Hello (Again), World

I'm not sure what motivated me to think about blogging today, but here are three quick bullet points before I head back to grading and preparing for tonight's class:

• No Bushes, No Clintons. I don't necessarily support or even *like* any particular candidate who is or who might be running for President in 2016.  What I do know, though, is that it honestly worries me a bit that the front-runners, or at least near front-runners, for our two major parties are a Bush and a Clinton.  I hope the nomination process brings us someone ELSE for at least one, if not both, parties.
• Being slightly more rational.  Subscription-based business models are wonderful...if you're the business.  For longer than I care to say, I've steadily maintained my "Y" membership despite not having actually used it.  Why be so irrational?  Well, you see, although I may not use it in practice, I use this membership in theory.  Actually cancelling the membership would force me to say that I don't use it in either sense.  Well, finally my credit card expired and I thought, "Well, okay, that sort of did it for me."  But apparently not.  Even after the card expired -- and suffice to say I had not entered the joint since said occurrence -- the Y continued to send me statements w/increasing "amounts due" at the bottom.  This got me to FINALLY say, "Okay, the jig's up. Time to stop pretending that I swim there, or whatever it is I think I do, and just cancel this thing."  I went in this morning, knocked out all the paperwork, and learned that they have one-day passes for military members for $3.  So the story ends quite well -- no more $38/mo charged to my card, and whenever I decide to do the *actual* kind of swimming, as opposed to the theoretical kind, I can do it at a solid 12 times a month before I even hit the break-even point.
• Perma-working.  Only because I looked, I know this was the last entry I did before this.  I still perma-work, and will continue to do so until my passive income hits the right threshold.  I sometimes wonder how many people perma-work (I bet it's a sizable chunk of people; I'm not trying to sound special or play a woe-is-me card here).  I'm nowhere near a one percenter (believe me, I just filed my return, I know this).  But things are trending in the right directions, and I eventually plan to get there. When I do, no one else -- except my wife -- will really know what it was like during this part the climb.  I have no idea what I'll be like when I'm on that side of the table -- I hope I don't become a pompous jerk -- but the more I see and learn about the world, the surer I am that very few of those bashing the one-percent would be game for the 4 a.m. wakeups on days that end with the last train home.