Happy Valentine's Day

Unlike most times when I make a stab at reviving the Tome where I stare idly at a blank screen for a minute or two before going on to do something more engaging to the focus-challenged mind, tonight the words flood my head and steadfastly refuse to trickle out in an orderly fashion. So I suppose I can start with the elephant in my corpus callosum: my ex-boyfriend gave me anal warts. I found this out on the 28th of September, one day before my birthday, when I went to the school clinic suspecting I had a month-old hemorrhoid. From then to the first week of December I went back every Friday to get them treated. And as one would expect a needle full of acid being injected into one's anus to be, it was quite painful. The clinician referred me to an actual dermatologist when the trichloracetic acid she was using stopped having any effect.

The actual dermatologist turned out to be the actual dermatologist's assistant, with the "M.D." conspicuously absent from his picture on the waiting room's slideshow, on a smaller monitor next to Regis Philbin on the big television. I've been seeing Nathan (doctors apparently like to be on first name bases with their patients, probably to make them feel more comfortable) since late December, shelling out $25 co-pays with each visit and another $25 roughly every two weeks for the cream he prescribed (one tube is supposed to last four weeks). So much for that stable financial base I had planned.

I ran into my ex on a slutty hookup site my friend had demanded I make a profile on late one night when he was drunk. I haven't been having sex because I don't want to bestow upon anyone such a damn painful infection, minus one celebratory booty call I made during a very brief period in November where I was clear. At any rate, when I told Taylor that he had benefactored me a little wart problem he insisted it was in fact the other way around. After explaining to him how virtually impossible that would be (before him, I had sex with one person once almost exactly a year before I met my ex) he admitted that he had, in fact, infected me and went on one of his characteristic apology rants, making unnecessarily profuse amends for first being such an asshole to me (he was), but primarily for giving me warts. Apparently he had some on his penis shortly after we broke up, but never thought to tell me because he thought I had infected him. This brief online encounter of ours was almost two weeks ago now, and despite my best efforts to forgive, if I ever see him again I will have to be restrained from bludgeoning him. The callous stupidity, the offensive indifference. It did make me feel slightly better knowing he hasn't had sex with anyone since me (that was now one year ago), but knowing him he told me that in an effort to get me to feel sorry for him.

Nathan says they're looking good; since they're all white and dying he thinks my immune system is finally beginning to clear the virus (it's no fast process; he said that about three weeks ago). And while some of them will fall off when I take a dump or a shower or even while I'm applying the cream, they hurt so. fucking. much. For weeks I haven't been able to walk, sit, take a dump, or clean up taking after a dump without experiencing some degree of pain, usually mild but sometimes severe. I had to stop myself from screaming on the toilet a few minutes ago; imagine spreading your bare ass as you sit directly on several upright nails. You know, after stealing my zippo, being such a raging cunt, and giving me goddamn anal warts, Taylor went to the doctor once, for one treatment, and never had to deal with them again. Karma my black ass.

So that's what I do these days. I've got an oral exam in Spanish on Tuesday and (again) a written Spanish exam and a physics midterm back to back. My cultural rebellion professor wants a summary of 100-some pages of Jack Kerouac's On the Road for tomorrow, and for the next four days I have to surrender my evenings to trifling with the Nation of Africa, all the dumbass appalachian white people, and the utterly pretentious student managers at my minimum-wage job. Paul has the goddamn nerve to try and tell me, one of the only people there that actually does anything, what the fuck to do when he has the whole Nation standing idly in the corner gossiping cattily in an odd language and doing no more work than what is required of their bodies to continue living another miserable second.

In case you couldn't tell I'm very angry these days. My back and neck are hideously knotted with rage; the university offers semiprofessional massages but I don't have the time of day to get one. I really think the cure for what ails me would not be a proper two hour massage, or finding $10,000 in a briefcase on the side of the road, or even Taylor's head on a pike, but finally being done with these upsetting fucking warts--and by extension being able to have sex again. Happy Valentine's Day!