baby names; AIDS after 25 years
Jun. 5th, 2006 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleaBaby names:
Born to a coworker, Xiaoli: Alexandra.
Born to a Park mommy, Christina, and her husband Kyle: Matthew; big sister is Kate.
Another hour-long wrangle on names for the armadillo this weekend; mr. flea found a list of Polish names on the internets and kept reading them off and I kept saying, "These are *pope* names! They're latin!" (They included Ignatius, Clement, and Constanz.) He developed a fondness for Raphael, which led to a discussion of which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one should name a son after.
On the plus side, we may have agreed on a middle name.
*****
On AIDS at 25, in 1981 I was 9, and AIDS was not on my radar, unsurprisingly. By 1985, 1986, 1987, though, it was. And those were the formative years of my adolescent understanding of sex. I definitely remember thinking, when I was in high school, that soon I would know people my age with AIDS, that we would all have to be so careful about sex. Not everybody my age has been, of course, and I probably would have been anyway, but awareness of AIDS certainly reinforced that tendency in me. I'm still surprised, sometimes, that AIDS didn't become widespread in the American middle-class heterosexual community the way I thought it would when I was 15. I knew only one person who has died as a result of AIDS, and he died only within the last couple of years, from a heart condition (caused/exacerbated by AIDS drugs) after many many years of living with HIV.
Born to a coworker, Xiaoli: Alexandra.
Born to a Park mommy, Christina, and her husband Kyle: Matthew; big sister is Kate.
Another hour-long wrangle on names for the armadillo this weekend; mr. flea found a list of Polish names on the internets and kept reading them off and I kept saying, "These are *pope* names! They're latin!" (They included Ignatius, Clement, and Constanz.) He developed a fondness for Raphael, which led to a discussion of which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one should name a son after.
On the plus side, we may have agreed on a middle name.
*****
On AIDS at 25, in 1981 I was 9, and AIDS was not on my radar, unsurprisingly. By 1985, 1986, 1987, though, it was. And those were the formative years of my adolescent understanding of sex. I definitely remember thinking, when I was in high school, that soon I would know people my age with AIDS, that we would all have to be so careful about sex. Not everybody my age has been, of course, and I probably would have been anyway, but awareness of AIDS certainly reinforced that tendency in me. I'm still surprised, sometimes, that AIDS didn't become widespread in the American middle-class heterosexual community the way I thought it would when I was 15. I knew only one person who has died as a result of AIDS, and he died only within the last couple of years, from a heart condition (caused/exacerbated by AIDS drugs) after many many years of living with HIV.