Tell It To COACHIE

No.

PLAYSKOOL
KOTA THE TRICERATOPS
Approx. Retail: $ 299.99

Really. Just Stop.

When I arrived at the local community center to vote on Tuesday, the cars parked all over the grass next to the parking lot and along the shoulders of the road probably should have been a clue that things were rather crowded inside. But on this post, since it takes so long just to get out the gate, I decided the crowd didn’t matter, I was not going home to try again later. The population of the local town is about 1,500 and the polls had already been open for two hours. How crowded could it be?

Really, really crowded. The community center is a long open room, like a fieldhouse without basketball hoops. There were four long lines of alphabetically arranged voters, with probably 50 or so people in each line. Each time our line moved a step forward, the door to the center would open and another person would come fill in the gap. A lot of the voters were from on post, but a lot of them were just locals, lining up and patiently waiting like everybody else.

As has been demonstrated time and time again throughout my life, in a room of 200 people, I will always end up standing next to the strangest one. Yesterday was no exception. The guy in front of me in line “A-F” looked like a cross between a poorly groomed Civil War reenactor and the unabomber (I’ll call him Ted)- I would have thought he might be homeless except that I don’t think they have homeless people here. As I took my place in line, I braced myself for a possible 45 minutes of crazy talk, but he barely glanced in my direction, and wasn’t engaging anyone else around him either.

After a minute or two Ted lowered himself into an Afghan squat. I thought he might be tying his shoe or even feeling a little sick, but after a few moments I realized he was talking on his cell phone. And he continued to squat and talk on his cell phone for another 30 minutes. Every minute or so, when the line would step up, Ted would step up too, but not stand up, just extend his legs and walk forward while still squatting down and talking on the phone. I don’t know how to describe it, except it definitely reminded me of this:

What seemingly hard-living, 50-something man has the knees left to squat walk like that over and over again for 30 minutes? I’ve seen little kids do it, but they do it to be funny and even they give up after a few steps. Anyway, after realizing that Ted was not in fact a crazy person or the next unabomber and then chastising myself a little for judging people by appearances (but in my defense, showers are your friend, dude), I killed the time by daydreaming and making snap judgments based on everyone else’s appearance - including the pregnant teenager behind me (showers can be your friend too, missy) and the woman at the far end of the room who was up on a stage painting a mural on the wall (she was perfectly attractive, but I wondered if she was nervous that every registered voter in town was spending 45 minutes or so occasionally glancing at her backside). But every time the line moved up, I had to stop and consider the dancing dwarf again.

As we got nearer to the front of the line, Ted stood up to conclude his phone call, and here is what I overheard: “Yeah, well, are you voting? Are you registered to vote? You gotta vote man. If you don’t vote, you’re saying no two both choices. When you vote, you’re saying yes to something and no to something else. It’s important. Next time…get registered.”

After which I had to chastise myself a little more.

So I got my ballot, and went over to the folding tables where all the voters had to sit and fill out their ballots within plain sight of line “R-Z”, which I was not too pleased about, but then it was over and I felt really good. There really is nothing quite like a good dose of civic duty.

I’ve never had to wait to vote before, and of course I was going to wait, I was happy to wait and everyone else there was happy to wait too. I didn’t see any eyes rolling, any angry cellphone calls, anyone trying to jump the line because their time was more important than everyone elses. People shifted from leg to leg, stretched their arms and looked at their watches, did crazy squat walks across the floor, but no one complained and no one griped at the poll workers. It was nice.

* Although I realize that it’s possible that the strange one is having the exact same thought about me

But now I am exhausted and dehydrated from weeping in front of the TV, so for now I’ll just say:

John McCain, where have you been? I know you are the man who gave that dignified concession speech, so who was that guy picking Palin and campaigning as you for the past three months?

Barack Obama, I’m so glad you’re here.

A month or two ago, faced with the rapid approach of my 40th birthday, I decided I should try to make some changes so that I would be less-stressed, better-rested - basically that I should try to postpone the day when I overhear someone refer to me as “that hag over there.”

Decreasing stress was surprisingly easy thanks to the two-prong plan I set in motion: 1) avoid excessive reading about politics, particularly anything regarding a certain right-wing Alaskan who had the unmitigated gall to call me and many of the people I love unpatriotic and not a part of the “real America” and then she … ahem. 2) adopt the attitude of the other members of my immediate family regarding cleanliness in the home - for example, carrying dirty clothes from the bathroom floor to the hamper requires energy to be burned, contributing to global warming, and therefore for the good of the planet, clothes should remain wherever they are dropped (ditto for mail, school papers, candy wrappers, etc., etc.) Although I sometimes find myself getting angry as I stand on top of the piles of guitar practice books and dvd cases, I comfort myself with the knowledge that at least I have something to add to my resume should I choose to embark on a career in landfill engineering.

The more challenging problem was getting more sleep. I like to stay up the latest in our house to have a little downtime, read, meditate, contemplate existence, and/or watch reruns of Scrubs, but I’m never up very late, as the kiddies go to bed at 8:00 and the HP generally becomes one with the couch around 8:40. The problem with sleeping is trying to shut off the nonstop mental review of my day, the future, the kiddies, my nonexistent career, the fact that I was called unpatriotic, and the fact that somehow the Scrubs writers have never come up with a satisfactory JD and Elliot storyline.

Once I read that when you are trying to fall asleep, you should pretend that you are driving up a mountain. Then as distracting or upsetting thoughts occur to you, you should roll down your window and toss them over the cliff. Theoretically, if you can stave off the guilt from all that littering you did on the way up, by the time you get to the top you should be calm and drifting off to sleep. I’ve tried this off and on over the years, and sometimes it actually works. However, on days when I have a lot of stuff on my mind, I move on to another strategy I read about, where you imagine the person who is upsetting you, (say, hypothetically, the napoleonic, egomaniacal, asinine principal of your children’s school) is about the size of a small frog. You then pick him up by the leg, lower him into a glass jar, and screw the lid on tightly (no airholes) so that you can’t hear what he is saying anymore. Then you pick up everyone else who is on your mind, and put each of them in a separate tightly sealed jar until everything is quiet. This strategy works sometimes too, strangely enough.

However, in the interest of avoiding haggitude, I started working on the “happy place” strategy, too, where you imagine a place that is so serene and perfect for you that nothing can find you and bother you there. I decided it should be outdoors, but somewhat sheltered. It should be breezy, but warm. It should be quiet, but with soothing ambient noise.

So, where did I pick? Under an umbrella at sunset on a quiet mid-Atlantic beach? Under a tree on at dawn in a forest by a babbling brook? On the porch of a cabin on a mountain-top in West Virginia?

No, none of these places.

Apparently when I am subconsciously searching for that special “happy place,” I imagine myself to be, oh let’s say, on the second or third floor of an empty aboveground parking garage in Bethesda, Maryland. I had been retreating to this parking garage for weeks before it occurred to me that a more normal choice would be any of the places I’ve listed above. And yet, even now that I know how crazy it is, I still put myself in the parking garage whenever I have trouble sleeping.

So, uh, yeah, I don’t know what else to say about that except that maybe the isolation of Missouri is beginning to have an effect on me.

Last night we stayed at an Embassy Suites in St. Louis. Aislinn had an all day field trip to the awesome (and free) Science Center, and the HP had to fly out of St. Louis early this morning, so although gas is now cheap here, we decided to save the planet and just stay up there. We almost always get the same room at any Embassy Suites - on an upper floor, in a corner, and next to the ice machine. Yesterday however, we got a room on the first floor, a room that is usually set aside for handicapped people.

Apparently there is nothing quite as fascinating as a handicapped-equipped (?? anyone know the correct term for such a thing?) hotel room. All three kiddies stood in the big open space of the bathroom floor and tried to determine exactly what sort of handicap a person would have to have to need that much space in a bathroom. Finally, I told them, “Look, if you are in a wheelchair, you need lots of room to turn around, even in the bathroom.”

To which Marty replied,”Well why did they give this room to us then? None of us are wheelchaired yet”