Yeah, the Muppet arms are definitely incendiary. I’m starting my flailing. I have 6 more assignments in Math to finish, as well as a Word assignment, an Excel assignment, a Grammar assignment and a Grammar quiz to finish before Monday at midnight. Then I have two finals on Tuesday, two on Wednesday and one on Thursday. FIVE FINALS. THREE DAYS. BAWKBAWKBAWK!!

It’s a little overwhelming, y’know? And this is the LAST time I take this many online classes. I WILL be taking my finals in a classroom next quarter (except for my PowerPoint final which is the only online class I have). I’ve resigned myself to a B in my Business Math class, and I’m ridiculously happy with that. Hell, I’ll be happy with a C, but a B wouldn’t suck. At least the final for that is done on Tuesday, so I can be relaxed-ish for the finale of Glee that night with Toby!

Then I have two GLORIOUS weeks off. Movies. Knitting. Reading. Learning more about spinning. Video games that I haven’t had time for. NO GODDAMNED MATH. And then on the 28th, it starts all over again, with new classes. Oof. One quarter nearly down. Five more quarters to go. I’m 17% done! WOO HOO! And yes, when I get my grades, I’ll post them.

\m/ I’m a total fuckin’ rockstar. \m/

One of the assignments we have to do is a series of 13 worksheets based on a series of Excel spreadsheets. One of the spreadsheets is set up to simulate a paycheck, using variables such as marital status, withholding allowances, state and local tax rates, payroll period, gross pay, and voluntary deductions.

The questions that pissed me off are thus:

8.) Consider a single person, claiming one federal withholding allowance, with a biweekly salary of $8650 who has no deductions other than federal withholding tax, FICA, Medicare, state withholding tax (5%), and local withholding tax (2%). Would this person’s net pay increase more if they receive a 5% raise or if they got married? Don’t forge to increase the number of withholding allowances to 2 if they get married.

9.) For the single person described in Question 8 above, what percent increase in their biweekly salary would they have to earn to have their net pay be higher than it would have been had they married?

Obviously, the answer to 8 is “Get married.” I put in “Married. Of course.” Yeah, a little bitter.

The answer to 9? NINE PERCENT. In order to get the same amount of money that someone would get if they got married, you would have to get a 9% raise. There’s not a single company outside of an oil company or an insurance company that gives more than a 4% raise, and most of them haven’t given raises in two years as it is!

Do you see those numbers? NINE FUCKING PERCENT. Now tell me that fags and dykes shouldn’t be able to get married. Fuck you.

I should be doing homework, but I can’t get this post out of my head. It’s been in there for three or four days, and if I want to get my assignments done, I need to write this. DAMN YOU, MUSE! WORK WITH ME!

Have you ever looked back at your life and seen just how surreal it really was when you were a kid? And then wondered why your little kid-brain didn’t clue into it? Or, more, why the “grown-ups” in your world didn’t clue in?

I grew up in a town that was a Lifetime Movie of the Week. My mom will probably disagree, but really, it was. Let me tell this to j00.

The biggest scandal I’ve ever heard, even with all the Washington DC crap and political things, happened while I was in high school. And I’ll get to that. I need to tangent somewhat to a different topic, namely my beef with Glee.

I love the show more than I can put into words. Kurt’s struggle through small-town life as an emergent gayboi and his relationships with his father and schoolmates have me in tears every damn show. The music, even all auto-tuned like it is, is fantastic. That’s what makes me love the show. What I struggle with, even more than it basically being (as my friend Pamela calls it) “Teen Angst: The Musical”, is that in my high school, the glee club, known as The Entertainers (let it go; it’s small-town Wyoming), is (or at least when I was in school, it was) made up of mostly the popular kids. To have the glee club be the dorks? That makes me happy.

I was never cool enough to get into the Entertainers, and that still hurts. I could have been encouraged by the director to work at it but instead, I was ignored by her, and openly mocked by most of the performers. It wasn’t until I turned 27 and started singing with Voices for Diversity that that hurt started to heal. I learned that I had a damn good voice, nearly perfect pitch, and I could work my ass off to be a really strong singer. VFD, subsequently, has ruined me for any single-gender gay chorus; if it’s not mixed-voice, I can’t sing with them. I need SATB; TTBB just doesn’t do it for me.

So, our choir director’s son was my age. Her husband was one of the local vets, and the one that most people turned to when they had animal issues, and in a ranching community, he did pretty damn well for himself. In February of my junior year, he disappeared. A couple of days later, his body was found in a hotel in Colorado; he has committed suicide. The stories varied; one said he hanged himself, one said it was Valium and vodka. Needless to say, his family was devastated.

Over the next few months, stories came out that the director was having an affair with one of the sons of one of the local preachers. While the son was still in high school. The son was a friend of the director’s son. “Awkward” only begins to describe that. The preacher made his kid publicly apologize to his entire congregation.

Keep in mind that these families were still some of the rich families in a small town. To quote Allison Janney in Drop Dead Gorgeous, “It’s front page news when one of ‘em takes a shit.”

The director resigned mid-year. The vocal music program at the school was a mess. My heart sang just a li’l bit.

See? Totally Lifetime Movie of the Week. Hell, Lifetime Mini-series of the Year! Scandals in a Small Town!

So, there’s really no point to this brain-dump. You can see why I got the hell outta there. It was… toxic. I love my folks and I love the town. I hate the Peyton Place/Harper Valley aspect of it. It makes me wonder how I got out of there as well-adjusted as I am.

Bitch, shut your fucking mouth. I shouldn’t even know your name. Ever. And after having you regurgitate “Drill, Baby, Drill” for three months on the campaign trail, you should never say one fucking word about this oil spill. Fuck RIGHT off, Caribou Barbie. One face, no matter how plastic that face is, per person, La Palin.

Cunt. And yes, Mom, I’d say that to her face.

It’s 4:00 am. I should totally be asleep. However, for unknown reasons, Lady Insomnia has grabbed me by the face. I’m caught up (and ahead) on my homework; my next assignment for anything isn’t due until the 26th and, naturally, it’s a math quiz (Statistics. I’m excited. Can you tell?), so I’m not really all that pumped up to take care of it.

I’ve got a total of nine assignments (that I know of) due before the end of the quarter. Finals start on June 10 and I’ll have five to take. I’m taking my Intro to Keyboarding final either on Thursday or next Tuesday. I’m far enough ahead in the class that I’ll finish that one up with two weeks of no classes on Tuesday and Thursdays, woo hoo!

For the most part, this quarter has been good. I’m pulling solid A’s in everything. I’ve had a couple of assignments that have made me wonder what I was smoking, but the rest of them have been pretty okay, and I should end the quarter with a really good GPA, something of which I’m pretty proud. This has been very good for me, honestly, and I hope it continues.

Speaking of continuing, next quarter is another 19 credits. I’ll have Bookkeeping Basics, Principles of Business, Document Formatting and Skill-building I (the next level of my keyboarding class), Office Procedures II, Access Modules 1 & 2, and PowerPoint Modules 1 & 2 (my only online course next quarter). It’s those first two that I’m a little nervous about, honestly. I need them both for my major (I’m not taking a whole lot of random electives; those were covered in my last stint in college), but damn, they scare the glitter out of me. My books will cost me about $350, which isn’t terrible. I don’t have to buy the books for two classes, as they’re both using books I had this quarter, and a classmate said that she’d sell me her Principles of Business book.

My schedule is going to be… hectic next quarter. Mondays are noon to nine, with a 3-hour break. Tuesdays are going to be loooooooong. My first class starts at 9:00 am and my last class gets out at 8:50 pm. I have a 2 hour and a 2.5 hour break in there, but that’s not really enough time to get home and do anything constructive before I have to go back to school again, so I’ll probably end up sitting in the library or a computer lab, finishing my homework and not having to worry about much else the rest of the week. Wednesdays are short, and Thursdays are only a little longer. I have night classes on Monday and Tuesday, which is what’s going to make them so long.

I feel kind of at a loss as to where I’m going right now. I know I need to finish this degree. Someone in my Office Procedures I class asked me on Monday why I’m taking the class, since I seem to know all the answers anyway. I explained why.

And you know what? I hate like hell that I have to take these classes for the validation of a piece of paper. Evidently, 14 years in various offices isn’t enough validation. I’m sick to death of the stupidity of having to work twice as hard to prove myself because I’m an admin assistant who’s a guy. There are a lot of guys out there who are tired of the “glass ceiling”; I’m here to tell you that it works for men, too. It gets really old.

I’m going to get zero sleep before class.

I’ve obviously been listening to too much Wil Wheaton lately. And to be fair, my walks to and from school have been the entire runs of Radio Free Burrito and Memories of the Futurecast, all in the last two or three weeks. If you haven’t heard them, they’re awesome. And if you know him, Klae did a bumper for one of the early RFBs in his “Buenas Noches!” announcer voice.

In any case, I said that to get you to this story about why I’m right and Leon doesn’t think so.

We’ve been working our way through the entire run of Voyager over the last few months. It’s my favorite of the various Star Trek titles (as is evidenced by my first-season Voyager tattoo). Yes, really. Let it all go and just move on. We’re on disc 6 of season 5, on an episode called “Relativity”. There’s some (shocking!) temporal bomb planted on Voyager, and at one point, the ship explodes. When it happened, I said, “Ka-boom. Earth-shattering ka-boom.” Leon said, “Better than Ka-plop.” I said, “No, that would be on a Klingon ship,” and started laughing. He gave me a flat, unfriendly look. I said, “I win.” He disagreed.

Now, in order for that to be funny, you have to understand that the word Qapla’ is the Klingon word meaning, “Success!” It rhymes, more or less, with “ka-plop.” He was unimpressed that I made a funny using a completely made-up language. I made a total nerd-pun and, therefore, I win. Tell him I win. And that I’m totally the nerdiest.

No? Fine. I’ll sit over here in the corner with my friend Sheldon.

I just got back in from taking the dogs out to do their thang. Well, more along the lines of wandering around the backyard and sniffing at everything because “OMG THE WHOLE BACKYARD CHANGED SMELLS IN THE LAST THREE HOURS!!” (that would be Max) or “YOU LEFT ME FOR ONE MILLION YEARS WITH NOBODY TO TALK TO SO I’M NEEDY AND …is that a sunbeam?” ::flomp:: (and that would be Belle). The temperature is perfect (my desktop widget says 81°). The sky is the closest thing to the perfect sky color that I haven’t seen since I spent four days in Red Lodge, Montana, when I was 20 (let me tell you, if you’ve never been to Montana, there’s a reason they call it Big Sky Country. You will never see a sky that blue anywhere else; no, not even in Texas, but it comes close. It chokes me up just thinking about it). The clouds are large and puffy and blindingly white yet still hold some shadow that makes them that much more dynamic and interesting to look at. There’s a breeze that makes it comfortable. The backyard has started its wildness and has invented shades of green to go along with the eleventeen billionty that were already out there.

I came up here to write this blog post, thought briefly about grabbing my laptop to go back out there, wasn’t sure of an electrical outlet and decided to just grab my calculator and math book and a notebook and go do my hateful hellish number-crunching math homework on the back deck and enjoy the day. If I can figure out how to pipe the music out there, I may throw a Midnight Syndicate CD on. Or maybe just take my iPod and the stereo out there.

To all my pasty-folk: go outside. Enjoy the day. If you’re not blessed enough to have such a glorious afternoon, my condolences. Jetstream + Gulfstream got it right today.

The scenario:
Someone in a “monogamous” relationship plays with someone outside the relationship. The cheated-on partner comes at the person who played with the cheater and calls the playmate a home-wrecker and says something to the effect of, “How dare you sleep with my boyfriend! What right do you have to break up my relationship?”

We’ve all seen it happen. It happens every day in the news. Cheating spouses, jilted lovers, “home-wrecking” mistresses. And I think it’s well past time for people to start calling bullshit on some of that.

Sure, there are some people who seduce people who are in relationships. More often than not, though, the cheaters in the relationship are to blame. So why does it always seem to be the fault of the person who played with the cheater? Is it the playmate’s responsibility to safeguard the cheater’s relationship? Hell no.

Every relationship has rules. For monogamous relationships, that means the first rule is, “No sleeping with anyone outside of the relationship.” For non-monogamous relationships, the rules differ.

I’m in an open, poly relationship. Our rules are: Play safe. Tell each other when we play. No playing solo in the house when both of us are home. That means I get to play with permission.

If anyone were to come after me because his boyfriend played with me, I’d have to put that person in his place about it. I have no control over his cheating boyfriend or his dysfunctional relationship. If he wants to start throwing blame around, maybe he should start communicating with his boyfriend about what’s wrong with their relationship and why he went outside the relationship for sex and/or affection. And maybe he should start taking a good long hard look at himself to see what he did (if anything) to make his boyfriend stray.

And god help the first girl who comes at me for nailing her bisexual boyfriend. Because she will see that I fight like a girl, too. I have ZERO problems taking a girl down if she attacks me first.

Everyone makes choices. If you can’t handle the consequences of your own choices, that’s your problem. If someone attempts to make them mine, I will take huge issue with that.

I loathe April Fools Day. Hate it with the white-hot heat of a thousand thousand suns. The Death Star is strong today, and the guy with his finger on the button has a twitchy trigger finger.

However, ThinkGeek comes up with the best April Fools products, and some of them get made into real things. This year’s contestants:

My First Bacon
Tell Me Your Secrets Bear
Screaming Chef’s Knife
Monolith Action Figure
Canned Unicorn Meat
Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock
moodINQ – Programmable Tattoo System
iCade – iPad Arcade Cabinet

I think that the first five items should be real. Because they’re AWESOME.

As part of several of my classes, I have to participate on some web forums, specifically the ones for those classes. One of my classes, Business English, has us learning the eight parts of speech. I came to the realization that all eight of them have a Schoolhouse Rock song associated with them. I posted on the board, pointing it out (because, you know, I’m an English nerd and a pop culture geek). I got a response from one of my classmates saying that she had to go watch that now, and isn’t that the movie with Jack Black?

*blink* … *blinkblink*

I politely pointed out that no, that was School of Rock.

She’s 29. Was there that much of a gap in 8 years?

This is going to be an interesting quarter, I think.