I'm in the button biznez, bitchez!

                                                                 Are you thinking about buying a button maker for your organization? Different badge or button makers specialize in different sizes. Some companies don't make anything smaller than 1 5/8 inches. I opted for a 3 in one system from Badge-A-Minit. Big. Mistake. I planned on making MOSTLY the 1.25 inch size, the 2.25 and 3 inch mostly for novelty. Seriously the 3 inch size is like a frying pan. 

But the B.A.M. system cannot make 1.25 inch buttons properly. It's far to easy to over press and underpress. I had success about 1 time in 10 making a presentable 1.25 inch button. I wrote to them. I chatted with them. They sent more explicit instructions that raised my fail rate from 9 in 10 to 8 in 10. But nothing else. No replacement parts, no new machine parts, no refund. Their lifetime warranty is worth nothing.

SO... I cut my losses and bought a 1.25 inch only machine. It cost as much as the whole 3 in one B.A.M. system, but it is worth it! Foolproof is an understatement. I bought the model 250 from TheMadShop.com onEtsy. Seriously, if you need small buttons, Badge A Minit is not for you.

No Treatment or Vaccine for Ebola, but a $1000 Pill for Hepatitis C

Posted on August 3, 2014 by Lambert Strether on Naked Capitalism 

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/08/treatment-vaccine-ebola-1000-pill-hepatitis-c.html

By Roy M. Poses, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University, and President of FIRM, the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine, a not-for-profit organization (NGO) designed to raise awareness of external threats to the core values in health care as the first step toward addressing them. Originally published at Health Care Renewal.

The Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa continues to grow, and now appears to be the worst known epidemic of that disease to date.  In the US and Western Europe, press reports are now raising concerns that the disease could spread there.  For example, CNN, in an article entitled “Ebola Fears Hits Close to Home,” was a section headed “Could Ebola spread to the US?” An ABC article was entitled, “How the US Government Could Evacuate Americans with Ebola.”

Reasons for fear of spread are the increased mobility of people made possible by air travel, and the lack of specificity of early symptoms of Ebola, so infectious people may not realize the dangers their travel might pose.  A US citizen with Ebola was on his way back to the US via several connections, and made it as far as Lagos, Nigeria before becoming too ill to travel further (per CNN).  Making the fears worse are the high fatality rate of Ebola, the current epidemic included.  According to Vox, the current outbreak is the Zaire subtype of the virus, with an expected mortality rate of 68%.  Finally, there is no known effective treatment or vaccine for the Ebola virus.

Economics, not Science the Reason for Lack of Medical Options for Ebola

The reason there are no vaccines or treatments available for Ebola does not appear to be the scientific difficulty involved in developing them.  Vox also published a discussion for the economic genesis of the problem:

 Researchers have devoted lots of time to building a vaccine that could stop the disease altogether — and according to Daniel Bausch, a Tulane professor who researches Ebola and other infectious diseases, they’re making really significant progress.

Bausch says that the obstacle to developing an Ebola vaccine isn’t the science; researchers have actually made really great strides in figuring out how to fight back against Ebola and the Marburg virus, a similar disease.

‘We now have a couple of different vaccine platforms that have shown to be protective with non-human primates,’ says Bausch, who has received awards for his work containing disease outbreaks in Uganda. He is currently stationed in Lima, Peru, as the director of the emerging infections department of Naval Medical Research Unit 6.

The problem, instead, is the economics of drug development. Pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to pour research and development dollars into curing a disease that surfaces sporadically in low-income, African countries. They aren’t likely to see a large pay-off at the end — and could stand to lose money.

Prof Bausch elaborated,

These outbreaks affect the poorest communities on the planet. Although they do create incredible upheaval, they are relatively rare events. So if you look at the interest of pharmaceutical companies, there is not huge enthusiasm to take an Ebola drug through phase one, two, and three of a trial and make an Ebola vaccine that maybe a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will use.

Of course, that assumes that this outbreak, like previous ones, will remain relatively confined, at least to Africa.

The 10/90 Gap

So the implication is that had things been otherwise, those in developed countries now worried that Ebola could spread their way could have been reassured by the availability of a vaccine, or other treatment. 

The irony, if that is the right word, is that we do not have an effective treatment or vaccine for a viral disease that is relatively easily spread, and could likely rapidly kill nearly 70% of those infected.  Yet in the last months, we have been arguing about how the use of an extremely expensive treatment for another viral disease that is difficult to spread, and may kill a few percent of its victims over up to 20 or 30 years after infection. 

I am referring, of course, to Sovaldi, the recently announced $1000 pill for hepatitis C.  Hepatitis C does affect a lot of people, including relatively affluent people in developed countries.  As we noted previously, though, the majority of people infected with hepatitis C will never have serious medical repercussion from it.  Small proportions of patients will eventually develop severe liver disease, including cirrhosis, liver failure, and liver cancer, and may die from the disease.  (See the report by the Center for Evidence Based Policy). Yet the treatment is being promoted for all patients with hepatitis C, most of whom could not benefit from treatment.  Furthermore, the evidence that treatment will actually prevent bad clinical outcomes, cirrhosis, liver failure, liver cancer, and premature death, is weak (lookhere).   Yet considerable money was devoted to developing multiple hepatitis C treatments, with the expectation that huge amounts of money could be made from selling them. 

This is an example of the 10/90 gap.

A long time ago, in 1998, I was invited to Forum 2 of an organization called the Global Forum for Health Research  The GFHR was an organization dedicated to overcoming the “10/90 gap”:

Less than 10% of the worldwide expenditure on health research and development is devoted to the major health problems of 90% of the population

Yet the 10/90 gap is probably getting worse.  In the US, our health care has now been heavily influenced by advocates of neoliberalism, or economism.  Health care is now largely run by generic managers trained in business schools, with no specific training or expertise in health care, and doubtful loyalty to its values.  Current business school dogma emphasizes the primacy of economic efficiency over all other goals (look here), to maximize “shareholder value,” which usually practically means maximizing short term revenue, to the immediate advantage of shareholders sometimes, but nearly always to the great and immediate financial advantage of paid managers and executives.  The emphasis on short term revenue uber alles helps explain how we have multiple expensive hepatitis C drugs, and no Ebola drugs or vaccines. 

The real irony is now that some very well paid managers may be worrying about the possibility of contracting Ebola whose transmission was facilitated by our increasingly global economy, globalized in part due to the advocacy of those advocating neoliberalism and economism. 

Summary

Unfortunately, the fortunes of the Global Forum for Health Research seem to have faded.  It went into sudden decline in 2010, and was subsumed into COHRED, the Council on Health Research for Development.  The last Global Forum meeting was in 2012, although there seem to be plans for another next year.    Meanwhile, multiple international organizations. including Medicins Sans Frontieres, established a Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, although its progress seems to be slow (see Pedrique B, Strub-Wourgaft N, Some C et al.  The drug and vaccine landscape for neglected diseases (2000-11): a systematic assessment.  Lancet Glob Health 2013; 1: e371.  Link here.).

In my humble opinion, as long as much of the health care system is run so as to put short-term revenue ahead of all else, a manifestation of financialization encouraged by the generic managers who run so much of health, partly in their own self-interest, and by business schools promoting the shareholder value theory, we will not make much progress on the 10/90 gap.  Ironically, the realization that even rich generic managers may no longer be protected from some of the deadliest diseases that used to only afflict the poorest people in the world may have an effect on this problem.   

As I have said before,  true health care reform would put in place leadership that understands the health care context, upholds health care professionals’ values, and puts patients’ and the public’s health ahead of extraneous, particularly short-term financial concerns. We need health care governance that holds health care leaders accountable, and ensures their transparency, integrity and honesty.

But this sort of reform would challenge the interests of managers who are getting very rich off the current system.  So I am afraid the US may end up going far down this final common pathway before enough people manifest enough strength to make real changes.

Adventures in Networking, Parental Edition

My Mothers' Day treat was last night at Rendezvous in Central Square. *Today* we went to my parents' to give Mom her present: Make Netflix work on her Wii again, for the first time since they moved to a new apartment, months ago. The first 30 minutes we spent trying to make the Wii "find" the WiFi network. Eventually we realized that we had to MOVE the router into the middle of the bed room. After 20 tries the network finally appeared in the list.

The next 1/2 hour Jason (and I at his insistence) entered the PIN instead of the network key. Tried this security setting, tried that one, but always with the PIN. Three times he told me not to bother calling Nintendo for help because they won't be available on a Sunday. And if you want to get along with your man, you don't argue about this. You let him try until you can say, see? YOU NEED HELP!

The next 30 minutes we spent working with the Nintendo guy, who picked right up when we called and was wikkid helpful. Once we entered the *network key* like we should have attempted originally, it STILL didn't work. We would have had to call anyway for the guy at Nintendo to tell that us the key had probably been changed from the factory default, and that we could find this password on my parent's desktop. Only my Dad had accidentally kicked the power cord out of the router. 90 minutes in and the desktop stopped accessing the internet. I thought Dad was going to freak out.

About 10 minutes of stress, Jason finds the cord is out and powers the router back up. Dad hovers now at the computer because we have to WAIT for the internet to come back up and he is now sure we have completely FUBARed his desktop so bad only my brother Dan can fix it. Once it is working again he says, "DON'T DO ANYTHING MORE!" Because he thinks the loss of his desktop connection was OUR fault. So I talk him down and get back to the computer. The network key HAD been changed to something very short and easy, probably at Dad's request, but there was no way we could make him understand what we needed in his increasingly senile state. (Believe me, we tried) Within 5 minutes we the Wii internet settings working and have Netflix running.

But Mom had disconnected her account, since she hadn't been using it. And she needed to put in a new credit card, the one in the system was no longer any good. Only we don't use American Express, so we keep putting the wrong security code in and keep getting rejected. My Dad is so high strung about people touching his stuff and our annoyed tones of voice, he is ready to insist we give up after nearly two hours. He leaves, not quite storms out, to take a walk. He is back nearly instantly.

So now we have to call Netflix to figure out what we are doing wrong, and the girl there tells us not to use the Wii to reinstate, but use the website. Back to the desk top. Only Dad sits by and hovers and we wait in the living room. We can hear Dad asking Mom to give up and send us home, so I send Jason in (because Dad won't yell at him) to see if he can help Mom. On the Netflix site, there is a little question mark one can click on that explains what we are doing wrong with the security code (What? We haven't used American Express in over 20 years!) And finally, Netflix is working on the Wii on my parents' big-ass flatscreen. Yay.

This is when Dad announces that Netflix sucks and that their selection is crappy. I tell him with a smile of course, "Well, it's Mothers' Day and we are here to please Mom, not you!"

For the last 15 minutes I show Mom how to use the Skype app on her iPad to get ahold of AJ, who is ALWAYS on Skype. She video calls him, coos over his curls and is happy. Two and a half hours of WTF and we finally have Mom hooked up and happy. We kissed them, listened to Dad grumble and Mom thank us profusely, then left.

We stopped at the package store on the way home for some MUCH needed wine. The end

Epilogue: *sips wine*

If not us, then who? Some corrupt attention whore!

I have been roving around the circles of the spiritual community for 30-ish years, in the Happy Valley, around JP, recently out in metro west, and I keep bumping up this very frustrating fact: Of the people within these circles that I encounter the *vast* majority consider themselves "above" politics.

"I'm not political"

"I don't vote"

I understand their belief that they way to make the world a better place is to focus on positive energy, personal responsibly, taking their own inventory, but the reality is, what that mostly does is make the space closest to them a better place. You can make a great space for people to come and heal from the cruel world yes. Yes, it has some effect on the rest of reality outside your vicinity. But while folks are using (don't get me wrong, very valuable) healing arts, doing their drumming, yoga, or what ever, very un-spiritual, very sick, negative energy people are making policy that is crushing the souls of billions, making people physically sicker, or outright blowing poor souls to bits in wars that the sick, *willing* political participants are inflicting on the rest of the planet.

Why not get involved in making the *policy* that will heal the world, make it less cruel, make folks in it less in *need* of spiritual healing?

Sure, voting isn't working the way the system works now. But we didn't give up on medicine when "physicians" were bleeding people to death. We knew that doctoring had to happen, and it took brave souls to stand up to the established order and say "Healing: You're doing it wrong!" And brave souls to go to those doctors the established order disdained.

I just met a young man last week in yoga class who lived in a town from which I needed a signature to get my candidate onto the ballot for state rep in November. I asked him if he was registered to vote and he said no. I asked him if he would please register and I would ask him again to sign the next week. He seemed affable and amused, but when I returned to yoga this week, he was harsh. He asked me, "Why don't you just ask God?' I didn't understand. "Instead of asking people to help you get him on the ballot, you might as ask God because he will never win." (Mind you, this is someone who considers himself FULL of positivity and light!)

So I dropped back to my old stand by question: Do you consider yourself intelligent? Most people say yes, and then I say, "So if the smart people are too smart for politics, we will always be run by idiots!" Or some such quip. But this young man asked, "Smart in what sense?" I said in any sense. And he said blithely with a little grin "I don't know." Well, I knew what to say to that!

"Isn't that who should be making policy? People who *aren't* completely satisfied that they have already learned everything they need to know? If the compassionate, positive, spiritual people won't run for office, vote against the duopoly, get involved in *policy* making, then it will be left to the corrupt, the heartless, the attention whores!"

Well, he clearly thinks himself smarter than at least me, because he said one last time before leaving, "You can't win." But he said it with a smile. 

Way to stay positive.

Funny Story

Yes, I am in the middle of a series on Facebook Withdrawal, but something amusing happened today.

I went to Norwood Hospital to see my Dad. He is in the psych ward because after his prostate surgery he stopped eating. I am happy to report that, after some strong psychoactive drugs, he looks MUCH better. And he is eating much better.

My mother was there, which I didn't expect, but didn't mind. My father wanted to watch the end of Godfather III, so we did. But then I wanted to let Dad know that I had blown off a friend today because Dad asked me to visit. I told (my Mom, mostly) that I was "helping a friend" run for office and she asked, "Oh, is he in the Pirate Party, too?"

Fuck. I had not told my mother I was in the Pirate Party. I had not told her when I was in the GREEN party. There is one acceptable way to be involved in politics in my family: BE A REPUBLICAN. My brother, Dan, won the Republican nomination for state rep out here in the sticks back in the late 90's. He only lost the general election by a small margin. But he ran as a REPUBLICAN. They (my blood) all voted for Bush and McCain. The only thing worse than being a Democrat, in their eyes, is being in a THIRD PARTY! "They will be rounding you up with all the other radicals," my father told me last week when I said I thought not only should there be single payer health care, there should be single payer HIGH SPEED INTERNET ACCESS!

Little did I know when we had this conversation, and I marveled at how he jumped to this conclusion from my tiny tilt toward socialism, that my mother had Googled me this month. They knew. They knew that not only was I in a 3rd party, I was 2nd in command of the troops. GROAN!

What did I do? I told her: I am NOT stopping to soothe your nerves. I CAN'T keep my head down while the world falls into chaos. If I don't actively attempt to keep things from going to shit, I will not be able to live with myself. Before I was active, I was miserable. Today, I have never been happier. IN MY LIFE. Never happier in my life than I am right now. Put that in your pipe, Mom. And, I explained to her, my husband is happy, too.

She totally believes in astrology, so I told her, Jason has a northern node in Aires. He was BORN to be a community activist. To resist this is to kill his very nature. This made her think, indeed. "I don't know much about the northern node aspect," she said. "Look into it," I told her.

So the cat is out of the bag. I can expect ridicule and derision every time I see a family member now.

Fuck it. They better step off. I am not changing my stripes.

Facebook Withdrawal, Continued

(This is me, 18 hours in to my self-imposed Facebook exile, wondering what to do with myself while waiting for my son at the library.)

I'm back. And I am back on Facebook, too. I was having a very bad week indeed to consider deleting my Facebook account, but a year ago September I was having a bad enough time of it that I was considering giving my cat up for adoption. And I adore my cat. Luckily, my family insisted we keep him, and now when I look at him now, and pet him and love him I realize just how unwell I must have been at the time.

Mental illness. No point in hiding the fact from any and all folks that I am an obsessive/compulsive. Manifested itself in diet and exercise issues when I was a teen because that is what my fretful mother kept me focused on, (I was miserable, thought I was fat, but in fact looked AWESOME!) ...but it was not an eating disorder, which was the diagnosis du jour in those days (early 1980s). Critics of the way women are portrayed in media will tell you that unrealistically thin women led to the explosion of eating disorders.

I'm certain it was my love of watching TV and reading magazines that led to my badly exacerbated OCD. I used to believe, get this, that they couldn't put anything on the news or in print that wasn't true, or critically important. WHY would they tell us about the threat of biological and nuclear terrorism if it wasn't something I needed to be concerned about? Or germs on my counter leading to disease and death? Skin heads wanted to slay my children because their father is a Jew, gang bangers wanted to car jack me because I was white, Saddam wanted to thwart democracy because we had freedom. They wouldn't lie to me or misdirect me! The news was populated with my friends. They kept me informed so that I could stay safe.

But I was always terrified. Utter panic, fear, and misery all the time. It never occurred to me that powerful people benefit from a terrified population. Like the royals depended on the church and fear of hell to make the people seek salvation, the oligarchs of recent decades have depended on the mass media to spread fear of chaos to make people seek government for salvation and safety. And I did. I voted Democrat (because Republicans are scary!) and defended whatever atrocities the Clintons enacted because, well, I had to support my party, right? And a Republican would have been so much worse, right?

But I wasn't just afraid of the abstract, I was afraid of my neighbors, afraid of what they would think of me if they knew my husband *consumed cannabis*! If they knew I didn't make my kids go to bed at the same time every night, that I had OCD, that I had insomnia. I was afraid that anyone of them could be that mild mannered person who turned out to be a serial killer/child molester/rapist, because life is just like the movie of the week, right? You remember all those lame, made for TV "reality based" films that later wound up on Lifetime TV. TV for women. Watch it and be afraid. And depend on the patriarchy to protect you!

I retreated to suburbia and became isolated. I was lonely too. It was awful.

One day, I took my tiny children to the Ann and Hope outlet. My 4 year old daughter was thirsty, and there was a water cooler full of water from the nearby spring in their garden center. I gave her a cup as another customers said, "It's not good." I wondered what he meant, so I tasted the water. It was awful. I made the manger taste it and he said, "Oh, that's not right!" He called over an African guy called Mohammed and asked him if he just changed the water. He had. I panicked. Mohammed? The news had been full of reports of threats of terrorist activity! He POISONED OUR WATER! I freaked out, went home and begged my parents to stay at our house with us so I could get through a night of terror, waiting for the poison to kill me and my daughter. This is how an obsessive compulsive thinks.

Well, my mother did a good job of soothing my nerves. It turns out that Mohammed, being newly arrived from Africa, didn't understand that a particular KIND of water had to be put in the cooler when he refilled it. He didn't understand that he was supposed to go to the spring water tap. He refilled the cooler with the garden hose. Nasty tasting yes, but not poisoned.

She convinced me the next morning NOT to watch the news, that my nerves couldn't take any more scare tactics from the media. So when I arrived at my daughter's nursery school the next morning, I had no idea that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. "We are under attack, we are at war" the radio playing in the secretary's office said. "It's World War III!" I thought. I had been so well prepared by the media to expect an attack that I suspected the poor dude working at Ann and Hope, but it never occurred to me at that time that I (and the rest of us) had been worked up for weeks before hand for maximum fear impact on the day of the event.

This was my life before high speed internet. If they had handed me a gun that day, I probably would have started shooting anyone they pointed me at. I just had one tiny inkling of sanity remaining... I remembered that the news the previous week was full of Gore challenges to the Bush campaign (still) and stories were emerging of strange goings on in Florida before the election...

Nope. Old news now. Story dropped like hot rock.

Fear and dread and loneliness, deep emotional dependence on my husband and parents, no social life to speak of, I shopped for consolation. Imagine that. What made me feel better was spending money I didn't have on things I didn't really need. The skinheads could come for my kids any day, if the Muslims didn't get to them first. The world was spinning out of control. I am going to buy them lots of toys and clothes to make their lives as happy as possible now before it all goes to shit, which I was certain would happen any minute.

Yes this is coming back to Facebook, but not in this chapter. Right now I am going to watch Democracy Now while I do the dishes. Stay tuned.

Facebook Withdrawl

I didn't have a problem. I just wanted a break. So I suspended my Facebook account. NOW I have a problem. I realize now I must have checked it 12 times a day. And my cell phone was always chiming out PMs from people I didn't necessarily want to chat with, sometimes at 3 in the fucking morning.

It's been less than 24 hours and I don't know what to do with myself. I actually had to log on briefly to retrieve my back up copy of my FB files, but then I suspended the account again. I suspended Twitter, too. Didn't want to swap one drain for another. Google+? Naw. Not even tempted to check that.

I don't know if I would have been able to last even this long if I hadn't finally buckled down and taught myself how to put together an RSS feed last week (I've been using the Digg Reader). The reader feeds me stories I'm interested in, but here's the thing: I really want the conversation to be two-way. What is the point of *knowing* what is going on if I am not going to then turn around and *share* what I have learned? Sure for plenty of people, knowing is enough, keeping news to themselves is preferred as knowledge is power, so if you share your knowledge you share your power, right?

But I like to share. I picked a mate in life who likes to share. Facebook lets me share.

So I shared and I shared and I shared... but I don't get nearly as much in return as I give.

First of all, very few people I know in real life even CARE TO KNOW the things I share, and of course my list of "friends" started out as a list of friends, people I've known for many years. Then I would see someone comment whose name I'd heard in conversation or at a party and whose input I appreciated, so I would add them, and my list grew.

Of those people, few want to re-share my news, and fewer still want to DO anything about the bad news I repeat.  I've been called a downer, a socialist, a commie, been accused of being deluded, of being a psychic drain, and a cancer. I also get positive feed back, but not NEARLY as much. Let's face it: Most people won't speak up about how much they LIKE you, but they will speak up about how much you ANNOY them.

And I decided years back in my Facebook life to just accept this fact of human nature and ignore it. And this was a good thing. You can't let criticism stop you from being who you are. That's slow suicide.

But when I think about it, I had, other than my husband, VERY FEW (you could count them on one hand) people I knew in real life that had gotten involved with any kind of activism, other than the corporate same-old same-old, Avon Walk, Jimmy Fund, Support the Troops kind of crap that props up and supports the current broken and corrupted system. At least two were involved in "Buy Nothing Day", which I became very excited to hear, but when I reached out to one of them with information about the sanctions (at the time) in Iraq, depleted uranium deformities, etc, she asked that I stop. Such tragic stories that she felt powerless to change made her very depressed, and my circle of pals is not known for their emotional resiliency.

(OMFG, if the CAT would just stop MEOWING! I'm sorry there is snow everywhere cat. THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT!)

This interaction occurred *before* Facebook, before YouTube, even, in 2002 before we invaded Iraq. (Let that sink in: We trashed Iraq back before YOUTUBE was launched. That's, that's ancient HISTORY!) With no Facebook and no YouTube, people counted on long email lists for info and interaction. But everyday as the "news" complained to people about "spam" more and more filters went up, more and more people asked to be dropped off lists. So when I could join Facebook at last, I was thrilled: Only people who wanted to have things shared would sign up for this; they would be HAPPY to be informed, right? I under estimated how many people wanted to get on only to play Farmville and share cat pictures. Not that there is anything *wrong* with doing these things, but boy they did NOT want to be reminded that the world outside their door was a nasty place, nor that they had the power to do something to make life better for other people.

So off my list many real life friends dropped. "You post too much politics!" some of them would say, if we had been close. Those who I was merely acquainted with dropped off without a word. So I went LOOKING for people who liked knowing things. I hung out on political pages or pages of politically active people and reached out to people who had things to say that I liked, and some folks whose things I didn't like so much, but I sensed they were open to new ideas, and of course, I wanted to remain open to new ideas. I still want to.

*tires of writing* (Arm injury from last week is not happy about all the typing.)

Something I like about blogging: You don't have to be done with your thought before you publish. I am going to take a break from this, but I have more to say on the matter. And if I keep Facebook suspended I am very likely to write even more.

But before I sign off for now... fuck it. I have to reinstate my Twitter. If you leave it suspended for more than 30 days they delete it all, which makes sense, since the whole thing about Twitter is to be current. 24 hours ago on Twitter is old news. And I am not addicted to Twitter at this point. Not yet.

Well what do you know?

I realized tonight an important truth: I want to live. I don't know *what* I want to do with myself, but I don't want to die after all. I will find something worth doing. But first I will live.

And here you are. Again. I promise you the next one in line wants the same thing that I do. I offer you this loving advice: BE HONEST AND FORTHRIGHT. Not once in a while but always. You might not get what you want, but I promise you won't find yourself here again in a few short months.

Emerson wrote, the only way to have a friend is to be one. I tried. I really tried my best. Did you?

Peace, Lulu

OK then, so was I quite was lucid for a year. I had all my native focus and drive and energy. What did I do? I gave it to you. Who should it have I have given it to? Well, he was happy to share. Because that is the creed, isn't it? The creed of the truest: To share. And he is the truest of them all. But it's gone now. I don't know when it's coming back, but you had my best. You're welcome.


Love, Lulu.