The World According to Chuck

I believe I mentioned sleep once or twice in talking about my recent trip to Boston. This was an issue, of course, because I took a red-eye flight back east and nobody can sleep on a plane without medical help, in most cases serious ingestion of ethanol. Which I don’t ingest. Which I may have also mentioned a time or two.

In addition, though, for the past few months I’ve been doing some work that’s required me to stay up late at night and watch movies and TV. Or that’s how it seems to work out, although have you seen any reviews here lately? No. Actually, I’m paid to feel grammatically superior to hard-working folks and speech-recognition software and to stay awake, which I’m grateful to do, although it took me a few weeks to adjust to sleeping later in the morning.

The other advantage, which I truly appreciate, is that I can do this from home, or anywhere with Internet access, although broadband is really necessary. So I continued my schedule even though I was heading into a time zone with strange new rules. This is also responsible for my sleep deprivation while in Boston and telling everyone that Frankenstein never scared me, but marsupials do.

Because they’re fast.

Anyway (never mind, somebody reading gets that joke, trust me), while I’ve had plenty of sleep since I got home I still have a strange schedule from time to time, including Monday (really Tuesday), when I filled in for an east coaster and therefore agreed to be responsible for four hours of boredom between 2 and 6 a.m. This was a little tricky but I managed to doze for an hour or so beforehand and fulfill my obligations and hit the sack just before 7 a.m., sleeping all the way until 1:30 in the afternoon, when I was awakened by my wife and son laughing at pictures of cats and cheezeburgers.

This left me primed, at 7pm, for election returns.

Julie had left to attend A Thing, and John, himself sleep deprived, had crashed in his room, so I had the joy to myself. I made a big pot of chili (I took advantage of the solo time, since the smell of roasting peppers makes John nauseated and whiny), read blogs and watched Keith and Tweety and Rachel and Pat and that other guy and the guy with two first names, and I was in hog heaven. I love me some politics, particularly when the candidate I’m rooting for has a good night.

The only human contact I had during most of this, actually, was from a Loyal Reader, who emailed me to share the joy. I’m not going to identify this Loyal Reader since those of us who like Obama sometimes have to live with and/or deal with loved ones who favor Senator Clinton, and thus are grouchy and mean all the time.

Oh, JUST KIDDING. That’s what we Obama people do. We kid.

Aside from my personal preference, I’m happy because we’re closer to settling this loooong race, and it’s necessary because John McCain is turning out to be a CRAZY PERSON. I was one of those people who lean left and generally vote for the Democrat, even Dukakis, who liked McCain a lot a decade ago and wished I could prove my integrity by having a chance to vote for him in a Presidential election, assuming he was running against Dukakis (or someone similar). Even last summer, when things looked bleak for him, I thought he was a viable choice for me, particularly considering the fact that the nutcases on the Right hated him so much.

But the more I read and research and learn, the scarier he seems. Not finger-on-the-button scary, but dim-witted scary. Even the multiple position reversals (I believe some people call this flip-flopping) and the ugly pandering and the violent temper don’t bother me as much as the fact that he just doesn’t seem too bright. Or even interested.

Of course, I could just be falling for liberal, pansy, atheistic, America-hating propaganda.

We’ll see. But I have a feeling my summer will be a little more peaceful now that the sides are shaping up. And I can go back to sleep, which is what I do best, of course. That and making really hot chili. Even though I’m still scared of marsupials and McCain.