March 31st, 2004: I found myself rearranging my two-shelf bookcase today, moving my most impressive books from the bottom shelf to the top for easier viewing by people who matter. When I realised what I was doing, I stopped myself and said, "Katie, you're the only one who cares what books you've read." And that made me sort of sad.
March 17th, 2004: I'm leaving for spring break today. Spring break in Idaho. Not because I know anyone or have any business there. I just want to go to Idaho. And so I am.
March 13th, 2004: After spending all day yesterday contemplating how to "make every moment count" in an effort to procrastinate further, I opened up another Dove dark chocolate today to find on the inside of the wrapper the following: "A day without chocolate is a day wasted."
And I figure that the opposite of that would be "a day with chocolate is a day not wasted". So I can sleep and shower and cry as much as I want to. As long as I keep eating chocolate.
Done and done.
March 12th, 2004: This morning, in an effort to prepare my body for an entire day of writing final papers, I was consuming large amounts of Dove dark chocolates. Printed on the inside of one of the wrappers was the following advice: "Make every moment count."
I got to thinking about what my life would look like if every moment counted. I definitely wouldn't sleep for seven to nine hours every night. I would probably stop showering. I would completely ignore my health and never eat a carrot stick again. I would allow my dirty dishes to mold in my sink. I would stop taking so many pictures, stop recording and start watching. Make out with strangers. Never go to class. Leave my umbrella at home. Refuse to cry. Not wear socks. Chew huge wads of bubble gum.
And stop thinking so damn much.
March 1st, 2004: Wherever I go, there’s bound to be trouble, Democratic Presidential candidate speeches no exception. My friend Todd picked me up this morning at 11 to take me to see John Kerry talk in the OSU Student Union. Neither of us is a Kerry supporter, but a) it was a good excuse to get out of class, b) I’m certain that Kerry’s going to be our next President, and c) I’m all about posterity. My Ulysses professor and I exchanged words over e-mail a couple of hours before the speech, as he wasn’t about to let me skip class without a fight, but my basic sentiment was somewhere along the lines of: “I’m going. So fail me.”
When Todd and I arrived, there were probably 100 people—from the old businessmen in their suits to the young men in their BU**SH** buttons to the girls in their old businessmen-approved hoochie pants—already lined up. We joined the ranks and stood waiting for the next hour and a half, giving me plenty of opportunities to rant about Kerry and his rival, John Edwards, and rave about my next boyfriend, candidate Dennis Kucinich. There was plenty to entertain me, too. There was Todd, who happened to know every single girl who passed by us. There was a blind black man handing out literature about an Ohio Supreme Court justice and making me think about how hard it must be to be both blind and black when society has a hard time with either alone. There was an Edwards supporter passing out brochures with a picture of Edwards jogging in the snow on the cover, because, you know, if I’m looking for one thing in a candidate, it’s how good he looks in sweat pants. And there was my favourite, a man from a public radio show who was bald on top but had curly hair on the sides. He carried around a recorder and microphone that he shoved into the faces of the hoochie-pantsed blondes in line ahead of us. He also talked about school vouchers with the person right behind us, who I thought was a woman but later discovered was a teenage boy was an estrogen surplus. And while you can imagine how much I love being interviewed by anyone about anything, I decided that since I really won’t have anything nice to say about Kerry until he wins the Democratic nomination, I shouldn’t say anything at all.
We were finally metal-detectored and allowed into the Union’s west ballroom, only to have to wait another hour and a half for Kerry’s arrival. This time-passing was considerably less amusing, as I’m fairly claustrophobic and also fairly short (though 5’7” is a perfectly respectable height for a woman, mind you). However, I did spot a girl in the crowd who I swear was my most-hated elementary school friend (because everyone secretly hated their friends in school). She looks like she’s been doing some crack since 4th grade, but she was the only person still wearing feather earrings in the 80’s, and she seems like just the sort who would go for a faux-Democrat like Kerry. She was wearing a pink sweater that looked like it came out of her mom’s closet and had a man attached to her whose hair gel was so thick that I kept expecting it to leak onto his suit. I have to respect the fact that she didn’t look at all interested in what he was saying, though, like she was really have to work at the polite smile she managed as he yammered on and on about his stocks or his sports car or his penis enlargement pump. Todd and I had basically worn out all of our small talk at that point, so I started theorising about the Republican conspiracy that propelled Kerry into frontrunner position. The fact that big media isn’t bashing him is my main concern, seeing as how it’s all owned by corporations, and any good Democrat is going to be anti-big business. And, as I told Todd after reading the “Paid for by Kerry for President, Inc.” on the banners lining the ballroom’s walls, “even his campaign’s run by a fucking corporation!” Plus, all of the steelworkers at the speech had these really posh “Steelworkers Support Kerry” signs, and you know that some poor union didn’t pay for those. Conspiracy, I tell you.
When all of my will to gripe finally expired, I began poking Todd on the shoulder and then acting annoyed and saying, “Does it always have to be something?” when he would turn and questioned me. And so we kept each other awake until 2 PM, poking and singing along to Love Train, which was one of four inspirational songs being looped through the speakers above us. Not that there was really any possibility of our falling asleep, as there were two boys behind us who happened to know absolutely everything there is to know about politics and insisted on sharing with everyone in Columbus. The only thing that they agreed on is how much they hate Bush, and the only time that their arguing ceased is when the cry “Show your signs!” erupted from this large-and-in-charge black man in a black suit and top hat. Todd christened him “Crazy George”, because his top hat just happened to be one of those Mad Hatter types made up in red, white, and blue. Crazy George must have yelled “Show your signs!” twenty times in the course of that hour, hoping to get people to cheer and hold up the Kerry propaganda that was being passed out by the campaign staff. The excitement waned a bit after the fourth or fifth time and was basically non-existent by the 10th, but those blondes who had been in front of us in line were still going strong until the end. The one thing I can say in their favour, though, is that when someone handed them a “Caucus for Kerry” poster, they began protesting that we have a primary rather than a caucus in Ohio. Maybe the only intelligent thing to ever come out of their mouths.
Around 2, a Secret Service agent approached our section of the ballroom—to the left of the stage, directly behind the barrier that was to keep us from mauling Kerry—and announced that we should have our hands out of our pockets in case Kerry wanted to do some shaking and that he would have his own pen if we wanted him to do some signing. One of the loud boys behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could stand in front of me to get something signed. I had no problem with it, as I planned to neither shake nor ask for a signing, so he started getting all antsy, stretching his leg to put his foot in front of mine to stake his claim. Then, he began talking about how he knew all of the people on stage from the Campus Democrats and started calling out their names and waving to them. They waved back, but when Loud Boy tried to make conversation with them by asking, “What’s goin’ on?”, they ignored him and talked to each other. Loud Boy got embarrassed and said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll talk later!” And that amused me. When Kerry finally did arrive and make his way toward us, Loud Boy shoved me aside, but Kerry didn’t touch him, and I got to smirk to myself again.
Kerry actually looks much better in person than he does on TV, which made me reconsider my assertion that he’s the ugliest man alive. Still, he’s absolutely one of the most uninspiring speakers I’ve ever seen, though I’m biased because of my love for Kucinich’s platform. He basically skimmed over all of his stances—part of the Republican conspiracy, I’m sure—and threw out taglines like “Bring it on!” and “Mission accomplished!” every now and then. I was, quite frankly and unapologetically, bored with him.
Luckily—and here’s where the trouble comes in—there were dissenters in our midst. And if there’s anything I love, it’s a good dissent. After a bit of Kerry’s mumbling, the two girls and three boys in front of Todd and me whipped out signs that they had folded up into one girl’s purse. They read “S. 1290” and “W.hy?” At first, I figured that they were pro-Kerry and thought the kids rather foolish for wrecking their signs by creasing them. Then, I saw a man grab one of the same signs from another boy across the room, wad it up, and throw it across the barrier onto the floor. Still, that “W.hy?” seemed pretty damn anti-Bush to me. Then, from the back of the crowd, an overly-excited, effeminate man in his 30’s pushed through Todd and me to the group in front of us and told them to put away their signs. They just sort of looked at him, faux-bewildered, and asked him what the problem was. He told them that only campaign-approved signs could be displayed and again demanded that they be put away. When one of the girls innocently replied that she didn’t see that rule posted anywhere, the man became even more excited and told them that he would go get the Secret Service if they didn’t comply. The guy was so high on his power that his voice was breaking up, and he didn’t even seem to notice that he was yelling. I wasn’t into his threats, so I said, “Whoa, whoa,” disapprovingly when he decided to resort to that Secret Service intimidation. He told the group that everyone else had been mature enough to hand over their signs, but when the head girl looked at the head boy and he nodded, she said, “Go ahead and get the Secret Service.”
At this point, I was still totally confused about what was going on, so I asked the head girl why everyone was making such a big deal of the signs. She only said that they had to do with a Senate bill that Kerry proposed, but Todd later informed me that 1290 was to reduce the federal intelligence budget, and apparently, the Bush kids are still citing faulty intelligence as the cause of the current attack on Iraq. Pretty adorable, right?
Ten minutes later, Crazy George asked me to step aside so that he could grab the signs from the Bush kids. He sternly told them to hand the signs over, but when the head girl asked if he was from the Secret Service, he just plucked her sign right from her perfectly-manicured Republican hands without saying a word. I swore that she was going to cry when Crazy George continued plucking down the line of them. With the fiercest look on her face that I’ve ever seen, she said, “I’d like to have my sign back.” It was a definite win for the dissenters. Until Crazy George walked away with their signs, a smile on his lips so smug that I wanted to slap him. The Bush kids wouldn’t be put down, though, and raised three fingers above their heads to make W’s like some weird political Boy Scouts. And then they whipped out spare signs that were folded away in the purse for safe-keeping. Always prepared, those Boy Scouts. And serious about their cause. Even if it’s the wrong one.