VACCINES

This is off topic but I got pissed off reading this today. I feel like the US press has totally dropped the ball on this issue. This is a photo of an australian girl getting a free vaccine for HPV this year from the guy who invented it (it's called Gardasil, he's australian's man of the year this year because of it). Starting in april, all the 13 year old school girls in australia will get it. While other countries are scrambling to get their populations totally vaccinated for HPV, we're still arguing about it. American religious groups apparently know better than the millions of christians in europe and the pacific. They've figured out that STDs are a good thing for society, and even worth a couple of thousand woman a year dying of cancer. I think it's pretty clear that reaction would be different if the drug was approved for men (it will be eventually), so this is a feminist issue as well. Children used to get Polio from kissing among other ways, maybe we should never have cured it so we'd all grow up shit scared of dying if we kissed someone in junior high school. Nothing like paralysis and a slow death to teach those nasty little 7th grade sluts a lesson.

Anyway, women should know that this vaccine is availible here in the US. Even if only because it was squeezed past the christians as a "cancer vaccine." It is extremely effective and not dangerous as far vaccines go. If you're 26 or younger and plan on being single in the next ten years, I would demand it from your doctor and make your parents pay for it. HPV and herpes are already at epidemic proportions. Among the lower socioeconomic class in the inner city, more than 50% of the population tests positive for herpes. The general white community is probably fast approaching 25% and accelerating. I should stress that herpes is really nowhere near as big a deal as people make of it; most people don't even have a single symptom. I'm just making the point that these diseases are rampant and out of control. HPV has a variety of different strains that differ in danger. And it's believed that most of the infections are cleared after a period of time ranging from months to years. But it wouldn't be crazy to estimiate that 25% of people are infected with a strain that causes either cervical cancer, cervical displasia, or little bumps outside and/or inside your body. If you're a woman living in new york in your twenties, there is a very significant chance that your next boyfriend, even if he's a nice clean guy with relatively few partners and never displayed symptoms of anything, will give you something. That's what an epidemic is. This vaccine will protect nearly all the women that get it from getting genital warts or cervical cancer. Probably even women that have already been sexually active for a long time. It seems worth it to me. I know 4 friends who've gotten abnormal pap-smears back and ended up getting leeps. That's where they stick a big microscope down there and burn out a portion of cervical tissue. They were pretty upset and it upsets me that they didn't need to go through with that. This vaccine only protects from the worst strains of HPV. So abnormal pap-smears from an HPV infection will still occur but a vaccinated woman can feel very confident she hasn't been infected with a strain of HPV that will end up giving her cancer or cervical procedures that will complicate pregnancy. Unlike most things in life, this vaccine is, excluding religious nitwits, a no-brainer.

YIKES

Some of my work is finally coming out this month. I shot a scary sex doctor thing for maxim. This is virginia standing in while I tested lights doing her best to look scary.

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EVERYONE'S QUICK WITH THE ADVICE

Everyone's got advice for me these days. One secret of life that I've had to learn painfully is: be careful who you listen to. People are quick with bad advice even if they mean well. Good advice comes from people who've thought a lot about what you're thinking about. You usually have to ask for it and be in a position to take some bruises. Ex-girlfriends, oddly enough, are good to solicit from. Especially if you've pissed them off at some point, which I inevitably do. During that period of hating your guts, they will have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about what a horrible person you are and cataloging everything you've ever done wrong in your entire life. This on a level that you're worst enemies couldn't even begin to compete with. Lucky for me I'm pretty much a total jackass. So there is a weath of intricate knowledge of my personal inabilities and flaws shared by a variety of women. Furthermore, because I'm so used to taking critisism from them, I don't mind it. And they love you, you know, that's why they were so mad at you in the first place. I went to lunch with my ex-girlfriend who has a quick british sense of humor and her friend in the industry I'm thinking of getting into (the industry that is, not her) At some point, they discussed me in third person as if I could only understand american and not british:

Friend: Do you think he's good enough?"
Ex-girlfriend: "Never stopped him before."

Ha ha. Hmmm, I thought it was funny if you don't. I'm very happy to have friends and girlfriends that are frank with me. I would be ten-times the rich kid asshole I am otherwise.

I'm beginning to think there are lots of secrets to life; people just don't talk about them much because they're terribly disappointing. Always negative-- what you can't do--they're hard to appreciate. One of them is that the only people who really know what they're doing are lunatics and cowards. The rest of us are never quite sure. Scholarship isn't a process of gaining more knowledge as much as it's a process of increasing the visability you have over the endless knowledge that you don't have. Kind of like funnels in high school. You get down on your knees and start gurgling away but, just as you start to make some progress, some asshole from your track team sneaks his hand up starts pouring in a forty of budweiser. You drink until you lose it and blow beer all over the kitchen. I remember Chris Perry's face up there holding that beer with a crazy grin. He was out of his mind on LSD with pupils like shotputs, cocking his head around like a madman.

I wonder what happened to him and Andre. I wonder if high school kids still get fucked up and jump down elevator shafts. I wonder if they narrowly escape death by ripping all the skin off their hands. I doubt it. Probably they just stick to being obnoxious. There is a standard set of mannerisms developed by rich kids to deal with the world around them. It's employed heavily by those in upper class private and boarding schools. The recipe is 8 parts narcisissm and 2 parts Pseudoliberal-Aristocratic-Racist-Intellectual-Soliloquy. It's a long term but it has a catchy abeviation. It refers to a charatible contibution that one makes spending a part of their time thinking about other people. This might include serious policy discussions between 16 year olds on what's wrong with the black community. Or frequent contributions to a general algorithm used to size people up by race and geographic background. Paris Hilton, for instance, went to a somewhat infamous school for rich kids that couldn't get into the more difficult high schools in new york. When she was on SNL, Tina Fey said they took bets as to whether Paris would ask a personal question of anyone on the cast like "how are you?" Most of them lost when she suddenly took notice of Maya Rudolf and asked, "is she like italian?" Poor Paris. We are more similar than I'd like to believe. I'm sad she's such a dick. I think women like that meet so few female friends or boyfriends that challenge them, so they become cowards and totally isolated from a support structure of role models and criticism that would promote more dynamic behavior. I blame her wimpy boyfriends and crummy immature idiot entourage who let her act that way. Who don't care enough about her to risk their relationship with her to question anything she does. It is good to have friends that care about you enough to speak to you frankly and who you care about enough to listen to. I'm very happy to have them.

D-TOWN DOUBLE-A

Coming soon...

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WHOO HOOO

My favorite quotes of today are all from Sarafina:

"Cool, tim harrington is totally gonna sweat on our cellphones, i bet
thats the "art."

"omg dewars"

THIS ABOVE ALL... AND ALL
LIFUS INTERRUPTUS

I reread Hamlet on the bus this week because I'm apparently reading books from high school these days. Last month I reread 1984 which is scarier than ever both in terms of the bush administration and these muslim countries. I was inspired to rekindle my contempt for crummy people for if not stopped they do have a great impact. And to fight for what I want. I just finished an interview week for a job. I'm old so I need to get out of school and do something. At this point I may well just get a master's degree and leave. How about strategic in house consulting? Not good right. But they use every opportunity to refer to the place as a "think tank." I wondered if you need to get a license to get that title. It sounds so much better than consulting. That's because, conservative politicians not withstanding, people will think you must be a genius if you work there. Pretty neat trick actually. Everyone likes to work "oh down at the old think tank, where else?" It's like my friend who's literally a rocket scientist at cal tech. It was actually pretty cool. But a lot of it was sort of the same problem I have with science. Not the job, the people. There are smart people and then there are fake smart people. People who have very little going on in life and have nothing better to do but work really hard. They're not really smart and innovative as much as they're just dorks. But some of the guys in the office were calm and brilliant. Like where they ask you a question and you think you've answered it well, but then they've thought about it way more than you and have a brilliant opinion. I like to work with people smarter and more interesting than me which is what got me into this stupid endless school thing in the first place. That worked out to some extent. My friends Luke, Gaorav, Kelly and Jared are some of the best people I'll probably ever meet. (Luke was an iPod sillouette for halloween complete with black makup, a glowing fake iPod and fiber optic headphones he built all himself. He's artistic, writes at a publishable level, knows crazy things like kung fu and got into a shotgun fight with crackheads when he was living off campus at hopkins. And he's a really funny nice guy).

I think my mistake was not to realize that there are great people everywhere. I have an ex-girlfriend who went to NCSA for dance. Dance school is insanely hard work and she was working at a restaurant and yet she had time to do tons of brilliant shit. From artwork to reading...lots and lots of reading. I'm not sure how many literature classes she's even taken in her life but I quickly realized that her self-deprecating politeness about my feeble comments on what she was reading were just her being nice. The girl literally reads a book everyday. Maybe more. Really good books. She's read everything, has a brilliant sense of style and taste and she's a sweet, wonderful, good person with a pierced right nipple...nice right. Her friends were smart too. I've never felt dumber than hanging out with those girls. It was great. Being smart didn't stop them from having a personality and something to say. Imagine that. They were also exciting and fun to be around. I need to do something for a living that I'm not just good at but passionate about. And it turns out I'm passionate about the people I'm around as much as what I do. My experience at the lab I'm working at has been especially awful. I joined it with promises that we were going to be an interesting transcription lab. Instead, the professor I work for filled the place with his cronies who need a job and mostly unqualified people. It was beyond my wildest dreams of how unintellectual a science lab could be. And I'm noticing that science in general is a dumping ground for people who like to be alone a lot and are not very socially competent. They claim that they love the work but really, they couldn't make it doing anything else because they're the type more likely to be demoted to the basement than get the key to the executive bathroom.

When I was in college I never really hung out with scientists. I had a bunch of friends from english class because there were really hot girls in my english classes. And I made some life long friends with a variety of people I met through where I lived but I guess I didn't exactly chit chat in advanced biology lecture. And the labs I worked in were pretty special apparently, because I met some kick ass people. Most of whom left science I might add and thought I was stupid to go to grad school. The people in my lab now and much of the graduate school have personalities that range from sawdust to driftwood. Sometimes if I'm lucky I get a dead moth. Kind of like getting a lump of coal in your office mailbox everyday. And if I thought biologists were barely breathing, medical students are even worse. They've got the deadly combination of social skills and having nothing whatsoever to say. Where do people that boring come from. I've met some of their parents. They breed that way. These people could almost stop time if they were in the same room together and no one was there to see it. They're like that couple in Annie Hall that Woody accosts on the street saying "You look like a really happy couple. Are you?" They respond, yes. "So how do you account for it." The woman responds, "well, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say." And the man chimes in "And I'm exactly the same way."

I grew up in a jewish family with novelists, artists, comedians, intellectuals. Up until now I was the only scientist and I'm beginning to understand why. And I grew up in New York. I'm used to people being entertaining. Not to mention good and stand up types. I don't know if science/medical people are just bitter at the world for a particularly embarrassing weggie in high school gym class or they're just plain emotionally limited. I'm not asking for much, I just want to spend my time working with a team of people who lived a little. Doctors who don't make fun of their aids patients for instance. People who know something, anything, about life. Hang around with boring people all day and you start to become one. It's a horrible experience.

I don't know what I'm going to do for a living. Photography is something I've always been obsessed with without even thinking to take it seriously for a long time. But it's so hard to do really well and I'm constantly feeling that I'll never produce anything good enough. And there are so many insanely talented people in commercial art. I feel like I can never take a great picture. But I do love portraits and fashion photography. I'm probably one of the only strait men in the doctors office who flips though vogue over newsweek. And while I'm not at all happy with my photo skills compared to my peers, I've noticed a lot of them (don't tell anyone but especially in fashion photography) are just in it because they want to fuck hot chicks. Most models are like nineteen, or sixteen. It sounds great but they're so young. I used to work for a fashion photographer who's girlfriend was 19 and they had been dating for 4 years. He's over 30, and she's from St. Petersburg. I barely have anything to say to 23 year olds, I don't know how he does that but it's weird. Anyway, I do fine. The last thing I need is more women to hit on. I don't care if I end up some lowly photo editor at Sad-Sac magazine with no hoopla. Sounds pretty fun actually.

I wouldn't rule out a fancy job-job either. I found out that, strangely enough, I liked midtown. I liked feeling well dressed and taking what I do seriously. Walking out to get lunch was fun and I eyed the well dressed people like a bourgeois feral child recently decamped from my jungle rearing at the hoofs of heard animals. People on the street looked good, like pretty, crisp flowers in bloom. All different colors and types. Their heads were up, their feet in a strong gate. They seemed to have a strange sense about them that was hard to nail down at first. On the line for my delicious and affordable japanese talkout (where I work people have no taste and all the nearby food is horrible), I had an overwhelming feeling that the people around me were comfortable in their own skin. Not so much that they were polarizingly happy or especially wonderful but they were complete people. That they could walk into any room full of people and not cower and feel inadequate. That they lacked a deep paranoid insecurity that I've sadly come to expect.