More memories of get-out-the-vote in Iowa:

1) A guy on the bus had a hat saying: "Commes des F*ckdown".

2) As I was leaving the campaign office to stop at a legendary diner before catching my bus back to the city, one volunteer woman came up and tried giving me a $20 bill to treat me to dinner there.

"Please," she was like.

I refused, but she kept insisting, and she was like, "No, you have to, my brother-in-law owns the place, the money stays in the family."

I finally took it, but told her I'd use the leftover money to give the server a nice tip.

"Or buy yourself some junk food for the bus," she was like, "I don't care."

3) At that diner, late on a Sunday night, David Bowie's greatest hits kept playing on repeat.

The guy doing the seating said the cook liked that, and it was always that, or Prince.

4) That same diner had t-shirts for sale for $10; usually they were $20, but there was a fire and the t-shirts suffered minor burns, so they added a commemorative 2014 fire sticker to all the t-shirts and reduced the price to get rid of the stock faster.

5) The rental houses for students were astounding: piles of wet and moldy paper on front porches, beer bottles everywhere in screened-in porches, even one house where all the address numbers were broken off except for a very small bit of the top part of a "2", that was just dangling there by a screw.

6) One house advertised music lessons and guitar repair.  A woman answered the door in a black turtleneck and black beret, with heavy eye makeup like an Egyptian pharaoh.

Memories of get-out-the-vote in Iowa:

1) After I mention that I don't like to start canvassing until 10am, a local Iowa woman said that she's found that esp. true w/fraternity houses.  "It's like, 'Hell-ooooo, are you home yet?'".

2) At one of the 1st apartment complexes I hit, I had to step over vomit on the sidewalk to the door, then the door to the building unlocked...  First door I knocked, one guy answers the door but it's not the guy on the list, then a (short) (built) (hispanic) frat guy in a college t-shirt and tight-whities comes to the door and promises to vote Democratic...

When I tell this to the people back at the canvassing site, the one local Iowa woman is like, "Nice impression of Iowa, huh?".

3) The next day, a (tall) (lanky) (white) frat guy in a colored, patterned long underwear-style shirt answers the door in that and boxers, and also promises to vote Democratic.

4) Another woman at the canvassing site tells of the time that she knocked on a door with the sign "naturalist" taped in the window, and she's thinking to herself, "Nice, this person is in the Audobon Society and Sierra Club", then the door opens and a guy is standing behind it peeking out, and it's clear that he's naked.

She registers him to vote, and gets him to request an absentee ballot.

5) That same woman also said her daughter was canvassing on a college campus in Dubuque at like 11am in the morning, and a frat guy answered the door and propositioned her.

She was like, "No!", then left and walked down the middle of the road, it freaked her out so much.

6) Yet another woman at the canvassing site had a family that was a poster child for the Affordable Care Act:  she lost her job and lost her health care, her son had long-term problems that were considered pre-existing conditions, and her daughter turned out to have an undiscovered long-term health problem going back to a never-recognized birth defect.

All are now covered with manageable insurance and bills.

For a while when she was unemployed and having cash flow problems, though, one of her friends in suburban Chicago was like, "Sell your house."

7) The local Dem office holder who gave me supporter housing said she feels like the college kids she sees nowadays are like throwbacks to the Reagan years.

"Everything was just great, then the 80s came," she was like.  "And it's like we're back then again."

She then added that she was invited in to speak to student govt. leaders on the local college campus, and all of them were wearing business suits at the meeting.

"What's up with that?", she asked someone her age after she left.

"They all do that now," they told her.

Memories of get-out-the-vote in Wisconsin:

1) One old man at the door, after he told me that he had already voted and I thanked him:  "I hope that we can get that son of a bitch out of office."

2) Another old man, after saying he's a Democrat despite his stance against abortion, and decrying how much young people today sleep around:  "Back in my day, it was special.  I tried to get in my wife's pants for the entire 5 years that we dated, but it didn't happen until our wedding night.  And that made a difference."

3) Bartender at the union hall election results-watching party, talking about visiting her parents in the northern part of the state:  "Everywhere you went, there was just Walker signs and only Walker signs, I didn't see a single Burke sign at all.  So I brought some up!".

4) That same bartender said a lot of people supported the governor since their taxes went down - not realizing that the change in their tax bill was because the county had devalued their houses and lowered their property taxes.

5) Another guy at the union hall election results-watching party, talking about the western, rural part of the county:  "There's just no Democratic signs, you think there would be at least one disgruntled farmer somewhere!"

6) At the get-out-the-vote site, I meet a teacher named "Dream".

"My parents were hippies," she was like, after she introduced herself and said her name.

Then, she spoke of how health care reform mattered so much to her, she organized as many as 3 phonebanks a week out of her home to get people to call and rally people to support its passage, and when Obama was speaking at a rally in Green Bay, she and a handful of others were invited to meet him as a big 'thank you' to them for their efforts.

"I'm Dream," she told Obama.

"Yes, I recognize your name," he was like (since he had been informed of her volunteer efforts?).

"My parents were hippies," she shrugged.

"That's cool," Obama was like.  "Mine were too."

Comments made to my undergrad writing class:

1) As I leave them for 5 minutes to complete a short exercise:  "After you try your best on your own, feel free to talk with each other, or take out your cell phone and call your helicopter parents."

2) After a student mentions how arbitrary Greek gods are and is searching for words to describe them:  "Yes, they're kind of a-holes.  Or, since they are Greek, I should say, 'alpha-holes'."

3) In trying to relate to students, I drop Harry Potter references, then later say about a particular writing technique, "It's small but extremely mighty... like a house elf."

4) When that falls somewhat flat with the majority of students, I elaborate, "No, really, we may be from different generations, but I can relate, really I can.  When I was younger, you have no idea how much I was bullied on social media.  The other kids used to send me the nastiest letters by Pony Express."

5) When I pause over the plural of the word "thesaurus", someone says "thesauri", but then I'm like, "No, it's thesauroi," and I write it on the board in Greek.

Later, when someone uses the word "chiasmus", I'm like, "Want me to write that on the board in Greek too?", and someone says yes, so I do.

Still later, after I use the word "appreciation", I'm like, "Should I write that on the board in Greek?", and when someone says yes, I'm like, "But that's not a Greek word, come on, people!".

6) As part of my standard guessing game, I ask students to guess how old I was when I read a particular book, so this time, I asked them how old I was when I read The Thorn Birds (answer: twelve!).

No-one knew what that book was, so I had to explain to them that it was a 1980s trash sensation whose plot was essentially "a woman f*cks a priest in the outback" (substituting "makes love" for "f*cks"), and that it was also a legendary TV movie with Richard Chamberlain as the priest.

"It was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time," I was like.  "Scandalous."

Then, I was like, "Name some other twentieth century pop trash sensations."

"Twentieth century?", one student was like.  "That's hard."

I then wrote "Peyton Place" and "Valley of the Dolls" on the board, and explained that those were pop trash sensations of the 1950s and 1960s that they should know about.

None of the students had heard of them.

First, I pointed at "Peyton Place".

"Written by Grace Metalious," I was like.  "She was a housewife."

Then, I pointed at "Valley of the Dolls".

"The 'dolls' of the title are the pills that the three main women characters pop constantly as their lives decay and become increasingly empty," I was like.  "It was also made into a legendary movie with its theme song sung by Dionne Warwick."

Then, I added, "This is the world you live in, you should know it.  These really are major cultural touchstones, really they are."

Then, again I was like, "Honestly, go ask your parents about The Thorn Birds," I was like.  "See what they say."

Insight: African-American politics with Illinois governor's race.

A (middle-aged) (black) woman who works the library security guard desk who I talk with gave me her perspective on the Illinois governor's race:

1) Gov. Quinn announced he'd try to live 30 days on minimum wage (an announcement he quickly revoked), and she thinks that pissed a lot of (black) voters off.

"It's like, who are you to do that, when I *live* this," she was like.

2) Rauner tried to split the black vote by:

- meeting with (black) voters in highly-publicized meetings.
- getting endorsements from a handful of (black) pastors.
- running late campaign ads w/video footage of legendary (black) mayor Harold Washington shitting on Pat Quinn.

All together, this sowed enough confusion where some (black) people may have voted GOP, but more likely just got a few doubts planted in the heads of enough people and those people decided to just stay home.

. . .

Later I told her that those (black) pastors disgusted me, because they sounded like true whores.

"Not all pastors," I was like, "I mean, just the ones that sell themselves for money.  That's the new line in politics that's dividing constituencies, people who do shit for money and the people who don't."

"I know," she was like, "And I agree.  But I always remembers, God is watching and sees everything.  They may get what they want now, but they won't down the road."

Addendum.

I forgot -

The (older) (ethnically Hungarian) (South American) woman had also been complaining about how conservative the Catholic speakers on campus are, and when I told her how that one speaker had shut me down when I asked about lesbian nuns, she was like, "At the next lecture, you come sit next to me."

I also forgot -

2 times ago in the lecture series, the (hispanic) boyfriend of my one (Asian-Canadian) friend came too, and at the reception afterwards I could see a staff photographer positioning himself to snap a picture of all 3 of us talking.

"More to the right, more to the right, get the epicanthal fold," I said as if I was the photographer voicing his thoughts, as he went to get more of my one (Asian-Canadian) friend in the shot.

"But my skin is brown from every angle," his (hispanic) boyfriend said, a bit uncomfortably and seeming like he was not all cool with the joke, which my one (Asian-Canadian) friend nevertheless found very funny.

Email from a hispanic Hungarian.

The other week at a lecture me and my one (Asian-Canadian) friend ended up sitting next to this older (white) woman from South America who we began chatting with forever, and when we finally traded emails, she asked me how my last name was pronounced, and when she seemed unduly interested, I asked her if she too was Hungarian, and she said yes, and then explained that her parents were Hungarian Jews who came over in the 30s because there weren't restrictions on higher education in the country that they emigrated to.

Then, when she then said her last name, I spelled it correctly out loud, which impressed her even more.

She later sent an email saying hello, and asking me if I spoke any Hungarian; when we talked in person, I had asked her and she said she had spoken some but not in years, but she had never asked me in return.

Interestingly, she closed off her email -

Szérbusz!

- which is the standard greeting "szervusz", but with the v-b confusion that a lot of Spanish-speakers make!

LOL.