A Wednesday
(1) Property taxes is a bitch.
(2) I voted today. Early voting is a good thing, at least until we all get like Oregon and just leisurely drop our ballots in the mail. This was the second-to-last day for early voting in Chicago, and I stood in line for about 40 minutes this morning. About a third of the way into my wait, a man approached one of the people in charge of corralling us all and making sure we filled out our forms and such, inquiring about the estimated length before he got to actually vote. Being told that ballot-casting was about 45 minutes to an hour away, the man shrugged and left. Now, possibly he was figuring that he couldn't be that late for work but could skip out early in the afternoon or something, but primarily I thought: "This, right now, is the least crowded this polling place is going to be. It will only get busier during the day, and it will be equally busy, if not more so, and Election Day proper is going to be a right mess." There's a part of me that believes we're immoral if we don't do easy commonsense things to make voting more convenient. (I don't know if we'll cover the other part of me in this post.)
(3) Incidentally, I only filled out maybe 17 sections of a probably 60 section ballot. I made the decision that I was going to vote party line in races I didn't know anything about, and abstain from voting if the race were all Democrats (because this was also a guarantee that I wouldn't know anything about the candidates). Most of the ballot actually had to do with judges, and in addition to not knowing anything about my local judges, the only judge-related vote I'm inclined to cast is one on a hypothetical referendum to end the election of judges, which is something I'm pretty eager to vote for.
(4) Mostly abstaining from chocolate and chocolate-related products for almost two months has, apparently, done nothing to change my relationship with the product. As long as I restricted myself to only ordering the occasional dessert in a restaurant, a highly controlled situation and one I'm not going to be in most of the time, I was fine, but yesterday a coworker was selling cookies on behalf of her kid's school and I thought "what's the harm in eating a little package of Famous Amos? - I don't even like them all that much!" It was like letting an alcoholic have a drink. I turned into a slavering beast and only the greatest strength of will has prevented my complete departure from the wagon. As it was I brought myself some shame with the aggressive manner in which I made sure to get all the loose chocolate chips out from the corner of the bag before throwing it away.
My dark master.
(2) I voted today. Early voting is a good thing, at least until we all get like Oregon and just leisurely drop our ballots in the mail. This was the second-to-last day for early voting in Chicago, and I stood in line for about 40 minutes this morning. About a third of the way into my wait, a man approached one of the people in charge of corralling us all and making sure we filled out our forms and such, inquiring about the estimated length before he got to actually vote. Being told that ballot-casting was about 45 minutes to an hour away, the man shrugged and left. Now, possibly he was figuring that he couldn't be that late for work but could skip out early in the afternoon or something, but primarily I thought: "This, right now, is the least crowded this polling place is going to be. It will only get busier during the day, and it will be equally busy, if not more so, and Election Day proper is going to be a right mess." There's a part of me that believes we're immoral if we don't do easy commonsense things to make voting more convenient. (I don't know if we'll cover the other part of me in this post.)
(3) Incidentally, I only filled out maybe 17 sections of a probably 60 section ballot. I made the decision that I was going to vote party line in races I didn't know anything about, and abstain from voting if the race were all Democrats (because this was also a guarantee that I wouldn't know anything about the candidates). Most of the ballot actually had to do with judges, and in addition to not knowing anything about my local judges, the only judge-related vote I'm inclined to cast is one on a hypothetical referendum to end the election of judges, which is something I'm pretty eager to vote for.
(4) Mostly abstaining from chocolate and chocolate-related products for almost two months has, apparently, done nothing to change my relationship with the product. As long as I restricted myself to only ordering the occasional dessert in a restaurant, a highly controlled situation and one I'm not going to be in most of the time, I was fine, but yesterday a coworker was selling cookies on behalf of her kid's school and I thought "what's the harm in eating a little package of Famous Amos? - I don't even like them all that much!" It was like letting an alcoholic have a drink. I turned into a slavering beast and only the greatest strength of will has prevented my complete departure from the wagon. As it was I brought myself some shame with the aggressive manner in which I made sure to get all the loose chocolate chips out from the corner of the bag before throwing it away.
My dark master.
Labels: Personal, Vaguely Political
posted by medrawt at
20:23
