When I spend time online, the last thing I want to be doing is homework. Especially when the "instructor" for the course wants to "make sure you read every fucking word of every page of every book ever written about the topic at hand" (emphasis and paraphrase mine). For instance, I was working on a quiz this evening, and was confronted with the following question: In English, word order affects __________.

If this looks like an innocent question, then you're not in grad school taking this circus of a class, are you? Because it's not. It's a direct quote from one forty-page chapter of a textbook. I read two chapters of said book this week, and also one chapter or so from each of three other books. Indeed. Needle in a haystack that covers the entire state of Montana.

And given the nastiness of this particular book and its infatuation with detail, the answer could easily have been anything. People. Air traffic controllers. Puppies. The medical profession. And for the record, single verbs are not those that don't get to file for marital benefits on their tax returns. They're not verbs that stand alone, either. But they are bitch-ass stupid.

But I digress. Today, for those who cared to watch it, was the Super Bowl. I happened to be among those who didn't care to watch it, but did catch a snippet of it because the lesbian roommies were watching it.

Rather than sit and watch sports today, I went out and explored more of LA. Back to West Hollywood, but from a new vantage point: with gay men instead of lesbians. I even went to the SUPER gay mall. Which is really just a mall. That attracts gigantic gay clientèle. With lots of money. And penchants for fashion and big-name designers. And a love of paying lots of money for things that come in tiny miniature-purse-sized Calvin Klein bags.

And then there was me, all awkward and uncomfortable walking through stores whose cheapest t-shirts were a bargain at $80.00. Awkward and uncomfortable because I don't know the names of the companies of even half off my wardrobe. I was thrown into a big gay pit of something completely beyond me. A black hole, more like. That makes more sense, given the thrill of ease and calm that swept over me the second we booked it out of there.

Words like botox and nose job don't usually describe people walking right by me. (Rather, they describe celebrity gossip, such as when Robert and I conjecture that Sarah Jessica Parker totally had a nose job!) And given that I wear jeans that don't have the designery vertical stripe thingies in the denim, I'm surprised I wasn't lynched by the Uber Gay Fashion Elite.