Staring at the ceiling at 6AM

["Y'know, I just get so sick of the 'We people.' 'We're off to Hawaii. We're taking the dog for shots.' They wallow in first-person plural because they remember how lonely it was to be first-person singular." -Michael to Mary Ann in the PBS miniseries adaptation Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.]

[It occurs to me that I often write this diary in first-person plural, and may often lose readers thereby. But I would respond that I'm not wallowing (if wallowing is what I'm doing) in first-person plural because of remembrance of loneliness past. First, even though John and I have been together for almost five years, I still get lonely; being paired doesn't make that feeling go away, it somehow relocates it to other areas of the heart. And B., the reason for using "we" all the time: we do stuff together, all the time. That's simply how we live our lives. Does that make the resulting stories less worthwhile to recount? Or does the greener-grass glamour of singlehood (to which I bet some of my paired fellow online journallers [in addition to the always forthcoming Joey] would cop to fantasizing about from time to time) simply make for more engrossing reading?]

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[In other ceiling-staring thoughts, I, too, was impressed by The Laramie Project, but I admit to feeling a little nonplussed by the keeningly sharp celebration Amy Madigan's character and family indulged in upon learning she didn't contract HIV from handling Matthew Shepard at the site. Granted, this was in '98, when all the marvelous medications that often (but not always) render a positive diagnosis a somehow different sort of news had yet to percolate to the general populace (meds from which I'm continuing to benefit.) However, there was this sense that Madigan's character's life was seriously, horrifically on hold while she waited for the results, and when the character turned out not to be positive, she could go back to...what? I'm not sure exactly. A carefree sense of...something.]

[To what extent does my distaste for this scene come from bitterness at my own life's turn? And to what extent might my distaste be somehow (objectively) justified?]

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