I feel like this question has been asked before but the answers seem pretty specific to each poster. 

I'm looking for a way to identify a given element and find the next element that has a particular class. I don't want to have to deal with parent() or children() since I'm parsing through a table and I don't want it to stop at the end of a row or even the end of the table itself (there are two side-by-side).

Is there any way to just search the entire page for the next instance of an element?

BACKGROUND INFO:
<http://jsfiddle.net/HKkAa/2/>

I'm trying to iterate through the bottom table starting at the highlighted cell and applying the "highlight" class to each cell until I reach the end date. I have a way to calculate when I've reached the end date, I just need the magic method to select the next instance of a link.