Perspective

I'm in the midst of what promises to be a very long culling process, trying to thin the mass of stuff in the house. In the process, I'm finding lots of stuff.

This morning I uncovered a number of my notebooks from my freshman year of college. At some point since then I adopted a habit of taking notes on pads of notebook paper and keeping them in 3-ring binders, a much more versatile system, but back at that time I used spiral notebooks, one for each class.

I couldn't resist the temptation to page through some of these. One of them was from the basic Biology class as an easy credit BDR. (Why I actually kept this, I cannot say.) Paging through I came across a figure in the human sexuality section that astonished me. In with the other STDs was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Most wrote it out then; the acronym wasn't yet familiar; this was 1983. Accordingly, there was little information in that section, but there was this one figure: somewhere between 1500 and 2000 cases to date.

It was 1983.