2003-01-16 - 11:18 a.m.

On the internal soundtrack: Theme from "Sesame Street". At least, the theme when *I* was a kid. I've heard it changed.

So, Kit has a post on frozen dinners.

I've written before on how we ate in San Jose. Basically, frozen dinners with extra pasta to supplement, because they never give you enough. And lots of Chinese food. GOOD Chinese food.

Then we moved to Virginia, got a dishwasher, and started cooking. When we left Virginia and moved to the apartment in Philly, we got a lot of takeout. This was fun for a couple of months, then it got boring. Mainly because the types of food we could get cheaply were somewhat limited.

Now, we're back to what I like to do. We still eat frozen stuff, but it's not the mainstay of our diet. We cook about two dishes a week (preferably on the weekend, but sometimes midweek) and each dish is enough for 4-6 meals. Leftovers are taken to work in a Rock 'n' Serve. The meals are supplemented by ham sandwiches or frozen burritos or hot wings (Poindexter) and frozen dinners or angel hair with pesto (me). Takeout only happens once or twice a week, when we have a hankering for something or run out of other food.

I was researching hearing aids a couple weeks ago. Mine are six years old, and in danger of croaking, so I put money in my flexible spending account so I can get new ones this year. Hopefully fully digital, if they'll help me at all.

While I was researching, I found a description of the different degrees of hearing loss: "moderate", "severe", "profound". My audiogram when I was 15 shows moderate-to-profound (going low-to-high pitch). My audiogram from six years ago shows, basically, severely severe (i.e. almost profound) to profound. I've lost more of the lower pitches over time.

Which means, I think, physically I am what people call "deaf", not "hard of hearing".

But I'm not Deaf, culturally. So I'm in between.

I found the Livejournal Hard of Hearing community, which seems to be made up of people very similar to me. It's fun reading their rants about lipreading.

I was reading "Philadelphia" magazine yesterday, and happened across a short blurb that shocked me. The magazine said there was a web site wherein gay men discuss where the best places are to pick up a guy for a quickie. Where the quickie is in the same location, not that you take him home after you find him. There was no URL, in the interest of "good taste" (little late for that).

The places included a 6th floor bathroom at Strawbridges, and a basement bathroom in the Mellon Building. Places I've *been* to, or might go to.

My initial reaction was shock and disgust. I'll admit, I feel an instinctive distaste for random promiscuity, as much as intellectually I'm a non-judgemental "whatever you're comfortable with" kinda gal. But it was more than that. So I started trying to figure out why. I'm not disgusted by two people who are suddenly overcome with lust and look for a spot as near as possible. There was just something about the deliberation of it -- going to a 6th floor bathroom in a department store with the intention of having sex in said bathroom.

Then Poindexter mentioned gay bathhouses, or gay bars, and I was not disgusted at all. So apparently my revulsion has to do with the fact that these are public places whose purpose is NOT for sexual trysts. Places where, if I were a guy, I could be in the next stall doing my business and there would be someone next door having it on. That just BUGS me. Not to mention this sort of thing is the reason why my favorite nude beach was shut down. Fuckers. (Pun unintentional, but it's staying.)

I still can't understand the magazine's motivation for publishing that information. Did they think it was cute? Were they trying to help some gays get a heads-up on the cruising here? If so, didn't they realize that they have just effectively shut down those cruising spots by making non-users aware of them? Or was that the intention? I'm just baffled.

Gratuitous photo of the day:

Another photo of me in the bug shirt. I think I'm officially out of photos. I'll either have to get Poindexter to take more, or start scanning old ones. Most photos of me are from college.

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