“Now ordinarily I wouldn’t give up: I’m no quitter, but under the circumstance, I think it’s better that I wash my hands of you”.

Found it really difficult to make time to write a blog recently. Had a lot of things going on in life and just not had the energy to write one. The Easter weekend has arrived and I’m spending the last day of the long weekend on the sofa watching trash TV (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition at the moment), although I would like to note that I did go out for a run earlier this morning! Every year for Lent I give up a number of food items, I enjoy food, I love eating so it’s an easier way to sacrifice something that I will really miss and find a challenge to do, and I don’t believe in taking the easy way out of things. I am really happy that I successfully managed to last the whole of Lent without eating any chocolate, crisps, sweets, cake, biscuits and bread. Unfortunately I’m annoyed with myself that I did have to quit something recently that I was really enjoying and it has been niggling me since.

I signed up to a Coursera course on HIV/AIDS. The course is 9 weeks long and involves about three to four hours (hmm!) of work a week including online lectures and then a mixture of small essays and quizzes, there’s also a forum focused on the overall arch of the subject as well as the weekly topics. I’ve decided that I was going to have to pull out when I couldn’t complete the second essay, I’ve had to move flats for a few weeks and have limited internet access, the essays have to be factual and not based on opinion so I wasn’t able to research enough to write a good essay, and I didn’t want to submit a shit one just for the sake of it.

I don’t want to bash the course, even in the four weeks I was studying for it I learnt so much about HIV that I didn’t already know and I’m quite geeky when it comes to the virus. I’m just annoyed that things out of my control meant that I wasn’t in the right space or mind-set to finish it.

The one thing that was disappointing was that for the first time I was in direct contact with people who hold pathetic ideas about the virus, denialists and people who, despite the course material, believe HIV is something that happens to a specific group of society. On the up side I was happy to see that many of the people taking the course weren’t doing so because they were also living with HIV but because they wanted to learn more about the virus, some of them because they’re doing medical studies, they’re nurses etc. but plenty of normal people as well, people who will help to fight the stigma and fear.

Maybe I will get the chance to do something like it again and see it through to the end, I hope so. It would have been good to have achieved a personal goal outside of everything else that is going on in my life. I’ve got it off my chest now so hopefully can stop dwelling on it, looking forward to my holiday with my boyfriend in less than three weeks so going to focus on that for now!