Election Day in America, continued

I’ll admit I didn’t see the value of CNN after they said Clinton “won” the debate in 2015 against Bernie Sanders and that lesser known third candidate from Maryland. When clear screenshots documented the watchers’ survey on CNN that 96% thought Bernie won, but CNN published Clinton as the winner the next day, I wondered: can anyone actually win a debate? CNN wasn’t reporting what viewers believed won the debate, but rather were a mouthpiece for whom they were supporting. I consider CNN a viable news source, with reputability in its name, but didn’t trust it to reflect what really happened.

I pretty much wrote off CNN for five years until after Election Day 2020. What turned me in particular is the vote count where Wolf Blitzer and John King interview local politicians and vote counters with ongoing vote counts in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania. They work with a touch screen and pull up a box with Trump and Biden’s pictures on them to write in the tally when a vote count or vote dump comes in, and next to Biden’s tally King writes the percentage of votes he’s won. Biden only had to get 56% of incoming votes, but was far surpassing that at a clip of 60-70% and, as was repeated through the wee hours of the mornings following November 4th, 2020, this feels like Christmas Eve for a little kid.

Earlier this morning, Georgia has Biden leading by 1,000 votes, where earlier they had Trump leading, and within the past hour, Pennsylvania’s got Biden in the lead by 5,000 some off votes. I still strongly believe that the Electoral college is a bygone, backwards thing that must be dismantled.

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11/03/2020

I was waiting for my boyfriend to get ready for our walk the other day, and as I was channel surfing through the TV stations I changed it to a movie I’d seen running before but didn’t think twice about actually watching. It’s a movie with an actress that I’m not a huge fan of, but it had a rating of 84% approval, and, more importantly, there were only 15 minutes left until the end, so I figured, why not kill some time?

The footage was grainy, slightly overexposed in certain scenes, and awful. A family was driving in a car with a woman complaining about how there were no good memories, except for when her daughter was three and was looking outside through the window of a house they used to live in, and said, “Mother, don’t you just love every day?” And then a girl piped up from the back seat and said, “that was me!” This mother seemed like a sick woman. Wearing a wig and flabbergasted that there were no good memories, worried that she could not make any new good ones.

No spoilers, but this movie had me bawling my eyes out by the end of the film, and one of those cries where you’re not able to quite catch your breath because all your lung capacity is a process of pushing out the pent up emotion that has become tightness, a sort of constriction pulled over your sternum holding in things you thought you’d be better off trying to conceal or minimize by showing no reaction to. Sometimes things blow over and other times they allow you to release.

The term “zero-day” refers to a newly discovered software vulnerability. Because the developer has just learned of the flaw, it also means an official patch or update to fix the issue hasn’t been released.

us.norton.com

After I wrote this entry, I was looking for the finished title. I usually fly a working title first, one that is a sort of throw away first draft that I can improve on once the words have settled. I first had the day of, which is because today is voting day and there are things that I have already revealed too much in it, so then I started to think about zero day, and how I have felt for so long that holding things in is a way to conserve a part of myself, or to hide in order to save myself from exposure.

The longer I live the more I learn that exposing those things – your feelings and true self – is one of the most difficult things to do. I think about how this is the last year of my 30’s and how long life has been for me being middle aged. I like to think about transformation and how starting a new habit or living differently would be radical, or at least more compelling than what has become comfortable and made me soft. William Faulkner wrote, “It’s always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.” The longer I live the more I think how picking away little by little on those automatic behaviors is the only thing I can change.

Today is voting day. In less than an hour, I’ll wake up for the day and appear at my voting place. I’ll wait in line wearing my mask and then the deed will be done, and I can go about my day knowing I did what I could to impose change the only way I can, by showing up and representing myself.