friday random elevenish: “so how about that debate, huh?” edition
This work week’s been kind of a whiplash-inducing experience, starting with a two-day “retreat” during which my work team did a bunch of decidedly not-work things; like guided meditation, painting, ice-breaker games, and going out to a nice dinner; to focus on the importance of self-care and engage in some team-building. It was…pleasant. It also hit at exactly the right time of the year, after the majority of the program management tasks for all those requirements have been finished and handed over to the procurement shop.
Then the day after we wrapped it up, I spent seven hours in meetings before spending another hour in the dentist’s chair. The winds shifted pretty quickly, you could say.
Outside of that, though, the week’s been largely positive. I’m getting pretty good (for me, anyway) streaming and sales numbers on Warmest Regards, I’ve gotten some decent outside time, and spent a pleasant evening with friends on Wednesday, sharing our enjoyment of Tuesday night’s Presidential Debate.
VP Harris played TFG like a fiddle, consistently describing her positions on the issues while dropping numerous obvious rhetorical traps that consistently got under his skin, frustrating and distracting him, sending him down strange tangents about crowd sizes and silly stories about immigrants stealing and eating pets in Ohio, rather than looking even remotely “Presidential” or competent.
It was masterful, and exactly the kind of thing we were hoping we’d see and ideally expect from someone who’s made a successful career as a prosecutor. We’ll see what the polls show in the coming days, though I suspect that this debate performance will win over a significant number of few-but-absolutely-essential undecided voters out there.
And it’s going to be close, because the way our electoral system is organized, *every* modern Presidential election is close, at least in terms of electoral count (if not popular vote). Thanks to population distribution, Gerrymandering (which I link because the etymology of the word never gets explained anymore), and the Electoral College system as laid out in Article Two, Section One of the Constitution (we’ll leave whether the EC still makes sense given modern population numbers and social conditions for another day). In 2020, for example, President Biden won the popular vote count by more than seven million votes, but his victory in the EC was primarily driven by a few thousand votes each in three or four states.
Our system is kind of weird.
Writing that civics lesson of a previous paragraph seriously threatened to harsh my vibe coming off of Tuesday evening, but it’s an important reminder that the Harris campaign and those of us who support it can’t take anything for granted. 80% of the voters in this country are going to vote for a given party no matter who’s on the ticket, and the rest of the undecideds/persuadeables/whatevers are that way because they’re not particularly engaged in the process. It’s convincing those folks on the margins to first, vote at all, and second, to support your candidate where all the work of the next eight weeks or so is going to happen.
Anyway, that’s the story for now. Here’s the usual Friday music; this time a bunch of 70’s pop rock, and some more modern tunes that mostly sound like it:
- “Hooked On A Feeling” – Blue Swede & Bjorn Skifs
- “Found Heaven” – Conan Gray
- “Takin’ Care Of Business” – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
- “My Beloved Monster” – Eels
- “Figure It Out” – Royal Blood
- “Shake It Out” – Florence + The Machine
- “Pinch Me” – Barenaked Ladies
- “Voices” – Cheap Trick
- “Mainstream Kid” – Brandi Carlile
- “The Underdog” – Spoon
- “Go All The Way” – Raspberries
- “The Man Who Sold The World” – David Bowie
- “Lump” – The Presidents Of The United States Of America
