My mission: recruiting for Obama.

Since Sarah Palin in charge of the U.S. scares the fuck out of me, I've decided to personally ask all my friends who live in or near major swing states to go out and campaign for Obama. I began yesterday with a friend from high school who lives in Tallahassee (she had done a masters degree there and now has a job there), and I think I convinced her; she's going to check out the campaign office there this weekend. She was originally hesitant since it's a very republican area and she thought they just stuck a clipboard in your hand and made you go to every door, but once I explained to her that they actually have you go to houses that have identifiedly voted Democratic in the past to make sure the voters still live there and identify their candidate preferences so they can get out the vote on election day, she was like, "Oh, I'd do that." I forget that most people haven't actually canvassed, so they don't know what it consists of, or how the campaigns have this shit down to a science.

She also said that she loved how Joe Biden's son introduced him during the convention. She felt it was very midwestern, to have someone close to you introduce you because they're close to you, not necessarily because they're some primo bang-up speaker.

Tonight I call friends in Kalamazoo and Lansing, and maybe some of their parents who I know.

I got me some free shit.

Yesterday evening was so nice, I decided to take my bike south for a ride in the evening after I was done with school. Like after a half-hour it got into gang territory, so I turned around on major streets and headed back north towards where I live, and when I was stopped at this one intersection, this older skinny black dude in a stained t-shirt who was hustling the intersection handing out papers to stopped cars came up to me and was like, "Here, take this flier," and I was automatically like, "No," and then he was like, "It's for a soul food restaurant that's just opened up," so I was like, "No way!" and grabbed that flier out of his hand, and then he was like, "Some bread pudding just came out of the oven, want to come and try a sample, we're just five doors down the block?", so I walked out of the intersection with him into the restaurant, and he went back and came out with not a sample of bread pudding, but a full serving, in a plastic bowl with a fork (no whipped cream, though), and I ate it while talking with the well-dressed female manager ("Lakita"), who told me that the dude who gave me the flier was the owner.

If I had had my wallet on me, I would have gotten some chicken and dumplings there for dinner, with a side of greens and another of either mac and cheese or spaghetti, but I didn't, saddly.

Afterwards, I went back to the intersection and had to push a button and wait to go across the street to start heading north again on my bike, and these two hefty black women with big shopping bags who were standing behind me started talking about me and one was like, "See, he pushed the button!", and then when I turned around, they were like, "We waited forever on the other side of the street, we had to look both ways and run to get over here," and then they waited to see if pushing the button worked for getting a walk signal, just standing there looking at the signal with their arms folded.

It was taking a while, so I joked that the button doesn't do shit, it just gives you something to do and make you less nervous while you wait, and they both thought that was funny, and when the walk signal finally did come, one of them was like, "Look, there it is!", and the other was like, "Of course, he pushed the button!", and she kept laughing at what she had said.

2 interactions with black women: bus, post office.

On Sunday I had biked up to see Wall-E, and I biked back to downtown but was too tired to bike all the way back home from downtown, so I tried for the first ever time to use that bikerack on the front of busses where you can strap your bike and take it with you while you ride the bus. I had a little trouble with it, and so I gestured to the bus driver who was a black woman if it looked okay, and she shrugged animatedly and very nicely and said, "It's a new rack, it looks good to me."

Anyhow, after that, like five blocks down, we hit this huge bump, and the driver called down the length of the bus to me, "Still there!"

When I got out,too, I thanked her for her help, and told her that after seeing Wall-E and eating a couple tacos, I didn't feel like biking back home, and she was like, "I understand, that's why the city gives us those racks, I think."

Today, I went to the post office and mentioned to the clerk who was a black woman that I was mailing in my absentee ballot application form, and she started saying how her niece goes to school in Oklahoma and how they don't always count the absenteed ballots there, so her niece has been on the phone already to make sure that'll get done this election season. She then started telling me about her hometown in Alabama where she's from, and held up the lady in back of me.

Joyless hipsters.

It struck me the other day that hipsters are joyless and have no love. Despite their always reading intellectual books, too, they read them not for love of learning, but to know something to hold over the heads of people who don't know it, or to seem intellectual, both of which are about power and appearance and not love of learning.

I went to see WALL-E for $3 at a Mexican discount movie theater up in Hipsterland on Sunday, too -- the hipsters are invading the Mexican neighborhood here -- and I found great joy in how the old Mexican dude who took tickets also made me check my backpacks, which they tend to do at Mexican places to cut down on gun violence. I found it kind of charming, the guy was so nice about it. Later I went to a taqueria down the road where I got a cactus gordita, and enjoyed looking at all the faces of the Mexicans in there, who are always so much more at peace with themselves than the kind of nervous, very discontented hipsters you always see at the bars with minimalist black and red decors and bitchy, lazy waitresses who are too fat for their punkish striped tubetops.

E-mail from my one Dutch friend.

My one Dutch friend was called up by that one Iowa college he had worked for before like a week before classes started to see if he could teach an undergrad course on ancient mexican religions, something he knows nothing about, and so I wrote him to ask how that shit was going, and I heard back from him today:

I know how to pronounce Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl better than they can, and I only had to answer once "I don't know" even though I don't know anything. Students are happy as long as they are entertained, so I give them lots of articles on human sacrifice.

I really admire people who take on a course about which they know absolutely nothing. Academics get so defensive about areas where they're weak, that they oftentimes refuse to engage or learn.