I'm awake and wish I was asleep.  I have undone homework...

and I wish I had time to do it.  Or not.  I know the material.  It's the reason I'm finding going to the classes so frustrating and boring.  But I must go, so I go.

I will walk tomorrow no matter what.

Sunday morning is the one day of the week where I actually read the newspaper without fail.  It's the one day of the week where a physical newspaper is actually delivered.  Turns out that subscribing to the L.A. Times website costs the same with or without the Sunday newspaper, so why not have it delivered?

In yesterday's paper there was the usual "money advice" column in the business section and a letter in that column got me to thinking.  It was from a parent who had filled out the FAFSA (that's the form you fill out to apply for financial aid for college) and been told that even though the family's income is *only* $175,000, their 'contribution' for school would be $43,000.  As a result, the college their kid has chosen, which has a $38,000 annual tuition, had only awarded them $2,000 in work study.

The letter's author had read an earlier column by the same author that discussed a parental contribution of 6% of income and wondered why they weren't being treated as a "typical" family.

That's just ridiculous.  As ridiculous as the notion that someone making $200,000 to $250,000 is part of the "middle class".  They may feel like they are middle class, but only in a world where the meaning of middle is completely skewed.  In 2009, an income of $175,000 puts a family into the top 5% of households.  I want to take the writer of this letter and shake them and say "do you understand that you're better off than 95% of the other families in this country?  That financial aid is based on need and while you may feel you have need, there are others who are needier who deserve to get helped first and there's no money left when they finally get to you on the need scale."

Then I take a deep breath and realize I don't have to fight those wars any longer.  It was just like that when I did financial aid at a private school.  Families who earned plenty of money to afford the tuition, if they'd properly prioritize their life to afford the choice of private education, insisting they qualified for help.

The most egegrious example that comes to mind was a woman who shared custody with her ex-husband.  She got $40,000 in alimony and $30,000 in child support from him annually, earned another $40,000 or so in interest on her savings (she had a ton of money in the bank from her divorce settlement) and she netted another $70,000 from her self-employment.  So with an annual income of $180,000, of the one-half of the tuition she would be responsible for, she wrote on the form that she could afford to pay....ZERO.

She got no financial aid.  She paid her half of the tuition and her ex-husband paid the other half.

American values are an issue.  At least they should be when you learn that in 2003, Virginia offered to exempt homeowners from property tax, if the homeowner happened to be a recipient of the Medal of Honor.  The state received 642 requests for exemption on the basis of those applying for exemption claiming to have been awarded the Medal of Honor.  The problem is, there were only 132 living repicients of the Medal at that time, and only four of them lived in Virginia.  At least 638 people were willing to lie about having received the nation's highest honor for valor in battle, to avoid paying a property tax bill. 

It's a simple word.  Compact.  When it's printed at the rear of a parking space, it means that the space is marked off and designed to hold only smaller model cars known as compacts.  It is not an invitation to squeeze your Hummer into the space, actually taking up three such spaces.  It isn't an invite to park diagonally across two of those spaces so no one will park near your car.  And it certainly isn't an invitation to pull your car into the space so close to the car adjacent to you that the driver of that car hasn't got a prayer of opening their car door to get in and leave the space.  I may well let the air out of two of the tires of the next person who ignores the reality of compact car parking and parks too close to my car.  Right now I just leave notes letting those drivers know they are being jerks.  But I'm losing patience.

To whatever moron keeps forcing pop-up ads for Netflix past my pop-up blocker.  I already subscribe.  Go away!