Scranton

I awoke bleary eyed around 6am after about 3 hours of sleep. Late the night before I had decided to forgo voting and drive to Scranton, PA the next morning to get out the vote for Obama.

I wasn't really concerned about him losing PA, but you can never underestimate the American electorate's ability to make huge, ignorant mistakes.

I arrived at Obama's Scranton HQ around 10:45. After a quick cup of coffee, I began to call elderly and disabled people to schedule drives for them to polling locations. They were generally nice, affable, and even a few; religious. God Bless Me for helping Obama. That's sweet.

A few hours later I began to call "Probable Obama Supporters" in the area, to: make sure they knew how to vote, knew where to vote, and see if they wanted to volunteer.

Most of them had been called already; some were rude about it, some hung up immediately, some used it as an opportunity to affirm their support of Obama. It was here that I began to see how unorganized things actually were.

A lot of volunteers were "taking the long way 'round". Checking one thing ten times, instead of checking ten things once. Having people on six different lists, making sure that one item is in a packet of five things, instead of counting all five things at once...

That sort of thing.

I'm pretty sure that was made up for by two distinct things:

1) Free Baked Goods: WOW! Everyone's Halloween leftovers were there. Not to mention fresh baked cookies, breads, pastries. Delish! I think the rust belt has the best home-baked goods. I can say this with certainty because I went to high school just a few hours away.

2) The Sheer Joy Of The Volunteers: Everyone was totally nice, sweet and determined. I gotta say, since this was the closest "swing-y state-y small city" close to New York, there were a lot of Jews From NYC hanging about. Those be my favorite sort o' folk. Good fun all around.

Anyway, I'm getting up in another 5 hours and doing it again. It's nice to feel like I'm actually accomplishing something productive, rather than the normal "crying/pornography/crying pornography" routine.