Whatever happened to class? Part 3: Short and sweet: My team presented. It went well. We all got an 'A' for the class. Woo-Hoo!

Now what am I gonna do? Several possibilities:

1. Put out feelers among friends about my new status as an 'A' student in event planning. Get some practical experience by working for them. Refuse to do weddings. (That latter was Abbie Salny's advice, and I do believe she knows what she's talking about.)

2. Contact HR at Ethicon (where I'm a computer consultant now). Ask if their events are done in-house or if they use an outside firm. If in-house, ask about signing on as an event planner. (Let's face it, they're never gonna hire me in the IM department.)

3. Get my transcripts from Michigan State University. See if any of those credits can be transferred to the certificate-granting program in event planning at Raritan Valley Community College, so I don't have to take all 30 hours of courses. See if my life experience at planning RG's for Northern NJ Mensa counts for anything, too.

And of course these are not mutually exclusive. But I took the course because the description in the catalog looked interesting, not because I had some master plan for career change or development. Now that the first class is over, I have to decide if there will be more -- and just where this is all going to lead.

It's a Challenge: The good news this week is that, while the Post Office has raised the rates for first class postage (from 39 to 41 cents), the rate for 2-ounce postage has dropped -- from 63 to 58 cents. So that means GAAMC saves 5 cents on every copy of Challenge we mail out over last year (or, for that matter, last month).

The bad news is -- well, partly my fault, I guess. Along with being Challenge editor, I also run the front desk on Monday nights at GAAMC. I wasn't there on May 7th, because I was meeting with my teammates to do our final review of our class presentation (which was in lieu of a final exam), which we were doing the next day. In my place, I was told, three people took over and did the stuff I usually do: take door donations; make name tags; put up the white board and the cork board; and generally be a friendly, welcoming face for all those who walk through the door.

What I didn't mention was that I never, never, never put out a stack of Challenge copies on the front desk. I do hand them out to non-members and first timers, after asking if they had gotten a copy. But in the past, members would take an extra copy or three on top of the one they had been mailed at home. The result would be no copies to impress the first timers, and no copies to entice the non-members to join (or rejoin, as the case may be).

On April 30th, I left some 40 copies of Challenge in the front desk storage box. When I returned on May 14th, only 6 were left. Because the people at the front desk put out a stack of Challenges. Now I have to do an additional print run of 35 copies, because a snafu over creating labels meant that our corporate subscribers did not get their copies mailed out by the beginning of May -- and their copies were a huge chunk of the ones sitting in the front desk storage box on May 7th.

I must educate more of the "regulars" in how the front desk operates. I think I shall request a chunk of time at the upcoming Board meeting for a little instruction. And maybe an operations sheet as well.

"You should only speak good about the dead," Bette Davis once said when told that Joan Crawford, her hated rival for many years, has passed away. "Joan Crawford's dead. Good!"

The Reverend Jerry Falwell died today. In regards to him, I can only echo Ms. Davis' comment.

I think I spend my life waiting. I'm waiting for my final grade (event planning class, Raritan Valley Community College) to be posted online. I'm waiting until May 31st when I'm taking a long weekend at Disney World (the annual Gay Day event). After that, I'm waiting until July 3rd for the Mensa AG in Birmingham, AL. I'm waiting to get motivated so that, this year, the new outside doors go on the house, and the new front stoop railings get installed, and the sun room windows (all 10 of them) get replaced, and the grandfather clock gets repaired (it hasn't chimed in close to a year now), and the mattress gets replaced (o TempurPedic, how I long for thee), and the TV gets replaced (which means replacing the furniture wherein the old TV resides).

I wait for Bill-the-Honeybear 99% of the time because, even when we agree on a time to leave for something, he's never ready by that time. I wait for him to become my partner and not my dependent. I wait for him to stop acting as though he were still a 20-year-old and start acting a little more like the 48-year-old he is...just a little.

I wait for the news that I no longer have a job.

I wait for the day when there will be that one clear, clarifying realization that yes, I am an adult. I wait for recognition of that fact by others.

I wait for usefulness.

I wait for the day when the support I get is not moral or emotional, but physical and/or monetary.

I wait until I am tired of waiting. Then I wait some more, thinking these feelings will pass.

My life is spent waiting. I'm tired of the expense.

Last night, when I came home from bowling, Bill-the-Honeybear was watching "Real Time with Bill Maher", which he enjoys watching. (I do, too, sometimes, depending on who the guests are.) I came in in time for the start of the "New Rules" segment. The first few were funny -- one was about the overacting of host chefs on the Food Channel, another about news photos of recently-deceased famous people lying in their coffins. But then he started talking about paranoid schizophrenia -- prefacing it with "I am not a doctor, but I am on television." And then proceeding to diagnose the President with paranoid schzophrenia, listing 'symptoms' and giving examples.

I am not a doctor, nor am I on television. But I'm smart enough to know that paranoid schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, one that is fairly difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat. And it is a disease that affects not only the sufferer but his or her entire family. There's not, to my knowledge, even a way to detect it early enough to prevent. But for the sake of a joke, Maher gets to play fast and loose with mental illness and its symptoms, from the relative safety of subscription cable.

Well, it's only a joke. Lighten up. Funny, but that defense didn't save Don Imus' ass -- or his job -- earlier this month. I guess we can add a new category to those groups about which it is still OK to make jokes: the mentally ill. (Fat's still there; gay is lingering, but on its way out; and I'm sure there are one or two more.)

Whatever happened to class? Part 2: Last time I posted about the event planning class I was taking, I had just taken the midterm exam. For all my worrying, I got 96 (out of 101). Now comes the final project, working on a three-person team to create a weekend drivers' training event for a Porsche dealership. We present this coming Tuesday. Am I nervous? Of course I am. (You thought I'd have changed over a few weeks?)

The separation of powers: Well, we've just been treated to the spectacle of Congress passing a war funding appropriation with a timetable for withdrawing the troops, the President vetoing the appropriation (as he said he would), and the House failing to override the veto. Everyone's blaming everyone else, as usual; politicians are trying to score points, as usual; commentators and protesters are broadcasting their views, as usual. Am I the only one who remembers something called the Constitution, or that quaint notion of the separation of powers?

Congress' mistake was in tacking on that timetable. According to the Constitution, the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Along with that power comes the ultimate authority on deciding strategy and tactics -- including when to withdraw troops. Congress overreached, possibly spurred by the unexpected shift of both houses to Democratic control last November. (Yes, it was unexpected -- at least as far as the Senate was concerned; everyone expected the House to shift party control.) And when Congress overreaches, the President gets to use another one of his nifty Constitutional powers -- the veto -- which he did.

The President's mistake was in not trying to negotiate something better with Congress before the bill came to him for his signature. Yes, as commander-in-chief he gets to lead the armed forces. But the Constitution gives the power of the purse -- the ability to decide how much money is going to be spent for which projects -- to Congress. The shift in control of both houses should have been a clue that he could no longer play with the troops like tin toys in a sandbox and expect to have money for those troops given to him at his whim and pleasure, in the amounts he wanted. Congress was willing to give him money for the troops -- but correctly read the 2006 election as a mandate from the people to end a mismanaged and unpopular exercise in military might. (No, it's not a war -- only Congress can declare war, another one of their nifty Constitutional powers -- just like Korea and Vietnam were not wars.)

So what's the answer? Publicly, Congress needs to pass another appropriation bill (they've promised to do so by Memorial Day -- how fitting) to give the President just enough money to fund the troops until some specified time -- say, the end of 2007. (Let the GAO figure out what that amount is.) Privately, Congressional leaders need to tell the President that when that time runs out, so does the additional money. If he wants to keep playing in the sandbox, he'll have to shift the money from other areas.

Why will this not leak all over Washington? On the Congressional side, if they let the time limit news leak out, the President can publicly declare the Democrats in control as not being supportive of our forces. On the Presidential side, if they let the time limit news leak out -- well, they won't, because it makes them look like they caved to Congress.

Now, what are the chances this will actually happen? Snowball. Hell. You do the math.