Diva in Demand

The gremlins I work with are triumphing. The don’t get wet, don’t feed after dark, sick all the damn time gremlins. My co-workers are always sick. ALWAYS! And they usually blame it on their children. One came to work a few weeks ago after being gone for about a week and told us that she and her daughter both had red spots in the back of their throats and the doctor said it looked like hand, foot, mouth disease. Ain’t that what damn cows get! Amazingly enough, not only do they blame their children (who are all less than school age) but they say that it’s the fault of going to daycare. My great aunt runs a daycare and the children are always healthy. My girlfriend Kay’s mother also runs one….never has any problems. But somehow, these unclean gremlins send their kids to daycares where they keep getting sick.

Yeah…..right.

Usually I get here before anyone else and I take time in the morning to spray Lysol everywhere and Clorox down my work space. The damn gremlins are stronger than disenfectant y’all. I woke up this morning with a stuffy head and nose and a sore throat. I’m hot and clammy. I don’t feel good.

I hate gremlins.

Public vs. Private…

Exhausted and I had a conversation this past weekend about the Chicago Public School System. She is very serious about her children going to public school. I’m not particular either way. When we have kids my focus would be for them to have the best education possible and if that happens to be at a private school or out in the suburbs then so be it. This morning’s news contained a story about presidential kids attending school. Are you particular about whether your children go to public or private school?

Negotiation…

This morning I heard someone on the radio talking about HIV in African American women and her hope that we would become more empowered when it comes to negotiating condom use. HUH? *Insert confusion here…* What is negotiating condom use? How do you negotiate condom use? Why would you negotiate condom use? I must be missing something. Understand that epidemiologists attribute the increase in HIV among African American women to socioeconomic and demographic conditions specific to many African American communities. Black neighborhoods, they say, are more likely to be plagued by joblessness, poverty, drug use and a high ratio of women to men, a significant portion of whom cycle in and out of a prison system where the rate of HIV infection is estimated to be as much as 10 times higher than in the general population. And condom use is negotiable? Do you know that women’s reproductive biology puts them at greater risk of HIV compared to men. For purely biological reasons, a woman is about twice as likely as a man to contract HIV infection during unprotected vaginal intercourse with an infected partner. Moreover, a young woman is even more vulnerable to infection, due to her less mature reproductive tract. According to the 2000 census, blacks make up approximately 13% of the US population. However, in 2005, blacks accounted for 18,121 (49%) of the estimated 37,331 new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the United States in the 33 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting. AIDS is now the leading cause of death for African American women ages 25-34. African American women are over 21 times as likely to die from HIV/AIDS as non-Hispanic white women. And condom use is negotiable????