I was later to bed on Friday than I had hoped because of the damn Rockets, who played a late game against the Lakers and did not pull themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves in the first half. My wife was at the game with one of her best friends, so I watched on the couch, eating mediocre pizza and dreading my last shift at the polls before giving up and going to bed at about 11:10.
In my weird congested state, I can’t seem to fully enter the Room of Sleep, the small chamber adjacent to my Waiting Room of Light Sleep, which is where you think you are not asleep while you are actually sleeping. The walls of the Room of Sleep are covered in purple velvet, and the atmosphere is half-gravity and highly oxygenated so that you drift effortlessly, listening to a pleasing, somnolent hum. It is the room you enter during a colonoscopy procedure while experiencing the best drug-induced sleep that you will never have in real life.
By contrast, the Waiting Room of Light Sleep is your bedroom. And you turn and turn like trapped in a revolving door that once entered has no openings, just glass walls showing you the better places you cannot visit.
At 5:30, the revolving door deposited me where I started, my bed, and I got up to shower and prepare for the day ahead.
And what a day.
The best way I can describe it right now (at 12:43 a.m. on my sleepless Sunday morning) is to draw a comparison to my former posting. In 38 hours spread out over four days of early voting in a municipal election, we processed about 800 voters and I had four hours of lunch and no manual labor. On Saturday, I worked from 6:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. with a thirty minute lunch break, processing nearly 2000 voters and then spending an additional hour breaking down and completely storing the voting room into secure storage.
It was like going from handing out towels at a sleepy beach club to working the line at a Vegas buffet. Like going from dropping your kid off at school to driving the neighborhood school bus. Like playing a friendly home game of poker then finding yourself in Day One of the WSOP Main Event.
You get the picture.
It just started right away and never stopped. I rotated every two hours to a different station and got to take lunch at 12:00, which is when I reloaded all of my waning meds and snarfed a couple of chicken salad croissants and some Fritos before returning to the crowd at 12:30 and not letting up again until the door closed at 7:00 p.m.
We had two supervisors at this location, both of whom were wonderful friendly people who had worked together at this precinct for twenty-plus years. They were both addicted to the adrenaline of elections, problem-solving with ease and grace amidst the swirling chaos. They were funny and charismatic and committed to the job and the highest examples of public service to practical democracy. Donald Trump could accuse them of corruption and it would be so utterly implausible that a giant abyss of truth would open up underneath him and swallow him whole.
It also rang completely true when one of them said, “We get people trained and broken in just the way we like them and then they leave us for other precincts.” Well, yeah. Eventually, just like people decide that working for the bomb squad is what has been making their hands shake, and they open a yoga studio instead.
I haven’t decided yet whether I will go back and work with these two in future elections. They said they liked me and my good humor, so they may ask me back. But I kind of wish I could work with them in smaller measures.
It’s now 1:15. I know I’m not in the WRoLS because I have not yet been diagnosed with sleepblogging, which is not to say that it is impossible, just mostly unlikely, because it would probably look like hdhdhrjrurjid ywgwhdjajiddj hJjeehwhaj whsgdhdjoeleo so no, not yet.
But no major plans tomorrow other than self-care and contemplation of things to come in May. I hope I am well-rested, finally.
No comments:
Post a Comment