(no subject)

I hereby pat myself on the back. I have already been to the polls this morning.

What's amusing about that is that the man in line in front of me was the one whose car hit mine, last Tuesday. As I did mention he lives right around the corner, so it's not that surprising, but it was funny all the same.

On the way from voting to her grandma's house I tried to teach Rosa to say she's a Democrat. She said no, she's a little girl.

(no subject)

I sent Ray this email earlier today:

You better be sure you go vote. We need all the democrat votes we can
get!!!

But I sure hope your registration is right, because you were still listed
in the book at my precinct. Yes, with my address.

and he replied:
I would rather shave my head with a cheese grater than vote for a
Republican. Yes, I've voted. Straght ticket Democrat. Have a good day.

Is that snarky, or not? I can't quite tell. The comment about shaving his head with a cheese grater is one of his 'sayings', so I take that part as normal conversation. But the rest seems awfully curt. ::shrug::

Campaigns and memories

All the election and campaign discussions this year have made me feel like I need to get back into politics again. I need to volunteer for a campaign, to get into some local activism organizations, to do something that has a bigger effect than my own house.

In 1992 my friend Kelly--whom incidentally I hadn't even thought of for months or years until today--got me involved in Sen. Tom Harkin's presidential bid. I can't remember what all I did, anymore, but I know I was there at his St Louis campaign office many evenings stuffing envelopes and making calls. It was during that campaign that I first really started drinking coffee.

At that time Missouri did not have a presidential primary election. We had caucuses instead, and to participate in the caucus you had to be a member of a ward party chapter. I was a member of the 8th Ward Democrats. I had a card in my wallet and everything. By the time of the Missouri caucuses Harkin had quit his campaign due to lack of success in other states, so everyone at the caucus who had come there to support him first went for Jerry Brown.

That of course is the reason they gave up caucuses after that election: it tended to cause the more radical candidates to win, and the national party wanted centrist candidates like Clinton who might appeal more broadly to the rest of the country. I'm not so sure that is a good thing. It has tended to water down the message until we have very little to distinguish the parties from each other. There are still a few things, of course, but nowadays it seems to me that that is because the Republicans have gone further right--right into the pockets of the Christian Coalition--and the Democrats have moved into the empty space in the middle.

But I didn't actually start this with the intent of writing a discourse on party politics. I intended to talk about something else altogether. So I shall leave this digression and rant half-formed and return to my original topic. I was working for the Harkin campaign, and spending two or three evenings a week and some Saturdays on it. I was also taking an RPG/400 programming course at Meramec Community College. (Yes, I know. No, I don't remember a thing about it except that it had some really weird column-based structure rules. No, I never used it for anything. Did briefly use the AS/400 environment background I picked up in the course of the class.)

First day of that class, a dark-haired dark-eyed man walked in, looked around the room, and sat right next to me. Over the next several Saturday mornings we got acquainted, talked about all sorts of things, I helped him with his assignments, one of our classmates--a skanky old man with greasy black hair--made a fuss because we talked too much in the computer lab...I went back to work during the week and told my friends I'd met someone I thought I liked, blah blah blah blah. But he never asked me out.

Finally I decided I was going to have to make the first move myself. I was going to ask him to have coffee after class. But then one Saturday, I had some campaign obligation or other and had to leave class early. So I handed him a scrap of paper with my phone number on it and said, "For the homework." I figured if he was too dense to figure out what to do with that...!

That, of course, was Ray. He did call, and we talked for about two hours that first night. He asked me out to the Funny Bone comedy club; we went on the following Saturday night. We got to talking about Star Trek: The Next Generation because the show was on while we were out and he was somewhat regretting missing it. I told him I had taped it, so after the comedy show we adjourned to my apartment and watched Star Trek. One thing led to another, and he stayed the night. Next morning, we went to the Missouri Botanical Garden and spent most of the day there.

It was quite a good first date, and we were pretty much inseparable after that. We quickly settled into a routine where he stayed over about three nights a week, and on December 12, 1992 we got married.

Years later when the marriage was starting to crumble, he blamed all our problems on our sexual activity while dating.