Tealin's Voting Adventure!

[tealin]

I really don't have any justification for drawing particular attention to my own voting experience, but:

1. Maybe someone will be interested, or at least I might like having documentation of it sometime in the future
2. This is a blog, dangit, that's what they're for
3. It's got pictures. People like pictures!

The designated polling place was equidistant from work and home so I'd planned on going at lunch, but I was ready to go much earlier than usual in the morning so I thought I'd ride by and see what the line was like. Too long to safely get through it before dailies at 9. Fun to see, though. I made my way back there at lunch (after stopping off at home for sustenance) and to my surprise there was no line at all. There were dogs, though. It was like a doggy club social. There was the guy to the left here, who looked like he was walking a three-headed dog, but to my disappointment upon closer inspection it turned out to be three dogs walking very closely together. On the lawn out in front of the building was a congregation of overbred lapdogs surrounded by young, fit people cooing at them. And, the requisite distance away, a trio of very attractive young ladies selling 'No on Proposition 8' to honking passing traffic. I suspected everyone driving by was planning to vote no on it anyway – this is 'godless heathen Hollywood' after all – but it was nice to see the effort. And slightly ironic because our polling station was a Baptist church. As I walked into the building (no line!) I followed the most Californian of old ladies, a seasoned veteran in the war against age, who to my inexpert eye had had at least one facelift and her eyebrows surgically removed so that she could draw them on an inch higher than they should have been, which made room for a swath of incongruous eye'shadow'. Amazing. Why is it that people who draw on their eyebrows always put that blob at the inside corners? Anyway, my sister had come home from voting obscenely early that morning and told me that there was only one person on the register with our last name, and that had been her, so I had brought several forms of ID and proof of address in case there was trouble at the desk. I'd looked up my address on the LA County Register website and knew this was the place I was to go, and that I was to direct myself to the 'green table' as two precincts were voting at the same place. I told my plight to the lady manning the desk. She asked to see my sample ballot; I replied I had received a card saying I'd successfully registered and nothing after that. She said the registration system was a mess. We checked the list for my name anyway, which of course wasn't there, but then she pulled out another list and lo, thereupon was my name. Apparently the 'blue list' (it was on blue paper) was for all the people who didn't register in time to get on the fancy bound 'white' list ... even though I registered before my sister. The lady repeated that the system was a mess. Buoyed by my triumph over the system and filled with democratic zeal, I marched to the voting booths! Of course, had the desk with the ballots actually been labelled as in my illustration, I might have noticed it, rather than arriving at a vacant booth, looking around for something to mark, and then wandering back in pursuit of ballots. I eventually got one from the guy who belonged on the Axiom, after he demonstrated to me how to slide it into the box/booklet thingy and mark my selections. This was very exciting, by the way; I remember watching my dad vote, probably when I was six, and it looked like he had a device that you stuck through a hole in the box/booklet thingy and punched a little hole in the ballot paper underneath, which had looked like fun. On the positive side, California (or at least Burbank) hasn't gone touch-screen (thank goodness!), so I still had the chance to use this device; on the negative, it doesn't actually punch a hole, it's a flat-topped felt pen that marks a little black circle on a designated bubble on the ballot. Oh well. I had plenty of fun making dots anyway. Then I took it back to the Axiom man and scanned it (SCANTRON!) and was on my way! Huzzah for democracy! As I was unlocking my bike from the signpost where I'd parked it, another biker came and took the spot. We exchanged pleasantries and shared our excitement. There really was something in the air that made it feel like A Big Day. As I've gotten older, things like Christmas and my birthday have lost a lot of their momentousness, and I expected Election Day to be much the same – I knew, cerebrally, that it was a Big Day, and expected that to be as far as it went, but there was something really visceral about it. That night, as I rode home after watching the BBC coverage, it was unusually windy. By all rights it was a random fluctuation in the space-time continuum, the sympathetic fallacy and all that, but it was really hard not to think symbolically about it. Exciting times. It'll be interesting to see where things go from here, but at least they will go.

Comments

[missuscarroll.livejournal.com]

I didn't get to vote, being a minor and all that, but I did see the Decemberists yesterday. The end was spectacular--a huge chorus of "here all the bombs fade away" and a call and response of "yes we can" + "yes we did." Something about Colin Meloy winning a bet on whether North Carolina would go blue. All very exciting stuff.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Oh dude, that is SO COOL. Aren't their concerts fantastic? As much as I love their CDs, ever since I saw them in concert the CDs have since served mostly as a reminder of the live performance. They closed with "Sons and Daughters" at the concert I attended too, though at the time it was more wistful. Crazy how all these songs have suddenly shifted tone! I've been trying my darndest to avoid it but I'm actually getting my hopes up! Somebody stop me!

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

The higher you put them, the more they will shatter when they meet reality on the descent.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

That's why I've been trying to avoid it. They certainly aren't as high as some people's. I think I'm just a little giddy at being reasonably confident the president-elect is smarter than me.