Atmosphere

I have two things to celebrate. First is that I finally figured out how to put a user picture in, and found this adorable one from Potterpuffs. I'm still working on improving the layout of this thing and/or figuring out how to put little in-parentheses links to bigger entries, but it's a start. I'm hopelessly naive after all- I don't even know if a user picture is the same as an icon. I'll get there eventually.

Second thing to celebrate is the weather. It's a hot, close day. The air clings to your skin like a warm damp towel, and the sky is so uniformly grey-white from orizon to horizon that if you stared at it long enough, you would probably go blind. Sounds seem to be nearby, so that a bird crying across the yard makes you whip your head around. Not the best day to be outside, certainly, but a marvelous day to appreciate from inside an air-conditioned house.

Also, as prescribed, a daily dose of my random musings. Today, they're about viruses. I saw an ad for a drug that claimed to cure AIDS. Of course it's ridiculous that something as important as a cure for AIDS wouldn't be all over the papers, but I set that aside for the moment. The drug claimed to 'flush' HIV from the body. HIV is a lysogenic virus- as opposed to lytic viruses, which simply enter the host cell, take it over to produce more of themselves, and then explode it from the inside and depart. A lysogenic virus actually blends its genetic information with that of the host cell, so that when the cell reproduces itself, it also reproduces the genetic information of the virus. These viruses can remain inactive for a long time until some sort of stress or stimulus activates them. Then they become lytic. So it would be nearly impossible to remove the 'dormant' virus, since it's basically one with the host. And by the time it became lytic, it could be in most of the cells of your body- and how you could remove it is beyond me, and apparantly beyond most scientists as well. It irks me that a commercial would claim to be able to do such a thing. Yeah, I'm just an ignorant girl ranting about something she knows little about. I would 'fold' this, which is what I call putting a link to it so that y'all wouldn't have to read it unless you were addicted to boredom or something, but I don't know how. Bear with me.

~Learning as she goes, Kit