What's everybody doing for their Onerous Task today?

Going to therapy. And finishing writing the proposal for the fiction project, so I can send it off to my agent.

I have done most of my work-related onerous tasks! I edited together some videos for our school tv. And, I'm almost done grading some speech exams on communication. I only have the matching left, so just the easy parts to grade! Yay!

Most of the 8th graders are gone a field trip so I'm getting a lot of onerous tasks done. I had 1 kid in 5th period, 1 in 6th, will not have any in 8th. So, I can get work done!

I have other things to do when I get home, but I'm not thinking about them right now.

And finishing writing the proposal for the fiction project, so I can send it off to my agent.

Whoo! Have some pom poms: *o/*

Well, imagine I have two arms.

This made me laugh from the comments section.

**********

TL;DR version of the exchange between Aaron Barr and Anonymous:

Barr: I cast Power word, IRL!
*spell fizzles*
Anonymous: LOL, NO U
*critical hit*

So, I did a little filing, but then got caught up in a conversation about 14-year-old work gossip. Good times.

Exams are graded and grades input into gradebook! WooT!

Finished reading that email!

Finished reading that email!

Yikes, that was an onerous email.

A visit to a Shanghai fake-marriage market, where lesbians and gay men meet to find a husband or wife.

SHANGHAI, China—"I'm here to find a lesbian, to be with me and to build a home," No. 11 says to the crowd clustered on floor cushions at a sunlit yoga studio in Shanghai. No. 11 is a muscular man in a flannel shirt and cargo pants, and he easily commands the attention of the crowd of 40 or so young men and women who are gingerly sipping glasses of wine and whispering to their neighbors.

"In my view, a 30-year-old man should start thinking about having a family, but two men can't hold each other's hands in the street. We're not allowed to be a family," he says. The crowd nods.

I'm at a fake-marriage market, where Chinese lesbians and gay men meet to find a potential husband or wife. In China, the pressure to form a heterosexual marriage is so acute that 80 percent of China's gay population marries straight people, according to sexologist Li Yinhe, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. To avoid such unions, six months ago, Shanghai's biggest gay Web site, inlemon.cn, started to hold marriage markets once a month.

This is just sad:

While past generations buried their sexuality in straight marriages, the people gathered at the yoga studio are trying a new approach. No. 8 (the men sport numbered buttons in a pleasing shade of blue, the women's are pink), a pretty 22-year-old woman with curly dyed chestnut hair, skinny jeans, and Snoopy slippers wants a fake marriage to ease parental pressure, but she doesn't want a baby. No. 15, a strikingly tall man with side-swept bangs, says: "I want to get married for my parents, but I think lying to them will make me feel terrible. So I want to have a fake marriage with a lesbian girl, but just for one or two years, and then I want a divorce to show my parents that I am not a marriage type." There's one constant: All the participants talk about pleasing their parents.

Jesse, gossip that is 14 years old, that is about a 14 year old, or that makes you feel 14? Inquiring minds want to know.