pins and needles
What is there left to say? It's early afternoon on Election Day, and I am already feeling sort of numb to my anxieties—a rare emotion for me to be feeling. If I think too much about it, I literally start to feel nauseated. I have never been like this about an election in my life, which in a way was part of the problem four years ago: I, like way too many others, just took it for granted, as a given, that Donald Fucking Trump could not possibly win a presidential election. This time, I am facing what is clearly the very real possibility of another four years of this insanity—maybe not a fifty-fifty chance, but we also have to consider that his chances are higher this time than they had been estimated to be in 2016.
I do feel like the aggregate data predictions at FiveThirtyEight.com tend to be more accurate when the odds are closer, but that seems like a kind of strange thing to be comforted by. I just sit here, figuring that likely by the end of the day, I will be feeling either immense relief or devastation. And even in the former case, it won't be fully real for another two and a half months, on Inauguration Day.
I will say this, and I am only going to say it here because I know it will go nowhere productive if I share it on Facebook: countless people are sharing memes today with the simplistic message "Choose Kindness," which I find frustratingly empty and meaningless. The fact that it is uniformly being shared by middle-class straight white people strikes me as telling. For queer people like myself, and especially for racial minorities and particularly black people, far too much is at stake to subscribe to this misguided, oversimplified worldview that it's just that simple no matter who wins this election. Don't tell me you believe in "choosing kindness" unless you also demonstrate what you are actively doing to get rid of the man in the White House who clearly believes the exact opposite.
As for last night, I made a big salad for dinner. Leftovers of that was for lunch today. I decided to watch the miniseries premiere of The Undoing on HBO, which I found just compelling enough. I then retired to the bedroom to watch the season finale of We Are Who We Are, which left me with a lot to think about, for a series that overall I truly loved. Once again I went right to starting to listen to the Still Watching podcast episode about it, but I did that while getting ready for bed which meant I got about seven minutes in before finishing it this morning. Then I went to bed, kind of early.
So then what happened? Our building's fire alarm went off. I had to get out of bed, get dressed, and Shobhit helped me gather the cats. I left my phone behind so I had to stand outside kind of twiddling my thumbs for maybe fifteen minutes. During this time, Shobhit walked around speaking to certain people, rightly considering it "his job" since he's on the Board. There was no fire, but apparently the alarm was triggered due to some kind of flaw that had been discovered during fire confidence tests that were run last week—that day, we didn't have to go outside because we knew they were tests, but the alarms kept up for much longer.
The whole episode seriously freaked out the cats. I always feel so bad for them in these situations.
And finally, I just finished up with Office Zoom Lunch Meetup #14. We had a decent showing today, seven people total: Rebecca, Brent, Adrienne, Zaira, Andrew, and Noah, in addition to myself. For much of the hour we talked about movies, and some about TV shows, so I quite enjoyed that conversation as you might expect. Zaira is still in her twenties and keeps bringing up these great movies she just watched for the first time. A few weeks ago she mentioned seeing the original Alien; today she talked about having seen two different Stanley Kubrick movies for the first time, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. It's fascinating to me to consider the idea of seeing such movies for the first time in 2020.
Brent and Adrienne both had to jump off the call shortly after 12:30, but the five of us left kept things going plenty well for the rest of the hour. But, as was the case with everyone on the call, I have to get back to work now. The next time I post, we'll have a better sense of whether the world will end more slowly or more quickly going forward.
[posted 1:09 pm]