I too made the
mistake of staying up way too late to watch the
election coverage on
TV. Two things about this bothered me.
-
I flipped back and forth between stations like an idiot. Somewhere, buried deep in my subconscious, is the stupid hope that there will be actual election news. For some reason I cannot get it through my thick skull that all of this information is coming from the same consortium.
-
The nagging feeling that voting for Nader was a mistake. Having that feeling that my vote actually counted and was actually a check in the wrong column. This is especially irksome knowing that I may soon be very much in need for health care that extends way beyond the limited means that I have. Maybe all this talk about free trade will open up the market for people to actually sell their organs and I could just get a loan to buy a new pancreas.
My African-American Studies class was more than a little surreal today. The professor didn't show up. Normally, we would have collectively bailed but today was supposed to be an exam day. No one wanted to miss a test so we all just hung out. The boredom finally set in and we started talking to each other. It was like something out of The Breakfast Club. One person had just lost both of his parents in a plane crash and was leaving town for a while. It's weird to have all these perceptions that you have of people shattered by actually interacting with them. I know that my radical ideas about interpersonal relations have already occurred to others but...
Ballot initiatives are frustrating. There were quite a few in Colorado that were total trojan horses and aimed mainly at slipping underhanded legislation under the noses of voters unwilling to read the full text of them. We had a really slippery measure regarding abortion that thankfully did not pass. The part that I agreed with was legally obligating doctors to inform women of the availibility of counselling and after care. The part that blew was that there was supposed to be a waiting period of at least 24 hours and some kind of standardized literature and video tapes given to each woman. Insert big sigh here.
One kind of disappointing failure was a ballot measure that would've required voter approval on expansion. Denver is developing a case of urban sprawl that in the next decade is going to give Los Angeles some competition.
The gun show measure also passed with the momentum of the killings at Columbine High School. I don't have a real problem with this because it just closes a loophole in existing law but I am pretty tired of what happened at Columbine being the justification for any action, no matter how unrelated. I keep thinking about the super soaker fight scheduled at Mile High Stadium that was cancelled out of "respect for the victims of Columbine." Uh, ok...
Go home. Go to sleep. See Yoon. Be happier. This is my to do list for the rest of this day.