Why I probably won't vote in the primary Part 2: Deaniac

Sometime that fall I settled on Dean as my candidate. I can't remember why. I remember that unlike Kerry and Edwards Dean had not voted for the Iraq War, largely because governors can't vote on wars. There may have been some healthcare aspect to him; had he gotten all the little kids in Vermont insured? Who knows? Who cares?
I do remember reading an article about his campaign and being taken with the idea of a houseparty. The article I read had said something like, "Some people gather over donuts and coffee, some gather over beer" and I immediately thought, "But what about donuts AND beer?" That was enough of a theme for me!

I think my boyfriend at the time had picked Dean before I had, and he was game for some politicking. That was essential, because someone with a car needed to pick up to pick up the keg. I picked a date and registered it on the Dean meetup website. The internet was changing politics! I was going to talk to my neighbors and mobilize them! Not my immediate neighbors though. 'The Jungle' (as my house was referred to, thanks to some graffiti and my room mates propensity for going out into the middle of the street at 2 in the morning and screaming) shared a split house with a group of history grad students who were curiously politically conservative. Down the street in the other direction were three rowhouses occupied by home childcare providers and drug users, who also would use the street for early morning screaming.

No, I would mobilize internet neighbors, preferably some respectable clintonville types, and the creme of the osu student crop. I emailed the Students for Dean president about the party. The Students for Dean told me they couldn't be affiliated with the party because there would be alcohol served, but some of their members would come. Wrong! No Students for Dean would show up.

The format of the party was a sit down meeting at 7, and a ked party at 8:30 or 9. Boy did I try to hustle up people to come to the sit down meeting. I invited all the people from my classes, all my friends, and I might have announced it at an improv show. The only people who showed up were people from the internet. It was an ok meeting, although the Dean rep who showed up to talk to us was pushy about getting money from everyone.

At around 9 people started showing up for the kegger. My room mates had spread the word about the keg, but not necessarily about Dean. Instead of going with the flow, I was still in obnoxiously earnest mode and kept forcing an email list on people. One white kid with an afro looked at me sideways, his hands occupied with a donut and a beer, and told me he wasn't interested on being on the email list because he was voting for someone else. Why do I never bitch out the people I should? At a later party, this kid would steal a bottle of liquor someone had hidden in the stove and almost get his ass kicked. I imagine that kid's life is just a series of almost ass-beatings.

So I considered the party a partial bust. Me and my boyfriend at the time signed up online to volunteer at the Dean Columbus office, and that same night got a call from the state coordinator that they needed people at the office to make it look busy for a news report. The local news wanted the local angle to the big Iowa push. So we went to the office and fooled around on the computers for a little bit while the camera guy got closeups of our best 'serious collaboration' faces. I got asked to explain why college students were so interested in Dean. Despite my recent experiences to the contrary, I gave an earnest soundbite about college students being excited about a new kind of politician! Yes, after the camera switched off I did feel deeply ashamed. My soundbite made it into the news report. And I found out all the secretaries at the overwhelmingly republican law firm I worked for watched the evening news. (That's how hardcore this law firm was- even the office staff was republican.)

I felt conflicted about being in the news report. On the one hand, I felt like a fake. On the other hand, I LOVE being on tv. I've always thought I should be a spokeswoman. And I liked that none of the Students for Dean got to be on the news.

The reporter had asked me if I was excited about going to Iowa, which I had not planned on doing, but put on the spot I said, "Yes, so excited!" So that meant we were now planning an Iowa trip that weekend. All of these busses were leaving from all over Ohio, but we were told that me and my ex couldn't be on the same bus and wouldn't be going to the same part of Iowa. When I got my period that was the final straw- I'm not taking any bus trip while on the rag unless there's a holiday involved.

I worked maybe 20 hours that week at the Dean office. I worked with a kid who wanted to be some kind of staffer as a career, and who wore a tie every day that week. When we were given the task of drafting some flier saying how much better Dean was than Kerry, he wouldn't put any of my suggestions in, because he thought they were misleading. Well, yeah, saying one politician is better than another one is misleading. Duh. But campaign materials are SUPPOSED to be biased. I wasn't making up numbers or accusing anyone of incest, so I stand by my contributions. The upside to that kid is that he made me really grateful for the wiccan herbalist hippies of the Comparative Studies department, where no one has any ambitions of being a 'policy-maker.'

Then Iowa happened. The scream happened. The monday following I showed up to the office at 9 and the doors were locked. So I went into work at the republican law firm early, the secretaries gloated, and I kept myself busy reading injury descriptions in the worker's comp files.

NEXT UP: ATTENTION K-MART SHOPPERS! I'M OUTSIDE YOUR STORE BOTHERING PEOPLE!...

Thank you!

Thank you to my body, for being healthy and not making me spend much money on it to keep it in working order.
Thank you to my dog for excelling at her role as cuddle-instigator.
Thank you to my family for making thanksgiving dinner even though they weren't planning on it this year and for being excited to see me although I had nothing new to say.
Thank you to factory farms for feeding me.
Thank you to activists fighting factory farming so that the world won't be as poisoned.
Thank you to my temp agency for giving me a job when I really really needed money.
Thank you to capitalism for making me worry about money, thus teaching me compassion and frugality.
Thank you to my bike helmet for keeping my brain safe.
Thank you to my bike for getting me to work and to my shows and helping me manage my mood.
Thank you to my bed for being so soft.
Thank you to my clothes for keeping me warm.
Thank you to other comedians for making me laugh.
Thank you to other comedians for making me compete with you.
Thank you to the boys I fall in love with, for teaching me about striving and impermanence.
Thank you to the boys who fall in love with me, for being sweet.
Thank you to the internet, for giving me people to talk to all the time.
Thank you to the people in asia who made all of my clothing.
Thank you to the people in south america who grow all my vegetables.
Thank you to the city of Chicago, and before that the city of Cleveland, for cleaning my water.
Thank you to Allison who drove me to Cleveland and gave me arnica gel for my bruises.
Thank you thank you thank you!

Boys on Bikes
I'm working on summarizing my experiences as a Deaniac, but this morning I'm inspired to wax rhapsodic on the joys of the Chicago male biker community.

Good work boys! You nearly uniformly have got it going on.

Good job on wearing those tight blue jeans with the leg rolled up and a carabiner tucked into your back pocket. Good job on standing up off your seat allowing those behind you a full view of your ass. Good job on wearing fitted shirts that hint at a wiry, muscular frame. Good job on not wearing a helmet so the full glory of your crazy indie hair can be seen.

Actually, bad job not wearing a helmet. You're gonna die.

Since my heartbeat is already elevated when I ride to work, you boys don't have to work too hard to get my mind to wander to my happy place. My happy shirtless bike shop, where Pootie Tang plays on a projector and there's endless spanish hot chocolate served. Also, in this bike shop they build you a really lightweight road bike that's super sweet for 30 dollars and instead of trying to explain to you what's sweet about it they just tell you how cute you look on it.

It's hard to consistently be eye candy, but day in and day out, you boys never falter. I'm lucky if I can get it together to be attractive every 3 weeks. So I salute you swoon-inducing-bike messenger-apeing-unconcerned about a deadly impact with that bus that's turning into you-bike boys!

But take off that scarf, you look like a girl.

Why I probably won't vote in the primary: Part 1

Last presidential election I was motivated. Oh boy was I motivated. I had just decided I was going to go to law school, and I was finally an A student (now that I was done with math and science) and I had a boyfriend so I was no longer spending all my free time getting drunk and chasing band members. The time was ripe to flex my political muscle, to lead and organize people, to affect CHANGE upon the NATION.

I won't be doing any of that this time around.

The first candidate whose bandwagon I jumped aboard was Kucinich. I like Kucinich; he has a good sense of theater. Willie Nelson was going to play some benefit concerts for Dennis that fall, which was immensely exciting to me. Like anyone who wants to in Cleveland, I had met Dennis in person. I was a little kid so I didn't notice his short stature.

I signed up on a Kucinich state campaign email list. It was late summer, and the campaign asked for people to help run the Kucinich booth at the state fair. This was my chance to get my hands dirty rummaging around the grass roots!

I should've known not to trust those people when two state coordinators wanted to meet with me on saturday night at 10 p.m. in the OSU law school parking lot. I may not have been sharp enough to notice the rape risk, but I was sharp enough to notice that one of the coordinators had his last name on a bumper sticker on his car. I asked if he had run for small potatoes political office (well, not in those words) and he said defensively, "No, that's my father." Upon closer inspection of the bumper sticker, it was a Republican small time politician. I might have visibly recoiled. Not that it's a bad thing for children from Republican families to vote democrat, but when you stumble upon a real life staging of Oedipus Rex, you freeze up. The two state coordinators wanted me at the state fair at 7:30 sunday morning to work the booth. They assured me someone else would be there.

Their assurances meant nothing. I arrived at the cavernous hall of booths and found the Kucinich booth in between one dedicated to scrapbooking and one for a vinyl siding business. I decided to wait until my expected booth partner showed up. The booth had to be open at 8 or some fee would be charged. No one showed up. At 8:15, full of fear, I opened the cardboard boxes stored under the booth's table and started arranging things. Let's see, here's some t-shirts, here's some bumper stickers, here's a donation jar, here's a bunch of pamphlets, here's voter registration forms. Ok, ready to go.

I sat and sat and sat and smiled at the people walking by, surveying my table with worried frowns. Who was Kucinich? What was he running for? What free things did I have to give out? Nothing, as far as I knew. I told people they should register to vote regardless of who they were voting for. In this manner I registered at least 15 republicans. Some misguided souls signed onto the Kucinich mailing list, including an old man who put his address down and then asked me about where Kucinich stood on baby-killing. I smiled and smiled and smiled. 11 rolled around, and no one else had shown up, and I was worried that I'd have to go to the bathroom. Then 12. Then 1. Then 2. At 2:30 two other volunteers shows up, an aging hippie couple from Clintonville. They told me I shouldn't have put on a Kucinich t-shirt without buying it. Then at 4 a state coordinator showed up, grinning at our mastery of the booth. He chatted for 3 minutes and wandered off to look at the cows. I took off the t-shirt and hightailed it out of there.

The cows were interesting. Since my only interaction with cows is viewing them from highway or handling their groundup flesh sculpted into palm-sized circles, I had forgotten how enormous a cow is. They stood under a long pavilion with the scent of straw and dung wafting off of them. If you reached over the metal gates and scratched their back they didn't bother to look at you. I could see why a cow would be a sacred animal- they're so disinterested, so aloof, so half-asleep.

That semester I had a required political science course on globalization and there was a beautiful but naively shameless girl in it who admitted to working as a stripper, suffering personal pain from the existence of homeless people, and working for the Kucinich campaign. I decided it was time to work for a real candidate. But instead I volunteered for Howard Dean.

NEXT UP: CARRIE THROWS A DEAN PARTY.

Masochism is boring.

I feel like giving relationship advice today, which is pretty hilarious if you know my track record.
Here are my dating precepts:
1) Don't keep people around who don't like you
2) Don't try to figure out why some people don't like you

Hahaha, my friends and family exclaim in unison. For what has my dating life been but endless entrapment of people who don't like me and subsequent strategizing over HOW TO CHANGE THEIR MINDS. They must change their minds! I am wonderful, despite my sloppiness and sudden mood changes! How could anyone resist me? They simply can't; if they have resisted so far it is an aberration that can be remedied by my HARD WORK!

Actually, that last part is true. More than once my hard work in winning a man over has worked. And then what do you have? A man. Not an electric kettle, or a month's rent, or new eye makeup. Just a man, hanging around, who won't say which restaurant he'd like to go to and watches Celebrity Poker. Except you knocked yourself out for him, so everytime Lisa Kudrow places a bet it's a slap in the face.

But what's the harm in pursuing someone, getting them, and finding out they aren't such hot stuff? The harm is you're psyching yourself out. You start believing getting a man to hang around you requires hard work, when in fact it's just the particular man you chose. A lot of men will hang around you if you just smile at them a lot. A lot of men will hang around you if you smell like baked goods. Men can be really easy. Good looking men, men with money, funny men- difficulty is not correlated with quality.

If you keep choosing difficult men, eventually you'll wreck your self-esteem. Self-esteem isn't some endless reservoir to draw from; if you keep putting yourself in unrewarding situations your opinion of yourself will suffer. Winning a man over seems like it would prove your greatness to yourself, but by the time you've won him over there's too much damage already done. You've dressed sexy and bit your tongue and acted enthralled so much you don't believe it would be perfectly natural for someone to like you without the charade.

Ok, but I think the second precept is more important. Why doesn't he like you? Maybe he saw down to your innermost core and it was a festering, rotting, dripping black splotch that symbolized banal evil. That could be it. But why give him that much credit?

Other reasons he may not like you:
1) Your teeth aren't straight
2) His girlfriend needs to have done foreign aid work or he'll feel like a failure
3) He's dependent on promiscuity to validate him.
4) He's distracted by a spiritual quest
5) He only likes blondes
6) You don't strike him as needy enough
7) He hates white people
8) He's always hoped to marry a trapeze artist
9) He's been in love with his best friend since second grade and is writing a screenplay about it
10) You're not vegan

Think about all the reasons you haven't wanted to date exceptional guys! Do you want them pondering your rejection for hours? No, not when it's simply a matter of their arms being a little skinny or them talking about Radiohead for 20 minutes. You have rejected lots of guys who you know were pretty awesome, and you did it for stupid reasons. There are people out there who won't eat any white food; we are not a rational species.


Remember that being in a relationship is not an accomplishment. You're supposed to try to do a little something before you die that improves the world, and the odds that you'll figure out how to do that while hating yourself are actually not that great. Despite what the Catholics say.

Of course the reason I know so much about this particular subject is because I have studied the effects of male rejection on the female psyche intensively since the 6th grade.

Another Reason to love Tina Fey

The TV writers are on strike! The bargaining table issue is if writers get a percentage of rights to content on 'new media' (the internet). Which is incredibly important since the internet has already begun to displace tv as a provider of content. For example, I watched the last episode of '30 Rock' on NBC's website. And I watch every episode of 'The Hills' online, but that show supposedly doesn't have writers. Also this is important because I hope to earn money writing for tv some day, so the writer's guild is fighting for my future earnings now. Here's a link to the nytimes article, in case you missed it on the front page of the website. It turns out that people who write for funny tv shows also say funny things when they picket.

The Word of the Day is "Over-Extended."

Ok. It's 1:15 sunday morning, except it should really be 2:15. The neighbors directly above me are throwing a RAGING party. On pogo sticks. They've played "Summer of 69" twice. There was definitely no knock on my door warning me about the party and/or inviting me, which I thought was the etiquette.

This party is the latest affront to my existence. But let's start at the beginning.
Monday I performed at Zanie's. So that means I went to work at 9, left work early to get my picture taken, left that early to get to Zanie's, performed, got home at 11.
Tuesday I work late to make up leaving work early. But at least I go home to eat dinner and walk the dogs.

Wednesday I work late again, then go to the grocery store, vacuum the apartment and mop the floor in preparation for my boyfriend's visit this weekend. Yes, I have a boyfriend. I'm sorry you had to find out in such a negative post. That takes me till 11, so I don't walk the dogs.

Thursday I wake up at five, walk the dogs, go to the laundromat to wash my comfoter, go to work, work till 6, go to the Lincoln Lodge to work the camera, get home at 12.I get my period.

Friday I do that again, but I don't go to the laundromat. I think I did the dishes and put sheets on my bed instead. Cramps all day.

Andy (the boyfriend) and his friend roll into town around 11. Thankfully they go to a karaoke bar while the Lodge wraps up, and then I go home instead of meeting them. I shower and can't help falling asleep. He comes over at 1.

We wake up at 10:30. Then we go to my bank for me to deposit my paycheck. I unthinkingly did not get cash back off of the deposited check, so then I try to use the ATM. I opened up this account last saturday at Banco Popular with my last paycheck from Cleveland. The ATM tells me my balance is 0.00$. I go back to the teller, who tells me for the first month of a new account all checks take 9 BUSINESS DAYS TO CLEAR. Which is almost two weeks. I was not told this when I opened this account. I think I would remember being told I don't have access to my money for two weeks. So in addition to not having access to my money, the check I wrote my room mate earlier in the week has bounced, and I have an overdraft fee. So while Andy and his friends wait for me I wait to see a banker, the same one I opened the account with, who says, "Remember when I told you it takes 9 days for the checks to clear for the first 30 days?" NO I DO NOT. IF I REMEMBERED THAT I WOULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN A CHECK. OR OPENED THIS ACCOUNT IN THE FIRST PLACE BECAUSE THAT IS BULLSHIT. So she tells me only the branch manager can rescind the overdraft fee, who does not work saturdays, and my banker doesn't work mondays, so on tuesday I will know whether Banco Popular wants me to close my accounts. I went there for the free checking, but this is a really bad sign for our banking relationship. And I can't touch my first paycheck until the 16th.

Somehow the check I started my savings account with did not take 9 days to clear, so I took 20 dollars from that.

Ok, so after that auspicious beginning I try to forget about the stress and enjoy seeing Andy. Around 7 a headache sets in, and Andy ditches his friends to take me back to the apartment. This is the best part of the week. He makes my headache go away and we fall asleep.

THEN THE PARTY STARTS. My headache returns with a vengeance. I also start throwing up. While listening to "Rhythm Nation" from upstairs. Now we're listening to selections from Weezer's blue album while a mushroom pizza exits my body. Great. Maybe they can dance by jumping up and down and shrieking some more.

So look, if I am flaky this next week, if I say I'm going to show up somewhere and I don't, if I leave early, if I don't return calls, it's because my plate is full. So full that trying to eat it all has made me ill. Please forgive me.