More post-campaign etc.: Wake-up.

Because I work so late, I can get hyped and then end up staying up late till like 3 or 4am.

One night I did that and went to bed like four-thirty (!), and then the munchkin upstairs was loud a few times in the morning and I got woken up like two to three times, once for more than an hour, so I got up and set my alarm from like eleven-thirty to like one, since I thought that that would be a reasonable time to let me recoup some sleep.

Then, I'm lazing around in bed, and I think I should just get up anyways, and I turn my eyes to the clock, and it's like 5:04pm.

At that, I start and go up and lean forward so I can look out my bedroom door and see a digital clock in the next room.

It was also like 5pm there.

"Fuck," I thought to myself, and I realized that I must have slept through my alarm.

Later, I was trying to figure out how that happened and I realized that I must have been more tired than I had thought, and that although it was like twelve-and-a-half hours between when I first went to sleep and when I decisively got up, what with all the sleep disruptions I had I had probably gotten something like eleven hours of sleep, which isn't really all that out of the ordinary, though the time that I got up was.

Still, it was freaky, and I was freaked out for all that evening afterwards.

Surprisingly, though, I went to sleep at a decent time and I also got up at a decent time the next day, so I think that although I had all that sleep, I was still in need of some more, which is why I could get to bed at a reasonable time after getting up so late that morning (day? afternoon?).

Post-campaign etc.: Phone call.

After the campaign, I went back to work right away, and on my days off I was staying at home cleaning up my apartment in order to close off that stuff so I can go and focus on my writing.

Then, one day as I was headed into work on the subway, I get a call from a local number, and I answer.

It was the secretary for the local printer who had done all my printing for me!

They were wondering how I was doing.

Isn't that sweet of them?

The funny part is, is that I had been meaning to stop by that week when I was out running errands.

And, I did.

A sign of my aging.

I've heard "Bodak Yellow" a few times, once in the company of some young twenty-somethings who were really getting into it and saying all the words to it along with the song.

To tell the truth, I just don't get it, I really just don't.

At first I thought maybe it was the lyrics or something and you had to hear it again, but I've heard it again, and I just don't get it.

I'm almost like one of those old people who are like, "This is music?".
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It makes you realize that music critics who can stay real and stay current are a rare breed, and I'm not that.

Rest home entertainment.

The other week at the rest home, I was going down a hallway between errands, and there in a seat was one of my (Ethiopian) coworkers watching something on her smartphone on her downtime.

Since I could take a few minutes and chat, I said hi and asked her what she was watching.

"A movie," she was like, pausing the movie on her smartphone and straightening up in the chair that she had been slouching in.

"An Ethiopian movie?", I was like.

"Yes," she was like.

"Like a thriller, drama, romance, what?", I was like.

"Romance," she was like.

I then asked if I could see it, and she turned it back on.

There was this (fatter) (Ethiopian) guy who was the hero, and he was in a store looking at jewerly.

"He's buying a gift for his wife," she was like.

Then in the next scene, there was a (younger) (hip) (Ethiopian) woman at a restaurant doing girltalk with a friend, and then the guy shows up and gives her the present, and she's happy.

Then, they cut to another scene, and there was all these (young) (Ethiopian) guys around a pool table playing pool inside a restaurant, smoking and talking and putting their cigarette packets in their shirt pockets when they have to go make a shot.

At that, she paused.

"That's it," she was like.  "You like?".

Rest home dream: Weird soundtrack.

The other night I dreamnt -

I'm at the resthome over down by the lobby, and I suddenly realize that Sia's Christmas album is playing as background music.

"That's weird," I think to myself.

And then...

I wake up.

Rest home jigsaw puzzle.

The other night towards the end of shift, all the work was done and stuff was getting slow, so me and my one (Mexican) coworker both ended up in the newspaper room doing the jigsaw puzzle.

We were getting a lot done and there was just one quadrant left, but then she was like, "We have to go in ten minutes, tonight we will not finish."

I then joked that I'd clock out and then come back and finish up the jigsaw puzzle.

She got a kick out of that and chuckled some.

Weird self-realization.

I've been doing a post-mortem on my campaign on and off, and I've been realizing that I had a potential coalition and the fairly right issues to run on and I'm not a bad candidate, but it really came down to the $ necessary to scale up, and it's hard to even see how I could get to some dollar amount where I could put together the sustainable, sizable, costly operation that I realize in retrospect that I needed, and that couldn't be replaced by any amount of in-house work (vs. consultants) or innovative outreach (vs. the standard expensive stuff).

I don't have money and I work weird hours. And, people like me but I don't have rich friends (the kind who can donate $1-3K). And, I know people in labor and community organizing, but I'm not a tried-and-true person who an organization would automatically recognize as such and bank on with money or volunteers. And, *maybe* I could have fundraised just enough to hire a staffer who could harness the random folks I know into a sustainable operation, but what would that have even looked like at the time in terms of fundraising and breaking through into sustainability, etc. etc.

And, amidst all of this, I realized that my campaign repristinated my PhD experience: 

No amount of talent and work can substitute for money and the right kind of connections, and without them a person has very little room for error (if the possibility of advancement ever really existed at all).

Crazy, isn't it?

I kind of realized that the other night at the end of shift at my one job when some supportive assisted living co-workers were telling me that maybe I could hit a lot of people like them up for more money next time, or maybe I could save money for a few years for my next campaign, and I had to tell them that it was just a different level of money.

It's like once during my doctoral program when I was trapped financially and others were passing me by, and my mom told me that she and my dad could give me $2,000, so I could finish my dissertation.

Like academia, politics is not really accessible to me, though I can go through the motions to a certain point, and most people don't see the difference at all and I didn't even, not till late in the game or even afterwards.