Talk Hard!

 Planned Parenthood is currently running a campaign encouraging people to get yourself tested for STDs (GYT09).  They put together a video with a few different people talking about the experience of getting tested for the first time and why it’s important.

I think it’s very important to get tested, but I also think the third speaker on this video implies a belief about things that I want to counter.  She speaks of testing as something that lets you know if you’re in the clear or not, and then, as you get into a relationship, if you need to have a conversation, she says, you can have it.

What I want to say is that whether or not you have tested ‘clean’ for STDs, you always need to have a conversation about them with a prospective new partner.  Partly because not everyone knows all that they should know about STDs, and how they are transmitted, what the risks are, and what STDs can and cannot be tested for. Also, different people have different levels of risk acceptance, so behavior you think is risky your prospective partner may think is safe, and if she thinks it was safe, she might not tell you about it.  Is contact between the hands and the genitals safe for instance? Well, hands can have cuts on them and you can catch diseases that way though the odds are low: to be on the safe side, some people use gloves or condoms. Other people just accept that risk, because they’re okay with it.  How about kissing?  Well, a lot of people don’t know cold sores are caused by a strain of herpes so they might not watch out for that risk. Going down on someone?  A lot of people will have oral sex with no protection and think little of it, despite the fact that that is actually risky behavior.

I once started to get involved with a guy, and when he came to my bedroom for the first time he thought he knew what-all we could do that was safe. When I said we had to have a conversation he told me what he knew and how he was clean, and he was ready to go. I had to say “hold up, we need to talk.  I have herpes.” And then I told him all about herpes, because he didn’t know very much about it, like how you can have it without symptoms, and transmit it from mouth to genitals or mouth to mouth, and then we slowed way down.

Herpes is something you can get tested for these days, but the tests are not completely reliable.  Plus most standard test suites do not include a test for herpes. Other tests are more reliable, and very important, but a number of STDs take time to show up in the body, so if you’ve gotten tested but had sexual contact with someone new shortly before getting tested, they could have given you something that doesn’t show up on the tests.

So: Get yourself tested, definitely! To be rigorous about it, wait until you have gone 6 months without contact with a new disease vector - meaning you’ve been without a partner or you and your partner have not had any other new partners for 6 months. Then get tested. (If this really doesn’t fit your lifestyle don’t let that stop you though - do get tested! - just understand that while a positive result is a concern, a negative result may not guarantee a clean bill of health.)

Continue to get tested throughout your life, before and after sexual contact with new partners. Also, educate yourself about STDs, spend some time thinking about your own comfort levels with risk, and talk about it with every partner you have.  For their safety, and for yours.  Talk hard.

Fellow blogger Erin at A Dress A Day wrote in Oct 2006 about how You Don’t Have to be Pretty. A friend just pointed me to the post and I wanted to share.  For both boys and girls, there is a lot of emphasis these days on how you look.  As Erin points out, how you look is not going to be the most lasting thing about you, nor should it be something you feel you have to maintain for the benefit of everyone else, as though you were constantly onstage. So go read that post and think about being happy, not just with the way you look, but with your whole self.

Mainly, that abstinence-only education materials in Texas were found to be factually inaccurate in addition to being ineffective.

The money quote comes in the comments:

How do we fight this?

Follow the school board elections and fight for people who believe that students deserve an accurate education and a decent shot at growing up before becoming parents.

Sarah has written a great post about choosing the right oral contraceptive (on eHow.com). She talks about the history of the pills and some of the variations in prescription.

As she points out, it is important to discuss your priorities with your doctor.  It may take some experimentation to find the oral contraceptive that works best with your body. If you find you have mood swings, hot flashes, cramps, menstrual spotting between periods, lowered libido, dry eyes, or other symptoms that weren’t present before you went on the pill, discuss that with your doctor; a change may be in order.

There’s a great blog post by LilahCello on facial hair that I suggest people read. The main thing to note is that although the popular image of femininity is baby-soft skin and no facial hair, many many women get darker hairs on their face. If you have that, you are not alone. You are not a freak. People will not run screaming from you moaning about the horribleness of it all (if they do they’re just being obnoxious — no promises about younger siblings. But adults won’t do that).

However, if you have dark, heavy facial hair and if it makes you uncomfortable, or you find it unattractive, by all means do something about it. The woman who made the post beyond the link shaves her chin and looks forward to laser hair removal at some future date. Some women bleach or wax their facial hair, or have a salon do it for them. I myself have one thick hair that grows out of my chin. It is black and looks out of place and irritates my chin; for a while a few years ago I went regularly to see someone to try to remove it through electrolysis. Just one hair, how long could it take? Electrolysis is supposed to damage the folicle so it can’t grow back, but what I didn’t realize is it can take a long period of repeated visits to make it permanent. I gave up after a while. It’s just one hair. I can deal with having it there until I or a partner notice it and I pluck it out.

I don’t feel the need to hide the fact that it happens. It’s really quite normal. So don’t be afraid to talk about it if you have something similar.

This is going to be your holiday, every year, for as long as that child lives. If you are a typical first-time parent, you’re scared.  Further, you’re not sure what this is going to do to the rest of your life. It’s possible you will be an involved parent along with the child’s mother, but it’s also possible the child will be mainly raised by grandparents or someone else while both you and the mother grow up some more.

If you have the opportunity to get to know your child and you intend to be involved, I congratulate you on your interest and sense of responsibility. You aren’t alone. Consider that all around you there are hundreds of other first-time dads. Maybe they aren’t all the same age as you, but likely they’re just as scared or uncertain. Consider taking a class for fathers-to-be.  Talk to other men in your family and your community. Even if this pregnancy was an accident, don’t let shame about that keep you from reaching out to community resources to learn about what’s going to happen, to learn about babies and their development and how to be a part of it.

Good luck, all you young dads out there. Keep your chin up.  From what I hear, staying in this game is worth all the trouble.

Today is my day off. Well, it’s a day off for me, which means I still went to dance class because once you’re an adult who works at a desk it’s hard to keep in shape, and I have been cleaning the house a bit and filing papers, reading a book that’s background for an interview I’m doing in two weeks, but the rest of the day I have off to catch up on gardening and some work on one of the non-profit organizations I head, and relax and think. I even stopped by my mom’s house to be social with my parents and figure out what we’re doing tomorrow for Father’s Day. Nice to just hang out for a bit with them, with no big agenda. Don’t do that enough.

I’m a bit more of an over-achiever than most adults, but my point is, whether you’re a teen or an adult, you should value your time off and make the most of it. Most especially, you should appreciate it. When I was 15 I read 250 books a year in my spare time. Of course, I read all the time, even while walking to and from school, but now I look back on that wistfully, at all the time I had for purely recreational reading. And I think about how at the time I took it for granted.

These days, your average American spends 4-6 hours a day watching television and movies. I encourage you not to be average in this particular statistic. Spend less time passively absorbing things other people created and more time creating things yourself, whether those things are music, art, writing, new clothes, software programs, games, toys (cars and rockets count), clubs, good conversations, or even just your own self. I really mean that last one. That’s important. It takes work and creativity to create yourself, to figure out the particular ways you want to be in life, where you want to go, what you want to do, and who you want to do it with. Take time to get to know your friends, and take time by yourself to think and explore and get to know yourself.

Take time off, and really live that time. It’s one of the most valuable things you can do.

By Ed

Probably one of the most challenging times in a student’s life is high school, that transitional time where everyone argues that each choice you make will directly impact whether you get to go to a top-notch college or end up living in a dumpster.  Beyond the academic pressures of completing a public education, high school students planning to enter college have to take a bevy of extra tests, enroll in extra-curricular activities, and hold down external employment.  All in an effort to try to have the best possible image of yourself to put on college applications. But at the same time every high school student I’ve talked to is also trying to figure out what they want to do when they get into college.  Having been through the process, and having worked for a major university now for over eight years, I have a few tips to make the process a little less madhouse.

First, prior to your senior year in high school, probably the middle of your junior year, you should do a little looking online and read up on a handful of colleges you might like to attend.  Emphasis on schools you would like to attend; ignore advice from “helpful” people on this subject and ignore those magazine rankings.  Read up on the schools’ programs, look at pictures of each campus, see if any of them look and sound interesting.  In particular look at the sections on campus life, student activities, and the surrounding community.  You will be spending around ten to sixteen hours in classrooms per week, true, but you’ll be spending around sixty to eighty hours a week doing other things outside of class.  Read up on those too.

Second, if you find a few schools you really like, read up on a few broad majors that might catch your eye.  Ignore suggestions or demands you focus on “valuable” majors, whatever field of study you enter into is one you will have to enjoy doing for four years.  You might change majors, you might find you aren’t enjoying the field you started in, heck you might even not be that good at it.  I started in computer science and ended up in history, both because I loved history and because I was awful with computer programming.  But read up on a few fields that interest you and then email whomever the webpage lists as the “undergraduate advisor” or, lacking that, the director of the department.  Explain your interest in the program, that you are looking around, and ask what sorts of activities and classes the department looks for in potential students.  You will probably get a boilerplate answer but within that boilerplate might be some clues to things that will help you stand out a bit as an applicant.

Third, and finally, when it comes time to apply for college, spend a bit of time thinking about the essay you are going to write.  It does not need to be brilliant but it should speak to whatever passion made you want to go to that university.  Believe me, when reading those essays the admissions officer will be impressed with fine grammar, but even more impressed with an essay that actually sounds enthusiastic instead of blandly interested.  In any case though, good luck and don’t fret; most people who try to find a spot in college can make it in somewhere and the name on the diploma is not the key to success many people make it out to be.

Today ZenHabits has an article about dealing with money in a relationship that I recommend people read. I think these are good things to think about when talking about money with anyone, whether it’s your boyfriend or girlfriend, your best friends, your parents, or yourself. The important things include discussing priorities, being honest about what you’re spending and what you want to spend money on, and planning. Oh, and talking. Talking is important. Even talking to yourself (by way of making lists and reviewing what you’ve spent money on and what you want to get and how much it costs).

When you’re a teen these days you start to receive offers for credit cards in the mail. I recommend you accept one and start learning about how to manage money. If you take a part-time job so you actually have some money to play with, that’s even better. Having a credit card is useful for a few reasons. It’s convenient, the bill gives you a way of reviewing your expenditures that spending cash doesn’t offer (unless you keep receipts for everything), and using credit improves your credit rating if you do it responsibly, which will help you qualify for loans in the future.

The downsides are that you have to pay your credit card bill (at least the minimum payment) every month, on time, or you will get charged fees and your interest rate will go up. And you will get charged interest for any balance that you don’t pay off in full each month. Also, having a credit card can mean that you are able to spend more money than you have to spend, more than you can afford.

Most people would list that last as a positive aspect of credit cards, but really it’s a very dangerous thing. If you get in the habit of spending more money than you have, or than you’re going to have by the time the bill is due, then you may fall into the trap of maintaining credit card debt. Consumer debt is costing millions of people millions of dollars per year and making bank executives richer, all because people don’t learn to save and then buy instead of borrowing against money they don’t yet have. Then once you have debt it’s easy to just keep adding to it while ignoring how much it’s really costing you. In addition to the actual cost of fees and interest rates, there are the opportunity costs of what you could have been earning on that money if you had posted it in a savings account or CD and earned interest on it and then spent it, instead of spending it first and then paying that interest to somebody else.

In general, you want to stay aware of what you’re spending and whether or not the money you spend today will frustrate you by preventing you from buying something more important to you tomorrow. Don’t just spend what you have while you’ve got it, plan. Open a savings account and keep money there until you are ready to buy it, instead of keeping it as cash, which is easy to spend without thinking. And be careful about debit cards. Overdrawing a bank account can wrack up fees even faster than not paying a credit card off, sometimes.

After you have a credit card for a year, request an annual overview from your credit card company, which can probably categorize your expenses for you and send you a report. Look at your expenses and be honest with yourself. If you’ve bought things you wanted and are happy about, and paid your bills on time and in full, pat yourself on the back. If your interest rate has gone up, call the company and ask them if they’ll change it back down. Often they will. All it takes is talking.

Being aware of your spending habits will also put you in a better position to talk to other people about them. If your parents or your partner criticize your spending, you can respond from a position of knowledge. And that can make it less difficult to talk about it. People avoid talking about money for all kinds of reasons, but you shouldn’t feel ashamed about it - don’t feel ashamed about having it, needing it, spending it, or saving it. But do be aware of your own and others’ values having to do with it. Figure out what your values, habits, and priorities are, and talk about them to the people who are important to you. They might even be able to help you achieve your goals, if you talk about them.

Bleach is a caustic chemical you are not advised to get on the outside of your skin, much less pour down your gullet.

If you swallow bleach, you could get chemical burns in your esophagus (the inside of your throat) and your stomach. It could even kill you (though that is more likely with industrial bleach than with household bleach). You are advised to call 911 and or 1-800-222-1222 to get help from a poison control center if you mistakenly ingest bleach. For crying out loud, don’t do it on purpose.

Why am I saying this? An Associated Press article indicated that some teens in Florida believe that drinking a cup of bleach will protect you from HIV. Other rumors have been known to suggest it can help you pass (or foul up) a drug test.

Except insofar as drinking bleach will make you so unhealthy you are unlikely to care about any of the rest, and will therefore not participate in activities that lead to STDs, pregnancy,etc, for a while, bleach is not a prophylactic medicine (prophylactic means something that prevents or protects). Bleach isn’t a medicine at all. It is a cleanser, but it is very harsh and not recommended for use on skin, so don’t wash your genitals or douche with it to protect against HIV either. It will burn you and still not prevent transmission of the disease if you’re otherwise participating in dangerous behavior that exposes you to it.

If you use drugs with needles and syringes that you share, you can and should use bleach to disinfect those implements. Wear gloves while doing so. It can also be used to disinfect clothes and surfaces like counters and floors.

Please don’t try to use it to disinfect the body.

Thank you.