Bingo, Olympics, & Politics

Kim mirrored my thoughts last night when she exclaimed how tiring watching the Democrat convention is. Indeed, it's like work only less exciting.

Now I haven't seen the speech from der Wunderkind yet so I'm not talking about last night but up until now the speeches have been eminently fast-forwardable.

I miss the Olympics, even though it contributed to our instant gratification culture. How? By affording the viewing of a series of 2-4 laps of a pool, or once or twice around the track, and voila! You have a winner. (Just stay away from the water polo or soccer games. They. are. endless.)

In the Olympics, there are a lot of excellent candidates who run thirty-second races. With this presidential campaign we have a lot of mediocre candidates who are stumbling towards the finish of a two-year race. Call it Long Attention Span Theatre for those gifted with long attentions.

Why are our candidates mediocre and our Olympians excellent?

Because politics is about image and the Olympics about performance.

I'm guessing that John McCain will be tapping Gov. Palin of Alaska as his running mate [Update: er...not]and I was initially euphoric about it, to the extent one can be euphoric over something like politics. McCain has shown himself capable of self-discipline: after the 2000 nomination process in which some said he was unfairly treated by the Bush campaign, he swallowed his pride and supported the president and paid his dues. He also swallowed his desire for lax immigration by understanding, really getting, that the will of the people is to close the border first, and then worry granting legal status to illegals inside. And now, assuming he has chosen Palin, he snubbed his great friend Tom Ridge and was able to reach out to a pro-lifer for his VP pick. Not easy to do.

But it is another reminder, that in politics subjectivity is huge: your pedigree matters (Bush), or who your spouse is (Hillary) or what color your skin is (Obama) or whether you have ovaries (Palin). Be nice if people didn't care about such things and our politicians were held accountable and performance mattered, and not performance measured in such simplistic, materialistic terms as "are you better off than you were four years ago?".

The economy must be slowing since bingo was so slow last night that it reminded me of a dental waiting room. The afterwards was pleasant if the conversation unduly stimulative. I sense an ecelectism in our group; the new guy, a sales/rah-rah sort of guy, initially got on my nerves but he is witty and sharp and seems like he takes his role as father very seriously.

Carry (name changed to protect the innocent) works in the kitchen and is a fellow Officeophile. She was originally the quiet one. I'm not sure if she corrupted us or we corrupted her or it was mutually assured destruction but instead of talking about Dostoevsky or the complexities of a non-computable, nearly undefinable number in support of Gödel's theorem, we end up talking about her nude neighbors and the fact that her son, who is about 5, is obsessed with her breasts and she wonders if that's helpful. Boys & men have a breast fetish, she understands, but do they want to touch their mommy's? I'm not going to touch that one. To borrow from Obama, that question is above my paygrade. Less salaciously and much more soberingly, this seemingly devout regular Mass-goer and volunteer said that she had a dream (nightmare) in which her late father told her she was going to Hell. What to make of that? Dreams are symbolic enough that you can't take it literally.

Kim, of course, is familiar to longtime bingo readers (all two of you). Her good friend left her husband and children for a former classmate she met at a class reunion. Now it seems she's intimate with two men and is "happy". She may be happy in the short-run, and the short-run can run for a long time. Even to the end of our lives.

We also have a male nurse in the crew now, and he has entertaining stories to tell. We works the night shift, his sleep patterns constantly disrupted by weekends spent awake with the kids during the day and four ten-hour nights. And I complain about my sleep? (Which was rescued by quitting the allergy medicine Allegra-D. Stupidly I didn't marry cause (Allegra-D) with effect.)