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.

Gossip that is 14 years old. The resulting child is now 13.... I guess it's sort of ongoing gossip, since the one player still works here and the other does occasional work, and is buddies with various other people. But the steamy phase has been over for years -- both the torrid affair and the brutal breakup!

My onerous task is grading. sigh. I feel like Sysiphus.

I did get most of the messages out of my inbox, so that's good.

Not really onerous, but I did clean up the kitchen, do my nails, and cleaned off a lot of the TiVO. Now shower and go get mac. Really lazy today.

I should work on my inbox. I should clear 10+ year old docs and pics off my hard drive. But I won't, not today.

Today I shovel out (some) of the storage closet and make inroads on further organizing the contents. The Carlin theory of bigger house=more space=more stuff is apparently true. Woe.

I have to get back to work...

I kind of have an onerous task victory...but not from onerous task day. Describing it would be an onerous task in itself...but the short version is I was in a battle with Sears Home Improvement over a service call to my leaking chimney. Not only are they deducting the charge, but they are redoing the flashing on my chimney, which was done poorly the first time by the subcontractor they hired. It wouldn't have happened if I didn't complain on Twitter (and then write a 1000 word email of complaint.)