Election 2004

I have to say that I miss the overkill in the media of the American election. If I was in Canada I would be making plans to go to a friend's house on Tuesday night to watch the results. We would watch the map of the states become slowly coloured in blue and red - blue along the coasts and red in one big swath across the middle. Kind of representative of the socio-economic status of the entire country.

It's well-known that Canadians have a keen interest in American politics. Our economic well-being is, for better or worse, dependent on the US and for that reason, we take an interest in their politics.

I've missed the emails that would circle around from a few politically-minded coworkers and friends with links to articles in both the international press and alternative web sites. I miss the political jokes that would also make the rounds. I really miss The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Checking out the Comedy Central web site is not the same at all. Funny, if I was back home, I would be crying enough already. Watching it from afar is not nearly as fun. On Tuesday night I'll be going to bed just as the first results start rolling in. By the time I wake up, it will all be over.

I distinctly remember in 2000 watching the election at my friend's place. Gore just won Florida, which meant he won the election. I got home, flicked on the TV as I was getting ready for bed, and in the time it took me to drive home from my friend's house, the state of Florida was now coloured red instead of blue. I was up watching nearly all night. What came out in the following days was even more interesting, but what was shocking was the reaction of the American people. What would have caused full-scale riots in countries such as Bolivia and Venezuela, was not even registering in the US with anything more than a shrug of the shoulders. It has since become clear that the Republican party stole the last presidential election. Will it happen again?

I'll be thinking about you all on Tuesday night as I go to bed. It won't be the same reading about it the next morning on cbc.ca. My bosses at work are pro-Republican so I can't even discuss this with them. I'll have to wait for the email discussions. Again, not nearly as much fun as sitting up watching it with friends and discussing it at work the next morning over coffee.

Just a side note on my bosses. They are only pro-Republican because the head of the company I work for is. They are the biggest sycophants I have ever met in my entire life. I have avoided political discussion with them but I have had to correct them a couple of times because what came out of their mouths was so completely erroneous, I couldn't let it slide. Like when they said Clinton did nothing for foreign policy (but Bush did??). What about the Good Friday accord, which had to do with, uh, Ireland. Or the Middle East peace process. Let's put it this way, the one woman doesn't have any pictures of her husband on her desk, but she has four pictures of the head of the company I work for as well as the book he's written. I was warned about calling it 'the shrine' in front of too many people, but that's what it looks like.

For those of you in the US, vote wisely.

Some links that I have been looking at the last couple of days:
http://www.theonion.com/election2004/
http://www.thestranger.com/current/
http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/

All That You Can't Leave Behind

This post is dedicated to Bono because of my shameless use of his lyrics in this post.

I haven't written in awhile, and a lot has happened in the past couple of months. The job has gotten a lot better. It's gotten really busy for me at work, I get a buzz from what I'm doing, and I think I can do a lot with this job. Thing is, I'm wavering on Dublin as a whole. It's no secret that I'm not in love with the place, even though I have found some compelling elements about it. To quote a former boss, "I'm just not jazzed about it" (the city this time, not the job).

For a while I started to think that I would stay here a couple more years. As the visit from my parents approached, I even thought that I was crazy to go home at Christmas. I mean, what was I thinking? I hate Christmas. It's the worst time of year to go. There are so many things that I want to do and see over those two weeks and I won't be able to do half of them because of the holidays. Friends will be off seeing their own families, and the shops will be crazy, so shopping will suck. I also need to schedule dental, optometrist and hair appointments, renew my driver's license and get a new health card. That's not easy to do over the holidays either. I should have arranged to go somewhere warm and non-Christian over the holidays and visited Canada in October instead.

Now, part of me wishes that I was coming home for good over Christmas. I don't know when this changed for me. It seems like it was overnight. I know part of it was when the weather changed, and all of a sudden it was very cold out every day. I have even started wearing a scarf. It gets dark really early here and winter is generally damp and dreary. I now leave for work and come home in the dark, and we haven't even changed the clocks back yet.

I also know that another part of it was when a friend came to visit a couple of weeks ago. It's always great having visitors from home. Even though everyone here speaks English (though that might be debatable), only those from home really speak your language. The friend that visited was more a friend of my old flatmate than my friend, but it turned out that we got on like wildfire and it's safe to say that I have made a new friend out of the visit.

I have been really homesick this past week, the first time I've been this homesick since the spring. I realized that my friends are starting to drift. I've been warned that this happens around the nine-month mark. A lot of people have difficulty keeping up correspondence, and I'm as guilty as anyone. If you want to get a letter, you have to write one, and I've been awful this year.

However, the biggest thing that I've been homesick about is that I have no support system over here. It's something that I think I always took for granted because my family is just so solid. Many of my friendships were slow to develop, and as a result, my social support network snuck up on me. Now that I don't have that support of friendship locally, and it is something that I really needed this past week, I realise just how important it is, and how much it means to me.

Question is, am I ready to go home? The move back home would be really difficult. I wouldn't have a job and since I've only been at my latest job for 2.5 months, and temped the rest of the time I was here, I don't have a lot to show on my CV. If I could stick it out for a year, I would be doing a lot better career-wise. If I could stick it out two years, I would be laughing. I don't know if I want to though. I'm not sure being without my friends and family would be worth it in the long run.

In the immortal words of Bono, "you're on the road, but you've got no destination…", or maybe it's better to say, "you got stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it". At what point is it a zen moment of not knowing if you’re staying or leaving, and not really caring either way, and at what point is it just inertia?

Can you tell I was listening to U2 while writing this?