*** pre-history
In 2003 I was admitted to U.C. Berkeley as a junior transfer student majoring in English lit. Now, my personal history up to that point had been rather touch and go. I had been cooking professionally since 1986 and moved up through the ranks rather quickly. In 1999 when I had been diagnosed with HIV I was “chef de cuisine” of a large
Don’t worry; I’ll get us back to 2003 in a moment.
When the docs at Kaiser Foundation hospital in Santa Rosa, Ca. told me that I had HIV they also mentioned that it looked like I had had it for a very long time, possibly five years or more which meant that there was a possibility that my ex-wife, the last woman with whom I had had unprotected sex could also be infected. “Lovely,” I thought to myself as my dreams of a future with wife and children seemed to veer off down a different fork than the long and winding road I now found myself on.
Frankly I was sick, very sick. The virus was running rampant and unchecked through my body and my immune system had almost completely been destroyed. It’s a miracle that some nasty little opportunistic infection didn’t take me out. My weight had slipped down to 112 lbs and I had no appetite. What concerns me most is that none of my friends ever said anything about my dramatic weight loss, not even my ex-girlfriend who I continued to see on a professional basis twice a week. But I digress; I started taking the HIV “cocktail” within a week of being diagnosed, the side effects were, in a word, horrible and my mind turned inward and began to examine every speck of self-awareness it could find. I held myself under the most powerful electron microscope I could find, which is my own psyche, and dissected the fibers that were woven together and formed this macramé shell that once, long ago defined me.
*** history
The years between 1999 and 2003 are not without event; but their dissection and dissemination seems strangely inappropriate here. Rest assured that I will return to them in depth in the near future. Suffice to say that with a few years of therapy under my belt I had decided to go back to school, starting with junior college, just to see where it would take me. In 2003 I was accepted to
It is difficult for me to describe the feeling of happiness and value that permeated every cell in my body. For once in my life I had been validated by an organization that said I was “good enough” to be part of their elite club. A lifetime of experience was beginning to be proven erroneous while I witnessed people; professors, new friends and fellow students demonstrate their faith in my ability to do the work required to excel at
eHarmony, for those of you who don’t know is a relationship website that matches prospective partners based on “the 29 dimensions of compatibility” as defined by site founder Dr. Neil Smith Warren. “What are these dimensions,” you ask, I honestly don’t know. I do know that the psychological profile that I had taken took about thirty minutes to complete and seemed very thorough. What eHarmony doesn’t allow in their huge database of potential matches is the possibility of same sex matches. This minor oversight was fine with my as my musings seemed to be towards the hetero couplings instead of the homo variety; I was ok with that, but still looking back it should have been an indicator to me that not all was as it should be. The other thing I noticed is that there is nowhere, absolutely nowhere on the site that allows one to indicate that (s)he might be carrying one or two hitch-hikers in the form of viruses to our potential matches. Again, this should have been an indication as to the socio-political ideology that this site, in hindsight, seems to be fostering.
I’ll cover eHarmony in some depth soon.
Being relatively experienced in human relationships, both platonic and sexual I have found it best to be honest and upfront with people. Lies and bullshit, games and ploys are soon and quickly discovered, especially if, like me, you are attracted to individuals who posses a higher degree of intellect. It can become very ugly very fast and people get hurt. No esta bien. So, in answer to the lack of a space to list potentially deadly sexually transmitted diseases on my eHarmony profile I wrote it in under the category: “Is there anything else you would like your potential matches to know?” I can’t remember the exact phrasing but it went something like this:
“My potential matches should know that I carry with me the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Currently I am undetectable and on medication. My numbers are doing what all good doctors want our numbers to do; the good ones are getting higher and the bad ones are getting lower.”
I’m pretty sure there’s a subconscious reason for me spelling out HIV instead of using the abbreviation that we all are, by now, so familiar. Did I hope someone “hot” would gloss over it and contact me, possibly but that’s most likely a topic for another entry.
I joined eHarmony for three months sometime around April of 2004. Prior to that I had “dated” a couple of co-eds (under 25) and while my ego benefited greatly from the attentions and affections of, for example, the twenty-one year old anthropology major, my brain was craving the attentions of someone with whom I had something much more in common; someone say, twenty years older with a much broader experience base and possibly the children I could no longer generate without the expense of “sperm washing” (sperm washing is a process which allows the sperm to be stripped of the HIV virus thereby allowing me to have children without the risk of passing the virus to either my partner or my child). http://aids.about.com/cs/womensresources/a/washing.htm So eHarmony seemed a logical choice.
I was matched with people all over the bloody country. I’ve done the long distance relationship in the past and it never, ever works. During that first three month period on eHarmony not one woman requested communication with me and everyone with whom I requested communication subsequently closed the match. Depressing. And the insane thing is that here I was in the best public university in the country surrounded, roughly, by thirty-two thousand co-eds and I had pinned my dating hopes to a website that was matching me with women in New Jersey who subsequently went screaming and running for the latex barriers and bleach when they saw my electronic virus peering happily at them from the computer screen...sheesh. So while my ego continued to be boosted and assuaged by the amorous affections of both the male and female undergraduate population at Cal and while I was being unceremoniously turned down by people across the country who had never actually met me; three months after I joined eHarmony my subscription ran out and I began dating “S” on a regular basis.
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