Election Day Musings

Our long, political nightmare is over. It's called "Lead Up to the Election."

The commercials have run their course and now we can go onto complaining about something else.

This has been an especially crabby election season. Crabby and mean.

And when people are crabby and mean, I shut down and I don't want to play with them, listen to them, work with them or trust them until they've spent 100 hours watching "Mister Rogers Neighborhood" and learning about kindness, respect, and honor in the Land of Make Believe and otherwise.

It probably didn't help that I went to the polls after only a few hours of sleep. This was neither due to wild debaucherie nor too many hours prepping for this month's art show (for which I am grossly unprepared.) It's called the post-bronchitis cough.

Gives a woman time to think. And while I thought my way through holiday planning, the next chunk of story on my mental novel and a few other things, I fell into the election.

I think people vote (if they do vote, and they should) several different ways. There was the old tried-and-true straight ticket, which worked well in my parents and grandparents' day but seems a little too uninvolved for now.

There are people like me who split tickets. We have a tendency one way or the other but listen to debates (I listened to every debate I could find online or on-air for the major candidates in our area) and fact-check the ads on reliable, non-partisan sites.

(And they all lie. They may call it parsing the truth, but it's sort of like looking at the movie poster that says "Stupendous! - New York Times" when the review said, "What a stupendous waste of time!"

Then I thought of Lisa Murkowski, the woman in Alaska who was making herself a write-in candidate because she lost her primary.

I had fun voting today. I made careful choices for some. For others, I used the PAC sheet someone in my book club passed out. If they returned the questionnaire, I gave them a point; if they returned AND had a good rating, I voted for them.

I had perused the ballot proposals and cast a thoughtful vote.

But I still had blanks. Look, I have no business voting for the Board of Regents at U of M. I don't have a kid there anymore or go there or graduated from there or live there, so my town benefits from its presence. You bet I'll vote for MSU's, but Michigan? Wayne State?

And the governor. One is as slimy as the over abundance of hair gel he uses -- good grief; his head is an environmental, non-sustainability disaster. The other is smooth, like a piece of black ice that can spin out your car and tip it over in a heartbeat. With this one (who will win), I'll be listening to any speeches with the closed captions because his voice is whinier than Gypsy's at seven in the morning and he's out of kibble.

So, I voted for our TV station manager -- great guy, good with money, fair, makes wise decisions. He doesn't take any guff from folks and he can be lovably cranky, but he knows how to see the big picture. Rick's cousin Eric, who looks mighty fine in his Michigan sweatshirt and lives in Ann Arbor (no travel expenses, a fiscally responsible choice) and a lovely woman I worked with through PBS who now works for U of M in communications would be fine regents.

If you can write in Lisa Murkowski, I should be able to write in Kent, Eric, Glenda and the others I picked.

I voted Greenies and Libbies, Dems and Pubs, Yes and No.

I am an American. I may have an attitude -- a slightly snarky one today. But I'm out there.