8 hours, finished and working

I spent a few hours on this on friday and about 4 hours on saturday and about 3 hours on sunday.  I finally figured it out with help from not one but two actual professional ruby developers.  darren thoughtfully looked at it with me but i was still stuck.  eventually i talked with chris on hipchat and he gave me the idea to take out the pagination gem and try to actually just do it from scratch, and at that point my friend kai came over and we talked about it and within about fifteen minutes we got the ajax calls working and then everything just worked.

i still have some confusion about how and when to use .js.erb views and when to just render the html on the client-side.