The Test

I’ve just recently gotten tested. It’s a bit traumatic for me. I’ve played safe; I’ve used a condom, yet what if? That constant voice in the back of the mind, ghosts of one night lovers, often never satisfying.

I don’t talk about my family background much. The hardest thing for me, when getting tested, is the breaking away from my social history.

I just finished reading, The Fall of the House of Bartha in New York Magazine. I was instantly drawn to lament on my own family and past, I didn’t know that Dr. Bartha was Romanian. I saw all the insanity, which was my childhood in the article, reflected in his quest for the American Dream. That holy grail of sorts. For my father, it was his own business. He wanted to have his own business and the word President stamped on his business cards. He destroyed everything in his path to achieve this goal.

For my portion of the family, they never quite understood how to mix into American Society. I feel and empathize the exasperation of Bartha’s children. Yet as Gawker pointed out and as the fates would have it the townhouse property value actually increased after the explosion. LOL.

For me getting tested is hard, I was raised to believe that disease is caused by God and cured with antibiotics, everything could be cured with determined prayer and Erythromycin. When I was a child and my mother broke into my journal. She read that I masturbated, I was sent to the doctor because she thought that I would go blind. My father when he lectured me on sex said that condoms were unnecessary if you pulled out of the girl. That condoms impeded pleasure and were not used by real men. That’s what he said.

When my parents saw autistic children on the streets, they marveled at how many there were, because in Romania they were hidden from view. It was understood that God punished families that sinned with autistic children, to test their faith.

So often my worlds collide and something as personal as getting tested, something that I need to do, because my rational mind tells me, will keep me safe and help me make the right choices. Is at odds and wars with my emotional side, the primal mind that has been conditioned to believe that I have sinned and caused wrong.

So yes, as Bartha blew up his townhouse on the East Side, I could see my father react in just the same way. So I understand how the decades of communism, that is taken so light hardly by most native Americans, has destroyed so many (btw, I consider myself an American, not Romanian). I am the third generation afflicted by communism and I am the sanest of the lot. That is what causes my wonder.

Oh btw, everyone, as I lament on my own quandary, getting tested is important. Because there are curable STD’s out there, that if caught in time, will not affect quality of life. I think we forget that, a lot and people refrain from getting tested because they are afraid to deal with the results.

Comments

[Kiks]

You grew up believing you could go blind on wanking??? That's some HARD sheet.

[Single Guy]

I'm waiting on my test too!! Hear back on Thursday!