Sundays with Stretchy Pants

I’m a comma with nothing to blog about, but Jill Twittered that she’s a colon and I had to see what kind of punctuation I am. I’ve always wondered. And now I know.

Let’s see…happy Martin Luther King day, my kids are sick, the CPSCIA is dumb, and Obama is almost president.

I always ruin MLK day for my kids by making them watch the I Have a Dream speech and making them read things on Anti-Racist Parent and Racialicious until they rend their garments in despair over their white privilege. It’s a tradition.

Everybody here is coughing their heads off. Me? I’m taking Eleventy billion milligrams of vitamin C and eating garlic by the bulb. I smell bad. I know this because I smell well. Get it? Grammar. Good times.

Speaking of words, have you seen this bull?  The Consumer Product Safety Improvement for Dumbasses Act is trying to get rid of everything, everything! for children under 12 that might have lead in it. Hello Small Business Owner, you say you don’t have the money to test your handmade, naturally lead-free products so that we know for sure, for sure that they’re lead free? Too bad for you. Close your store you filthy child poisoner. And libraries? You’re the poisony-est and you shan’t let the children touch the filth.

And tomorrow we get a fresh and fancy new president. If you’re Facebook friends with my sister, go support her support of Barack Obama because some douche from her church hassled her about it and I’ve advised her not to hassle back because, well, there are a lot of douches in her church. Personally, I believe Christian douches are the worst of all kinds of douches. And I’m including Muslim douches and vinegar douches in that. Just so you know.

Oh, hey, look, I’m a comma:

You Are a Comma

You are open minded and extremely optimistic. You enjoy almost all facets of life. You can find the good in almost anything. You keep yourself busy with tons of friends, activities, and interests. You find it hard to turn down an opportunity, even if you are pressed for time. Your friends find you fascinating, charming, and easy to talk to. (But with so many competing interests, you friends do feel like you hardly have time for them.) You excel in: Inspiring people You get along best with: The Question Mark

I made some calls for Obama again last night and it was brutal. People aren’t supposed to answer their phones at this point in the election. They’re supposed to be so sick of getting calls that when they see the caller ID pop up with a number they don’t recognize, they’re supposed to mutter, “Dadgum political calls!” and walk away. How else can people like me feel like we’re helping the campaign without really doing anything? I love leaving messages and stuff, but I’m not so good with the talking to strangers.

I don’t want to discourage people from volunteering, but last night was hard. The first time I did it, I talked to about 7 people out of almost 70. Last night, almost half of my 48 calls were answered. By grumpy people. There were some bright spots, but my very first call started with, “That bastard isn’t getting my vote!” which I thought was rude even for a McCain supporter. Some of the people who answered just wanted to keep their vote private, which I understand so we just chatted a little bit, and I tried to suck up to them and make rainbows and unicorns travel through the phone lines, but I don’t know if that works when I’m calling from a cell phone. (By the way, Lena drew a picture yesterday and the caption was, “I HATE UNICORNS!” Is this the beginning of the slippery slope to being goth?) Sometimes I found myself randomly shouting, “COLIN POWELL!” which would make the person kind of stutter and say, “Uh, yeah, he’s a…he’s a real good guy…and I respect him a lot,” and then I would try to convince them that if Colin Powell says so, we should vote for Obama. But most of the people I talked to claimed to be undecided. And when I was talking to those people, I really wished I hadn’t seen this clip from The Daily Show because I really felt like saying the things that Samantha Bee and Jason Jones start saying at about 2:30 in this video:

I loved that debate! I love it when the camera stays on McCain’s face when Obama’s talking and he makes all of his weird faces. It would be hard watching that as an undecided voter. In order to really focus on the issues, I would have to listen to it with no picture. Anyway…

Dawn asked me what happened to make me change from a conservative to a liberal and this article about William F. Buckley’s son, Christopher, and his endorsement of Barack Obama and subsequent resignation from the National Review has me thinking even more.

The short answer that I gave Dawn was something like, “I have higher self-esteem now,” and I’d really like to think it’s something deep like that, but, really, I think Bryan hit the nail on the head when I asked him what he thinks changed and he said, “Well, you’re old now.”

He’s right. It’s oldness. It manifests itself in a couple of different ways, but it’s oldness. I never really cared about politics before, but now I do because I’m old and I have old-people interests. Like politics. And when I started looking at the issues, as old people are wont to do, I became a liberal.

I used to just vote for the candidate that my dad and my pastor voted for. You know, because I have those issues. What if I died and God was all, “So. ‘Abby’ is it? Is that what you go by down there? Says here you voted for Kerry in ’04, is that right? Even after you saw those unfortunate wind-surfing pictures? I’m sorry, but Jesus’ blood doesn’t cover that sin.” And I’d stammer and blush and cry and it would just be a terrible way to begin my afterlife. And don’t get me started about my dad. You can actually feel the heart attack coming when we talk politics, which I do not ever bring up with him.

Mostly, though, the oldness manifests itself in ways that have more to do with boring things like worrying about money thingies. We have more education, but less money than we did 8 years ago. And that shit just ain’t right.

And my views on God have changed, too. I think Jesus is a liberal. That thought used to be way in the back of my head, way back when I worked at the Christian bookstore and those WWJD bracelets were invented. Oh, you didn’t know I used to work at a Christian bookstore? Yes, I did. For years. In fact, I used to go to a Pentecostal Christian church. It was my innoculation against everything that went wrong in my parents’ lives. I was the perfect receptacle for the “God-shaped hole” speech. Except, pentecostalism is kind of weird never quite fit. A lot of pentecostals believe that if you don’t speak in tongues, God doesn’t hear your prayers. That never came from the pulpit (my pastor was amazing, exceptional even; he didn’t even have a pulpit because that’s how hip he was), but it did come from people in the church. That, and the whole what-sin-have-you-not-confessed-that-gave-your-baby-a-birth-defect issue. Anyway, I’ve never spoken in tongues and, in fact, I was always quite perplexed and distracted by it when it happened in my presence. It’s very distracting. Seriously, go youtube it and tell me you can get your prayer on with people doing that around you. Maybe it was just the devil distracting me. I don’t think so, though, because usually when the devil wants to distract me he uses p0rn. And booze.

I also went to a regular old kind of church. And that was ok for a while, but then we moved and, well, I don’t really like going to church all that much. It’s because of all of my filthy sin. Oh, and the people. I’m not very comfortable around church people. When I was a brand-new Christian, excited about this fancy easy-peasy protection against all of the evil in the world, I thought I would like Christian people, but that was because I didn’t know any. Here’s how naive I was: Shortly after hearing the “God-shaped hole” speech, I got a job at a Christian bookstore and expressed to my manager something along the lines of, “Oh my goodness, it must be so awesome working with Christians and…and…waiting on Christians, and well golly, it just must be a swell work environment.” I may not remember exactly what I said, but I’ll never forget the look on that manager’s face as he slowly put his cap on his pen, pushed his glasses up his nose, sighed, looked me in the eye and said, “Let me tell you something about Christians. They’re just people.” He shook his head slowly, rubbed his temples and said, “They’re all just human people.” And I thought, “Yeah, really swell human people!”

Anyway, I was a conservative and now I’m not. It’s because I’m old and because of cults. Or Jesus. Or the unchurched. Or the undead. Or the unpaid. I can’t remember where I was going with this, but I think I mean to say that people just change. And I have no pocket change. And now I’m voting for change. The end.

Kidding! Obama is totally not a terrorist. For realz! And, well, I probably didn’t actually pal around with him anyway. But I did go to an Obama rally with AmazonMidwife and her kids. We volunteered and it was fun. Dawn watched my kids because she rocks and because the children have been to two rallies and worked at one Campaign for Change headquarters and they’ve, frankly, had enough. Lena said she had mixed feelings about missing the rally, but she really wanted to hang out with Noah. Terrorist.

I saw the anti-classy anti-choice abortion van drive around and around the rally. With a great big picture of an aborted fetus on it. That was gross. And not classy at all. And super gross. It made me go, “Huh. That’s gross. And manipulative.” And then I wondered why we don’t go around bombing abortion vans and anti-choice protestors. And then I remembered it’s because we know that we can look at that van and go, “Ew, gross,” and then we can choose to look away instead of throwing rocks at it. Because nobody is forcing us to look. See how awesome it is to have a choice? It, like, makes the hate go away. Anyway, proof I was there (not much proof, since my camera’s batteries died):

As usual, Obama was totally classy. You know what else is classy? This:

On Friday during a town hall-style meeting in Lakeville, Minn., a supporter told McCain that he feared what would happen if Obama were elected. McCain drew boos when he defended his rival as a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”
In another exchange, a woman told McCain that she didn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” Shaking his head and taking the microphone from her, McCain replied: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Now if he could just put some ads on that have less to do with fear-mongering and more to do with those issues, he might still lose this race, but at least his credibility will remain intact.

Oh, they’re not drunk? Well, then you all better get out there and vote cuz there’s some crazy misinformed bigots people out there fixin’ to pick our next president.