I didn't receive my notice for voting (the one that tells me I'm registered and where to go) until yesterday. Given that I didn't get home until around 6pm, I was in a state of mild anxiety about it all day. However, I did receive it, and immediately afterward I spent two hours reading about the props on the ballot. (Let it never be said that I don't make an effort to be an informed voter.) The first hour was fun, the second hour, less so. Partly it was because by that time the conflicting information was starting to annoy me (I tried to read something unbiased about the prop, and then something for it and something against it, before finding out who's backing it/opposing it -- in that order, because I was trying to reduce possible bias on my part). (Legal speak is worse than science speak, because at least science speak I can sympathize with and understand at some level, even if the technical details don't make much sense.) The other part was that by that time, either my internet or some of the info sites were starting to crash, and waiting for the site to load got very old very quickly. By the time I got to prop 11 -- which I didn't exactly know what it was and three sites failed to load consecutively -- I was contemplating calling Kate up for a crash course. The smartvoter site finally loaded though, followed by an SF site, so it all ended well.
(Though for some of the props I just -- it sounded so good at first until you get to the details and then -- hire some scientists, people. We don't bite. Except for maybe some of the physicists but physicists are a strange bunch on the whole and shouldn't be held accountable as a valid representation of the scientific community. It was awful. I wanted to vote yes on the idea but the reality was less than idealistic.)
Got up at 6:50am this morning to vote (don't know when I'll be home tonight and I just know the after-work crowd will be bad), which was exciting since this's my first election and a potentially history making election at that (though if McCain wins I may have to take a leaf out of the book of my high school teachers and wear black). The prop 8 guy out front told me that the line was only about 20 minutes, except for the part where I had to wait over 45 minutes and I missed a bus by a second (as in I was standing in front of the bus door when it pulled away) and so ended up spending a while out of breath and dripping in the rain. But I didn't mind and you know why? Because it wasn't cold. (SD weather = love.) At least not until I got to my classroom, which is always cold and can possibly be used as an icebox in emergencies.
Emerald was telling me about how it felt vaguely like Christmas this morning. I thought about my sense of anticipation and admitted that she had a point, and went to get a hot chocolate after class because a) it's a Christmas thing and b) after sitting for two hours in the Icebox in damp clothing, I was really cold.
Will be obsessively checking the results later today in google news. Fingers crossed, everyone!
(And now that I've had the whole wait-in-line experience, I think I'll vote absentee the next time.)
No comments:
Post a Comment