Chaos Butterfly

I gleefully admit to being a relatively eccentric individual with hobbies some might think are weird.

For instance, sports make my eyes roll back in my head… but I am completely captivated by the Black plague of the 1340’s. My favorite book The Great Mortality by John Kelly is about the societal effects of the great plague and I have read it cover to cover at least 7 times. It is an absolutely fascinating book and, odd as it may sound, it is a very light read.

My husband chuckles when I tell him that I am feeling blue and am going to read about the plague to cheer myself up, but when I read about how people persevered in the face of such staggering circumstances it does give me hope.

There was one small city which lost 9,000 people in one month, an average of 300 people per day.
When I think about the SARS epidemic and how something like only 18 American’s died nationwide during the entire “epidemic” I find myself sniffing in disdain for the average person’s panic over the situation. I think about how the news would look if a city as large as Cleveland, Ohio was losing 300 people a day to a devastating disease and what if the news was reporting similar stories in city after city. The panic which would ensue as cities which hadn’t been infected yet watched the news for evidence of their impending doom. I can’t help but imagine Donald Sutherland giving a progress report, a ‘la “The Puppet Master” or “Outbreak” with his chart and the red dots of infection quickly engulfing the entire country.

I bring this up because several stories about HIV infections and AIDS caught my eye on yahoo news today.

One was about how in some small poverty ridden state of India it is very common for a person to be completely ostracized when they are diagnosed with HIV. The story also told of how their families were also ostracized in some instances, and how they couldn’t get priests to perform funerals, or even someone to cremate the body.

The next article I read was about how there is this wonderful test for HIV which requires only the painless swab of a cheek and 20 minutes to determine if a person has HIV and how the CDC recommended that all emergency rooms offer the test to anyone who comes in for treatment, regardless of why they were in the emergency room, but there wasn’t funding for the program and insurance companies refuse to pay for it.

There was another article that reported on a study where they found out a lot of people don’t think AIDS is fatal. AIDS is always fatal. How can people today not know that? It is fortunate that with modern medicine it is possible to keep people with HIV from progressing to full blown AIDS for years, but once it becomes AIDS it is always fatal. In the US AIDS is reasonably under control, but the disease is still spreading like wildfire across Africa and Asia. China denies it has invaded its shores. The leaders of Iran deny that there are homosexuals, so I can only imagine what their reaction to the spread of HIV and AIDS is. India, as I mentioned above, has its own problems with the disease. South Africa has an infection rate of something like 17%. In the 2005 about 13.4% of the population of the United States of America was made up of people of African descent, and about 4.2% of the population was made up of people of Asian descent. The AIDS epidemic in South Africa is the equivalent of every person of Asian or African descent in the US in 2005 having been diagnosed with AIDS. Think about that. Think about how often you pass someone of African or Asian descent just walking down the street or eating in a restaurant.

I suppose I shouldn’t be dismayed by the lack of information or the lack of coverage the disease gets in America. This willful ignorance of the real problem at hand is pervasive through out our society. American’s can barely be bothered to think about the tragedy we have created in Iraq, where the equivalent of the 9/11 attacks happen just about every week or so.

It is a great tragedy that this disease which is completely preventable, still rampages across the globe in a gleeful shroud of ignorance and malice.

The “Religious Right” advocates teaching “Abstinence or else”TM, and distributes false information about the effectiveness of condoms.

Last year there was some Congressman who announced he got HIV from some medical procedure, but was afraid to tell anyone because he knew “no one from my church would understand.”

Is that really what Jesus would do? Lie and then tell someone it’s their own fault for not following his advice to keep their pants on? Would he look at the death tolls in Africa and think “Eh, it’s not in my neighborhood. Besides, they aren’t real and their suffering isn’t real because they don’t look like me and they don’t believe the same things I do and they didn’t keep their pants on like I told them.”

And still the death tolls rise.

I am at Disney's Whore House in Orlando for a week long CPE course.

I am in a conference room with about 43 people. that's 43 live and breathing people.
Someone asked a questions and the moderator said "We'll talk about that off-line."

I ask you - off what line?

I know what he meant, but it just annoys me. Seriously, I don't think he realizes he can't talk off-line because we were never on-line. And it really isn't the same as saying "We'll discuss this on a break."

I wonder if other people do this during meetings.

Seriously, this bothers me more then "irregardless" which is pretty damn awful.

Ah well.

a typical interesection

My company sent me to India last week for an audit.
As anyone who has spoken to me in the last two months knows, I was an anxiety ridden mess over the prospect of having to visit India. Having to get vaccinated didn't help, because I hate needles.

As it happens, I enjoyed my trip to India and wouldn't mind going back. We stayed at the Taj Residency in Bangalore, which may have had the best breakfast buffet I've ever had, and the food overall was very good.

I feel the need to admit that I didn't eat anywhere but the hotel. I was warned against trying to be adventurous when it came to eating in India. Perhaps I overly erred on the side of caution, but on the otherhand I didn't get sick on the trip.

The main reason for the post was to show off my best picture from the trip.
I wanted to try and capture the chaos that is Bangalore traffic, which is hard to do with the little camera I have. My husband thought this one turned out well so have a gander.

By the way, that traffic is squeezed into three lanes.

I was walking back to my office today after picking up lunch at quasi-fast food joint in downtown Cleveland today. It is a journey I make fairly regularly and is about a 1 – 2 block walk. There is usually a panhandler asking for money about 20 feet away from the door as one leaves the restaurant.

For some reason, seeing him today made me think of those awful debit card commercials where there is pleasant music and everything is running like a little assembly line in a shop until someone tries to pay for their purchase with cash and the whole thing comes to a screeching stop. Well I’ll get back to the commercial in a moment. Just keep it in the back of your mind.

Developing a personal financial plan requires some skills similar to going on a healthy diet. You need to track where your money is going (keep a food diary); determine what you can reasonably spend in a week (how many calories a day you can eat); figure out how you are going to spend the money allotted (what can you eat for those calories); only bring enough cash for your daily allocation of spending (pack a lunch); etc.

A few years ago I was struggling to pay off student loans and keep the debt collectors happy. I started carrying my “allowance” in an envelope. It was enough money to pay for the weeks parking and lunch. If I was a goose and splurged at the beginning of the week, I might have to skip lunch on Friday type of thing. As I became better at controlling my spending I stopped using the envelope.

Lately I have been putting all of my purchases on my Amazon visa. I get $25 gift certificates in the mail for doing this. I like getting gift certificates. As a result I carry a whole lot less cash then I had previously. I figure I can just go to the ATM if something comes up requiring cash.

In the commercial mentioned above I would be one of the happy little workers keeping the assembly line running smoothly.

I was thinking of that commercial today as I paid for my lunch. I even had the song “Brazil” going through my head as I left the restaurant and passed the panhandler. Then my thoughts came to a screeching halt.

Both the government and the credit/debit card companies would prefer it if we did every financial transaction with plastic. It would enable the government to track how we spend every penny, enabling them to tax us more efficiently and do the whole “Big Brother” routine, and the credit/debit card companies would be able to charge us, and the vendors, fees which are their real source of revenue. Aside from the sinister aspects inherent in the system, it is a fairly convenient way to buy things.

Which brings me back to the panhandler and the stupid commercial.

Back in the day when I was doing envelope budgeting, I would sometimes give the friendly homeless guy a dollar or two. If it had been a good week and it was Friday, and I was feeling really flush, I occasionally gave him $5 so he could get a hot meal at McDonald’s. We went to the same food court, so I knew he was really buying food with it.

Even if I had wanted to, I could not have given the panhandler any cash today. I knew where I was going for lunch when I left my office and had deliberately only brought my credit card with me. It’s light, it’s handy, takes up very little space in the pocket and the restaurant was only 1 – 2 blocks away.

If the utopia portrayed in the commercial comes to fruition, what happens to the beggars?

It isn’t like they are going to have little credit card machines they can run your charity through.

Also, I think the more affluent a person becomes the less likely they will be to carry cash on them. In futuristic sci-fi movies only criminals carry cash. If that really becomes the norm in the future then what happens to the panhandlers?

I get that some people don’t think that is a problem and think having the panhandlers going away is a feature of having a plastic economy. But seriously, being poor is not an easy adventure. Being homeless isn’t some lark for the vast majority of people. (There is the occasional grunge rocker who is doing homeless for his art, but I think his kind are statistical aberrations who should be discounted from the population of homeless people for purposes of aid proposals.)

Well that was my big thought for the day. Cash enables charity; charity is good for your soul. Plastic makes for plastic people; plastic people have no soul.

I can't believe it is already March. Heck, it’s almost April. I thought surely I had written something since New Year's Day.

I've been tagged for another Blog game. Something about books and the fifth paragraph on page 123, or some such direction. As one of those people who has on average 4 - 5 books going at a time, I need to figure out which book to use. I already checked my favorite book, but it didn't have a fifth paragraph on that page... Ah well, one down 4 more to go. I wonder if this is considered cheating.