it would at least be a diversion. Instead, I loved the movie! I thought it was better than the first one, and I was more than happy to land in Carrie Bradshaw’s well-shod world once again.
Whatever, critics.
Today, I also finished the thank-you card I was working on, submitted a sketch to Lindsey’s Bravo challenge site–where I was quite impressed by the other submissions!–and began another 4×6-inch canvas to eventually add to my One Word Art site.
Current Photo Friday theme: Arranged
‘Nathan, Dan, Lindsey, Rhonda
The shirt is part of RED, a campaign to help eliminate AIDS in Africa.
Pictured on the mantel is a goat. A goat that came to The Compound some time back via a lonely goatherd named Famous Author Rob Byrnes. The goat sings “The Lonely Goatherd” from The Sound of Music in a Julie Andrews voice. It’s an event SO MOVING that it compels even those reserved Canadians to burst into song. Take that, Glee.
I should add that the goat is sold by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Even when FARB is bad, he’s good.
I always make Rhonda feel REALLY great when I tell her that her birthday–May 4–is the day Jeff died in 1995. Because that’s the kind of friend I am! In actuality, though that time was a dark one, only two years afterward, I met Rhonda online, and here we are thirteen years later, “in real life” friends, as they say, and part of a group of people who enjoy and cherish one another, most of whom I didn’t know existed in 1995. Celebrating Rhonda’s birthday while remembering Jeff reminds me what brilliant experiences and people may await me after bad times. No matter what happens, there’s always hope that eventually, someone could make a Pixie Bear on craft night.
I’m assuming–and I hope I’m right, because I have no cake baked!–that Rhonda will be blowing out candles at The Compound while the Canadians are here. And that’s SO SOON. I hope the jasmine is still blooming for y’all, because I was outside earlier inhaling the aroma. Awesome.
One of the daisies Tim got for The Compound looked especially lovely today. I’m presenting it here as a gift to ‘Nathan, because it’s orange and for another reason I think he’ll understand.
Today is also Star Wars day, which I only discovered last year, I think: May the fourth be with you. Once again, in regard to balance, this reminds me to laugh in spite of the other event that this date signifies: the Kent State shootings in 1970. In February of this year, the site where four students died and nine were wounded was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Usually this doesn’t happen for more than fifty years after an event, but the application offered a compelling case for registering the site. One of the applicants, Kent State Professor Emeritus Jerry Lewis, was acting as a faculty marshall on that spring day in 1970. Today, Amanda provided a link to a radio interview with Dr. Lewis that was really good. Thank you for that, Amanda.
Among the things Dr. Lewis shared was an excerpt from an article written this year by Elaine Holstein. You probably don’t recognize her name, but if you’ve ever read an article about Kent State, you’ve seen her son Jeff Miller in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken of him that day; at age twenty, he lay dead on the ground with an anguished fourteen-year-old girl kneeling next to him, her arms outstretched.
I’d like to repeat the quote from Mrs. Holstein that Dr. Lewis shared:
…once in a while, I wonder about my son Jeff’s future that had so needlessly been cut short.
What would he have been like now, at age 60? What sort of career would he have had? Would he have married? And what about those other grandchildren that my husband and I might have enjoyed?
Now, as I watch the news on TV each night, I deplore the increasing ugliness of politics, and I’m afraid. I know too well what can happen when hatred takes over.
Please, let us lower the volume and be civil toward one another.
For Jeff’s sake. And for all of ours.
Every life has its celebrations and losses, its joys and heartbreaks. I believe each time we’re willing to see that truth in the lives of others, even those from whom we feel different, we make civility more possible–and we nourish our own souls.
Rhonda, your date is a profound one–and this crazy world is better because you’re in it. Happy birthday.
I was called for jury duty the other day. I didn’t get picked. I didn’t even get called to a panel for the voire dire process. Several cases were settled and I was among prospective jurors sent home. Doesn’t matter to me whether I serve or not; I’m not a jury duty hater. I was amused when the bailiff made an announcement that someone’s car was in a judge’s space on the third floor of the parking garage and it would behoove that person to move the car ASAP. I guess it’s not good to piss off a judge. It’s also apparently a bad idea to piss off a veterinarian.
I shot that photo when Tim and I played fashion photographer to some Scout’s Honor dogs last week. They were saved from death row and OMG, CUTEST DOGS EVER. If you want to see some of their happy faces, check out the Scout’s Honor Flickr group where we share their photos. I’m assuming at least some of them, along with other great dogs, will be available at this weekend’s Scout’s Honor Adoption Day in the Heights, Saturday, May 1, from 10am to 3pm, at 1128 Heights Boulevard (between 11th and 12th Streets), Houston.
Just to entice you, a favorite of my photos:
April 28 is the birthday of my late friend Steve R, and as I have every year since he died, I enjoyed chocolate cake with friends. That’s what he did on his last birthday in the hospital in 1992, and I love honoring his life each year with the laughter and good feelings that exist among friends. The group around the table may change from year to year, but he’s always remembered.
However, I think you should know that anticipation can lead to jazz hands:
Kathy S, Tim, and Lindsey
Among our Christmas gifts from my sister Debby was a beautiful fantasy puzzle that Tom finished last week with very little help from the rest of us (although Lindsey, puzzle hater, did place three pieces, and I swooped in when all the hard work was done and found some key pieces to make myself look clever):
I shot this photo before I took it apart. I’m sending it and the Lord of the Rings puzzle we got last year from Rob E to Debby for her to do while recovering from back surgery. Because back surgery is not torturous enough. =) Get well soon to my favorite sister!
Comment on this entry and I’ll give you a color. Then you have to find ten things that you love of that color.
I thought some of you might like to see the photos I submitted to the Montrose Softball League’s Pranksters Art and Photography Show “The Contemporary Woman.” The first photo, Mounted Patrol, hung in the show. It and the other two photos will be part of Pranksters’ future book compilation of the show’s works. Sales of the art and photos benefit Aids Foundation Houston – Camp Hope, Bering Omega Community Services, and Live Consortium.
I’ve also included my statements that were submitted with the photos.