Seriously though, what the hell am I going to be for Halloween?
I was honestly up half the night thinking about this nagging question - the night when I’d been campaigning for 9 hours and had a 6 hour drive and an opera to see the next day. Pretty annoying. So yeah, I have a Halloween booze cruise to go on tomorrow (and can I just say, I missed the college booze cruise to go see an opera so this is really kind of full circley) and I NEED A FUCKING COSTUME. I actually had this (seemingly) great idea, where I’d be a zipper, wearing black with little silver teeth and then make a zipper thingie to hang around my neck like a necklace. Except that when I thought about it a little more it was kind of like I was dressing up as a crotch. So I went against that idea.
I am obsessed with this fall’s TV. I just can’t get enough of Lost and Life As We Know It. If you’ve not watched the second, you really need to because it’s My So-Called Life all over again, but with three cute boys instead of one. Actually, I think I had a dream last night about being like in the cast or something and talking to the one that’s dating Kelly Osbourne in the show and saying, “How old are you because the 5 o’clock shadow is out of control.”
So I’ve been in Ohio volunteering for the Kerry campaign. It’s looking like he’s going to take Ohio (cross fingers). I was canvassing voters that had not voted in several years, and they all said they were going out this year. It was so funny, I opted for “target areas” (read: low income and largely African-American), mostly because everyone else volunteering looked a little squeamish about having to talk to poor people. And the lady running the canvassing was like, “Okay, but I really don’t want you going by yourself, etc.” So they sent me with this horrible woman Ingrid, who was SO SLOW THAT I ALMOST THROTTLED HER. It took us three and a half hours to do an assignment that was supposed to take two - and should have been even shorter since about a quarter of the houses we were supposed to stop at were abandoned. But seriously, I was expecting West Humboldt, and these neighborhoods were so not bad. But Ingrid just kept saying stuff like, “We should go soon, it’s starting to get scary.” It was 3:30 pm. And making comments about all the ‘unemployed males.’ I wanted to slap her carcass (from the throttling). They tried to put me with her the next day, and I basically had to say, “no way” in front of her, which made me feel kind of bad, but I just couldn’t take another day with her.
The next day I wound up going out with this guy who was much nicer. We went to this housing project on the East side. A lot of the people were immigrants, and we were trying to find their kids who were voters, but also largely at work. So we talking with this Ethiopian woman and I comment on the amazing smelling coming out of her kitchen. And she insists that we come in and try the broccoli she’s just made. It’s incredible, of course. I’m always amazed at how people who don’t have that much are so generous with what they have. Which brings me to one of the worst memories of my life:
We (Amanda and I) were in Cuba at the house of Pablo, my informant for my Santeria research. We were having a very late dinner (10 pm) because we’d been doing a ritual, etc. I’m a little hypoglycemic or something, so basically if I don’t eat for a long while, I get really nauseous and then I CAN’T eat. So, Pablo’s wife Marisa has laid out this incredible feast - pork, chicken, beans and rice, avocado salad. I should mention that a chicken in Cuba costs about $2.50, and Pablo’s income is about dollars a month. And Pablo gives Amanda and I both these huge plates of food. And I’m so sick at this point that I can only eat about a third of it. And Amanda just keeps saying, ‘You’ve got to eat more.’ And I just keep saying, ‘I know, I know.’ But I just can’t at all.
I have never felt so badly. These people spent so much money, time, and care on us and (it wasn’t intentional) but I just kind of threw it back in their faces. Given, you can never eat as much as a Cuban will give you to eat, but, oh man, that was a bad day.
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