My last post was titled "Doom Has Come Again"...and then school came and I've been so crazy busy with trying to keep up with it that some stuff had to give...sadly one of those things was this blog. Luckily it looks like the tide has turned and I am now conquering Doom. So I have returned!
As I've been crazy busy doing school and such I've kept thinking to myself "this would make an epic post." So I figure I'll try to catch up a bit: As a good homeskooler I do weird stuff...like keep track of and get involved in politics. So when I get offered a week of intense campaigning before the election with fifteen other crazy homeskoolers and somebody else is paying for my room and food...life is good. Until you're a sick, starving, zombie, robot, ahem, I think I'm getting ahead of the story.
Anyways, my dad drives me down to this place like a couple hours away and drops me, my suitcase, and my fedora off with some homeskoolers and some college students he's never met before...and then he leaves me. This is at five o'clock at night, so rather than eating dinner and going to bed like smart people, we drive to campaign headquarters, eat some pizza, and start calling random people. Calling random people is fun in a really demented way. 'Cause you do this:
"Hi can I talk to Fred?"
"Hi Fred this is The Homeskooled and I'm a volunteer calling from the Hickville with a short survey, would you mind taking a minute to answer these questions?"
Then comes the exciting part 'cause Fred gets to decide what to say. Generally you get one of these responses:
1. "Sure, I'd love to tell some random dude from Hickville who I'm gonna vote for."
2. "Um, what?"
3. "CLICK!"
or 4. "Blank, you blankety blank of blank before I blank blank you!"
In reply to these I say:
1. "Do you plan to support Mr. Awesome for Congress in the upcoming election?" (this is a polite way of saying, "who are you gonna vote for?")
2. "W o u l d y o u m i n d t a k i n g o n e m i n u t e t o a n s w e r t h e s e t w o q u e s t i o n s ???"
3. "Hello, are you there still?...oh duh, it went click . The jerk hung up on me"
4. "Could you give me directions, I don't know exactly how to get to 'blank'?" or "Same to you, CLICK!"
So anyways after making calls 'til like nine o'clock we drive back to the hotel - side note: the hotel is actually like half an hour away from campaign HQ across a state line and a massive river - So after getting back to the motel we go to bed...nope! actually we go and do this awesome debrief meeting and then finally get to bed at like 11:30.
Next awesome discovery; my room mate is one of those extreme homeskoolers who gets up at 4:45 in the morning...I'm not a morning person so I "sleep in" 'til 6:30 leaving me a little time to get breakfast of biscuits and gravy before our morning meeting. After the morning meeting we have ten minutes to kill before getting in the van and driving to HQ. However there is a small problem, there are girls on our team...actually most of our team is girls...and inevitably at least one of those girls must attempt to do her makeup or something in those ten minutes...however also inevitably it takes more like twenty minutes to apply makeup...meaning we sit in the van for ten minutes waiting...but all is not lost because it's a great time to do the inevitable "how are you this morning? conversation" those cheerful morning people must inflict upon us in our groggy state of semi-consciousness.
"Welcome back! we've prepared for you to call from nine this morning till nine tonight with a great break of going door to door in the middle!" This is the warm welcome of one of the staffers at HQ, unlike the cold wet welcome that nature gave us as we hike from door to door. I typically could cover a five mile, sixty door walk list in an hour and a half. Note that this is averaging like three miles an hour (the speed a normal person walks at) while knocking on sixty doors and talking to a bunch of grumpy people, and in case you forgot it was dumping rain. My mind resorted to this strange process of making my current predicament bearable by looking forward to my next one. As I sat staring at the perfect sheet rock wall in front of my phone (actually there was this small hole left by a thumb tack, but otherwise it was perfect), I encouraged myself by thinking that in an hour or two I would get to go out doorbelling. Then as I stood in the rain on the umpteenth front porch of the day I thought of how lovely it would be when I got to sit in the warm, dry office and make phone calls.
This wonderful cycle continued until it was interrupted on Sunday afternoon with the news that, "from now on we're just going to do phone calls." So of course Sunday night I woke up in the middle of the night and guess what? I had an incredibly sore throat. That morning we had "volunteered" to get up two hours early in order to go and wave signs on an overpass with a couple of the top dog politic people. So at eight o'clock in the morning in a frigid wind I'm standing over the freeway screaming and yelling with an all ready sore throat. Thankfully there was half of one of my least favorite kinds of donuts left to eat for breakfast when we got to HQ...it's not like I wanted any of the Starbucks coffee that everyone else had already drunk up.
Two hours and about two hundred calls later, I'm grasping for any sort of a handhold while sliding into a complete zombie state. Luckily, it just so happens that a bottle of Dayquil "appears" and I take a dose. Almost instantly I return to the land of the living...until two hours later when I fall deep into the pit of zombiehood...and I'm not supposed to take another dose for two more hours. Enter the human zombie cycle, which I remained in for the rest of the day. That evening however one of my friends had a great idea, split your doses in half and take them twice as often...duhhhhh!
Welcome to Tuesday officially powered by Dayquil Split Dose! Breaking the human/zombie cycle and coming out on the human end of things, I had to try to carry my share of the load making 15,000 calls on our final day. Suffice to say it was a long day of calling...and then we got to go to the victory party at like eight o'clock. - Side note: Victory parties are really dumb. First, half the time they're a losing party, not a victory party. Second, they're held in these muckety muck upscale hotels,where although the ballroom is large enough and has a high enough ceiling for a good game of ultimate frisbee, just taking out one of the lights would probably cost more than I make in a year. Third, there are a bunch of people there who have dedicated their lives working like twenty hour days for the last couple weeks on this campaign and getting paid about as much as you get from unemployment, who either try to A. drink their woes away when they lose or B. Celebrate with about ten glasses of champagne and I really don't like hanging out with tipsy people. Suffice to say the best thing there is the beer and wine...and I definitely don't want either of those. - Anyways we get to the victory party and just as the band starts up - Side note: I've never heard of a live band at a victory party so that was pretty awesome. - we get told that one of the races is so close that they want us to make calls to people and ask them to drive to a certain post office that is open 'til ten so they can still get their ballots postmarked in time. Yeah, people are REALLY grumpy when you're calling them AFTER nine o'clock and they think the election is already done with...but it is better than "partying." So we made a bunch of phone calls and then we went back to our motel...and you're probably wondering about the election...I'll get back to that later.
I was feeling good enough the next morning that I decided to go off Dayquil cold turkey. However, my stomach was feeling rather rebellious against biscuits and gravy for the seventh day straight. Regardless, we did the sad and awkward goodbyes and maybe we'll never see each other again thing. And then my brother was supposed to pick me up...but he wasn't there. So then I figured out that since my cellphone was dead (cellphone chargers never work when you don't have a back up charger), I didn't have my brother's number. So I started calling a bunch of people who didn't answer their phones trying to get my brother's number when he pulls into the parking lot fifteen minutes late...I think campaigning had frayed my nerves. Anyways, we go to campaign HQ where we end up sitting around watching the guys with hangovers attempt to do something productive, because we had to wait for something but I've forgotten what...and then my parents pick me up and I go home. The End.
Oh, if you're wondering we WON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!btw, this is the first campaign I've been on that's won!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
