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I’m voting against you! Ptbpptbptpbt!!!

I took part in the political process earlier this morning, did my civic duty and voted. Yay me!

I went there with both my parents and thankfully, all of the discussion (at varying volumes) about our voting choices was done last night, so there were no arguments in the car ride there nor home again. However, Dad told us a brief story afterward that he considered amusing and I thought may have been seriously offensive.

In Minnesota, there are two new Constitutional amendments on the ballot: forbidding gay marriage and requiring a legal form of ID to vote. Obviously, we don’t need an ID yet, so since we were already registered, the three of us walked up to a desk, signed in, then went over to the table to get our ballots. When Dad got there, he put his driver’s license down on the table in front of the worker and she threw it back at him. Like I said, he thought it was pretty funny.

As for myself, well, I think I can understand why she would have such a bad reaction. If she felt really strongly about not wanting the voter ID amendment to pass, showing your driver’s license would be like bluntly stating to her face, “I’m voting against your strong beliefs.” (Meanwhile, she has to sit there and not say anything since that’s her civic duty.)

And it’s not just telling her how he’s voting. He’s making a physical gesture when doing so: putting his ID on the table in front of her. In my mind, that could be like saying, “I’m voting against your strong beliefs”, then giving her the finger. If that was how she looked at it, I’m impressed that she restrained herself enough to only throw his driver’s license back at him.

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Time for November Madness!

In preparations for the election tomorrow, I got a copy of a sample ballot and began filling in the bubbles for my candidates of choice. Or at least the candidates that I think won’t suck too bad. And as I did more research and kept filling in the bubbles, it suddenly felt like I was making college basketball picks for March Madness. Who will be going to the next round by being elected? Who will be curled up in a ball, crying on the floor in anguish after losing?

Then there’s the championship game, the presidential election, the one that matters most and will have the largest impact on the U.S. for the next four years. Unfortunately, there’s a distinct possibility that there won’t be a final score at the end of the night, no one will be celebrating and the winner could be determined inside of the wrong kind of court.

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Sharing is now more aesthetically pleasing

I got a text this morning from someone who was reading the blog using his phone. Why? Because that big floating SHARE was taking up a lot of space on the screen, so he had to read around it. Sure, he may have been whining, but he was also right—I checked and decided it looked a little too annoying on my phone, too. Thus, it’s gone.

Instead of the big floating SHARE, you have to go to the bottom of each post and click on the buttons there if you want to tweet it, like it, etc. The change also takes away the option of tweeting or liking the website as a whole, but now I can pretend that you all would have clicked them if they were still available. Thus, I consider the adjustment a win-win. If you don’t… sorry, Facebook still hasn’t created a “dislike” button.

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I’ll Pray For Douchebags, Too

I was visiting some friends this afternoon because I was going to do a voice-over for a WaZoo sketch. We ended up skipping it because the voice-over would have doubled the length of the sketch and it really wasn’t necessary. (Blame it on my English degree: get rid of the chaff and be succinct and to the point. Unless your paper isn’t long enough to fill the minimum number of pages, in which case you should bullshit as much as needed.)

While talking after dinner, their teenage daughter came downstairs to return a Flash drive I loaned her. The music on her iPod got wiped clean a while ago, so I used it to give her a copy of all my mp3 files. When she handed it back to me, she said that one song on there was particularly awesome.

I guess some of her classmates have been a major pain in the ass recently, so now whenever those people start being a nuisance, she can hear this song in her head and be happy again. There are two music videos for the song—this one was her favorite—so now I present you with Pray For You by Jaron and the Long Road to Love.

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Wait… what day of the week is today?

I’m hoping my brain is fully adjusted, but over the last week, I’ve been completely discombobulated. (Okay, it hasn’t been that bad, but I wanted to use the word “discombobulated” in a blog post.)

When I entered Augsburg’s MBA program last January, they gave me a sheet with my entire schedule laid out: these are the classes you’re taking on these days. There was a break of a couple weeks when the school switched from trimesters to semesters, but aside from that, I’ve had classes almost every Thursday night for a year and nine months.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. I think the problem was that our class size would have been too small, but the school asked if I’d be able to switch from Thursdays to Mondays for my final course. My schedule is pretty flexible and I figured I’d be okay missing Monday Night Football for two months, so I said okay. Thus, I entered the room for the first time on a Monday night schedule and knew four other people in a class of 33. (Like I said, a Thursday class probably would have been too small.)

Flash forward to last Thursday. I finished my final exam for Global Management around 9:00pm, then boarded a Greyhound bus that left Minneapolis at 12:55am Friday morning. We got to Chicago by 8:30 and I proceeded to spend the next 48 hours having lots of fun at HalloweeM, Mensa Chicago’s Regional Gathering. (You know, because it’s Halloween weekend, but it’s Mensa, so they use an M at the end… very clever.) I rode back home with some friends that lasted almost all of Sunday, then got a break of 24 hours before my new Economics class. A lot of stuff got mashed together very quickly into a couple days.

During the rest of this week… nothing. No “I’ve got class in two days, so I better stay up all night working on this paper.” I went to trivia Thursday night, but that didn’t help my internal calendar on Tuesday (or Monday or Wednesday or whichever day it was).

Now we’re past Thursday, I’ve got class coming up on Monday night again and I have homework I need to do by then. That could mean that my weekend is shot to hell, but since I’m not spending the whole time having fun, it should help me get my internal calendar straightened out. … You know, looking at it that way, I think I preferred not knowing what day it was.