Voter Registration

Today was the last day to register to vote in Pennsylvania.  The official numbers are not in yet, data has yet to be entered, but unofficially, tallied up over the phone with all the Regional Field Directors from around the state…we registered almost 200,000 people.

!!!

To give that number some perspective: Kerry won Pennsylvania by 140,000 people in 2004.

My personal contribution to that number was somewhere around 10-15.  Not huge, but something.  I am happy and proud of everyone on the Obama team here.  We’re going to win this thing just this way: by being out there, by being passionate, by being annoying sometimes, by asking over and over again, by dragging every single one of these new voters to the polls come Election Day.  We’ll win this thing.

my (un)mysterious illness, and navigating the healthcare system uninsured

I haven’t been writing this week because I have been sick, and in case I had some terrible chronic illness, decided I did not want to chronicle it on the internet.  However, since I’ve now been to see a doctor, and there is a medical record out there documenting these symptoms, I don’t think blogging about it is going to ruin my future with the insurance industry.  Also, it turns out I have allergies.

Allergies, you say?  How could you mistake such a thing for a terrible chronic illness?  Isn’t it kind of obvious when you have allergies? Apparently not.  Or not to me anyway.

All of this started last Wednesday when I woke up feeling like I should not have woken up.  I was exhausted, despite getting 8 hours of sleep, and felt dizzy.  I went to work as usual, but had to keep apologizing all day for my stupidity.  As I described it to a coworker, I felt like in the Sims (which, if you never played it, involved creating characters and having them walk around the house doing things to earn energy, health, wealth, and happiness points) when the characters run out of energy and fall asleep wherever they are standing.  I felt completely drained.

Thursday morning, I dragged myself out of bed, and sat at the kitchen table feeling dizzy and exhausted… and then I went back to bed.  I slept for a couple hours, hauled myself out of bed again, and decided to go into the office.  By the time I got there, I was once more seeing everything through a blur.  I could focus – but it required effort on my part.  I stayed at work for a couple hours and then went home and slept for 11 hours.  I spent Friday, Saturday, and most of the day yesterday in bed.  I could get up to eat, each day I made sure to get out of the house at least for a quick walk, but my symptoms remained – I felt exhausted no matter how much I slept, and dizzy if I pushed myself at all.

By Saturday I was a little scared.  There are a lot of possible causes for “fatigue” (other than not sleeping) and most of them are at least a little worrisome.  On top of that, I have no health insurance, and no doctor in Philadelphia.  On Saturday I started looking up free clinics, but they were all closed for the weekend, so I spent another couple days imagining permanent disability scenarios and trying to distract myself by watching movies on Hulu, which worked except when it started to hurt to look at the screen and I had to just lie there with my eyes closed, worrying.  I really have way too vivid of an imagination.

This morning I went in to one of Philadelphia’s city clinics, which happens to be nearby where I am staying.  I waited for 20 minutes, and then they told me their walk-in slots were full for the morning, and I could make an appointment… but to do so I would have to prove that I lived in Philadelphia.  Unless they were willing to take the New Yorker as a reference, that was not a possibility.  I walked home freaked out and despairing.  I found another clinic online that isn’t too far away and called; to be a patient, they had to do a full physical, and couldn’t schedule one until November.  I started panicking, and asked where I could go, and they said that I could go in as an acute patient walk-in.  Off I went.  I signed in at the clinic – in both clinics I was the only white patient and very aware of the fact that I am a visitor in the land of no-health-insurance, and not a permanent resident, which was a strange feeling.  After a few minutes the nurse pulled me aside and told me that they could not see me because I needed to have a physical, and could I wait until next Monday?  I broke down into tears.  At this point I was on the edge of a panic attack; helplessness is my least favorite feeling, and five days of feeling unable to do anything had definitely worn on me.  Add to that growing numbers of obstacles preventing me from seeing a doctor and getting fixed, and I fell apart.

Luckily, tears did the trick.  The nurse found a doctor, and some tissues, and the doctor said in fact they could see me as an acute patient, even though I did not have a file.  I took some deep breaths, stopped shaking, and went to fill out the paperwork.

How strange to sit down and tell someone that I have no income, and try not to feel shame.  I know that I am doing something worthwhile; but at the moment, having given up health insurance, and a well-paying job, surrounded by people who haven’t had the privileges of education and access that I have had, who didn’t choose to be there, I felt ashamed of myself.  Little white girl running off to save the world, cutting in line at the clinic with a few panicked tears.

Anyway, it was only $20 to see the doctor, and she pronounced pretty quickly that I have allergies.  Even though I haven’t felt congested, she said my ear canal was plugged, and my nose was blocked up.  The ear canal explains the dizziness, and the fatigue could be caused by bad sleep (even if I feel like I’m sleeping a lot, I could actually be sleeping badly because it’s hard to breath) or by my immune system releasing some kind of chemicals that make me feel tired so that I will rest and it can fight off the allergens (so says the internet anyway).  She prescribed me a steroidal nasal spray, and gave me some children’s Claritin, which is all they had on hand.  Hopefully these things will fix me in the next couple days.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the whole experience.  On the one hand: I will be a lot more conscious about giving up health insurance in the future.  You’d think I’d have learned that lesson already, with all the health problems I have had this year, but somehow it did not quite sink in until Saturday, when I started panicking about the fact that I could not just go to the doctor. (Though, in reality, I know that if I need to go, and couldn’t afford to, my family would step in and help me out, which again, sets me apart from a lot of the other people in that clinic today.)

On the other hand: this reinforces to me the importance of this election, and the importance of electing Obama.  McCain’s “spending freeze” would definitely affect all the people getting primary health care in government sponsored clinics, and the people on Medicaid and Medicare.  His plan for taxing employer-sponsored insurance would throw even more people off the insurance rolls.  Obama may have a hard time of it, in the current financial climate, but I know he will at least push to improve the state of healthcare in this country, so that no one needs to worry about whether they can go to the doctor.  So I’m glad I’m here, even if it hasn’t been very fun the last few days; as long as I can get back to work tomorrow, it will be worth it.

5 quick notes on Sarah Palin

There are a lot of things to say about the new Republican VP pick, but I think they have all been said by lots of other people. I’ll quickly summarize my views:

1. She’s scary (see: stories about her church)
2. Living in semi-proximity to Russia doesn’t mean you have foreign policy experience
3. The lack of a vetting process scares me even more than Palin herself – goes to show how McCain makes decisions (ie rashly)
4. As a woman, I am offended that the McCain camp thinks women will vote for him just because he placed someone with XX chromosomes on the ticket
5. Regarding the “media bias” against Sarah Palin, all I can say is that the Republicans have made hypocrisy into a fine art. John Stewart shows it best:

the power of the internet

One of my friends was looking for websites that laid out why Clinton supporters should now support Obama. As it turned out, she couldn’t find any. Instead, she created one.

http://www.beyondhillary.com/

Beyond Hillary gives easy-to-follow comparisons of the policies advocated by Clinton, Obama, and McCain, and addresses many issues of concern to Hillary supporters. I think it’s a great site and you should send it to any Clintonite friends who are wavering about their support for Obama!

Personally, I love that I have friends who will see a lack like this and fill it. Good work!

success!

Today, I worked for Barack Obama. Okay, so my work consisted of merging spreadsheets and making contact lists, but in some small way, it will help Barack Obama be elected president. Hurrah!

Yesterday I went to Philadelphia to visit a friend of mine (whom I met while going door-to-door for the DNC in 2004). We talked for hours, I met her boyfriend, saw their adorable red-brick house, and slept on their futon. This morning, after getting coffee, I went to Obama HQ.

I was a little nervous, the way you (or at least I) get before any meeting with people you don’t know. Even though I was going to offer them my help, free of cost, I had butterflies at the thought of walking into a strange environment. The door to the office was covered with “Welcome! Come on in!” signs though, so that helped.

Of course my fears were unfounded. A young woman inside welcomed me and I explained that I wanted to work a few days a week, and I was pretty open to doing anything. She called someone and then told me that the Youth Vote campaign really needed help, and she took me to the state headquarters (the location is a secret so that it doesn’t get overwhelmed by people wanting to give campaign officials their feedback). There I was immediately put to work making contact lists, which took me longer than it should have – I have forgotten how to use Excel. My boss was obviously overwhelmed; every task and conversation she had over the two hours period I was sitting at a desk with her was interrupted multiple times. Before she ran off (late) to a meeting, she told me that going forward I could take charge of a mini-project, or several, or I could just come in and do admin, whatever worked better for me. Real work! Hurrah! It’s interesting too, she’s organizing college and high school campuses, which is great fun – lots of enthusiastic volunteers, lots of opportunity to make an impact.

When I went in to the office I was thinking that I could go to Philadelphia a few days a week, and then spend the other days in New Jersey. The problem is that I don’t have a car, so getting back and forth is a big pain and expense. Plus, there’s really not that much to do for the campaign near my grandparents’ house (and New Jersey is not a swing state, so the work here is a little less urgent). So instead I’m going to try to find supporter housing in Philadelphia and just stay there (maybe with jaunts to NY or NJ for weekend visits, if I have time). They clearly have a lot I could help with there, and Philadelphia seems like a cool city. I just need to find a place to live where the occupants don’t mind me using the kitchen, so I can keep expenses to a minimum.

The moral of the story is: go to the office. I have been sending my resume and emailing everywhere, but everyone is too busy to reply. The way to get involved is just to be there. So now I need to be in Philadelphia.

they say san francisco is strange

I always forget how otherworldly my grandparents’ house is. Not just their house: their whole lives. I went to the tennis club today to watch a tournament between students from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. (And when I say “the tennis club” I mean one of the oldest lawn tennis and cricket clubs in the United States.) Whites (white clothes that is) are required on all courts. All of the spectators under thirty (there weren’t many) were elaborately pretty and well-dressed. Whenever I spoke about the campaign to any of my grandmother’s friends, my grandmother reminded me to keep my voice down, because we were in enemy territory. In short: I have left an urban land of hipsters and hippies for a suburban land of wealthy WASPs.

The weather is glorious here though: seventy-eight degrees, low humidity, blue skies forever. I wish this was the beginning of my vacation rather than two months in – it’s a perfect place to rest and relax. As it is, I am ready to find myself some occupation. I emailed the New Jersey Obama field director, and hope he will tell me where to go. When the subject of my volunteer-search comes up, my grandmother reels off a list of people who have some connection to the campaign, however tenuous. It just takes time to contact these people, and everyone is busy, and will get back to me later. I am trying to hold in my impatience. There is work to be done, somewhere nearby. I’ll find it.

if only I could see the future

So the reason I am in New Jersey at the moment, instead of, say, on Monday, is that I was trying to go to a Camp Obama training session, which I was told would put me on track for a campaign job. The training was Friday and Saturday, and I signed up too late – but wasn’t sure that I was too late until after I had booked my ticket. Now I am here, untrained.

Tonight, just when I was about to go to bed, I received an email from the Obama campaign inviting me to Camp Obama… in California. They are now holding fifteen or so of these trainings, on the West Coast. Argh. If you go to a training, they then send you to a swing state. So I applied, anyway – I guess nowadays flying across the country is no big deal – but I feel very silly. Every step I take seems to be in the wrong direction these days.

In other encouraging news, a friend of a friend sent me a long email about where I should apply for campaign jobs, including possibly Florida (their offices opened late because of the primary issues). I submitted a resume to the national campaign also, just in case they are randomly hiring (which apparently does happen). Fingers crossed something works out.

EDIT: I almost forgot – Biden looks like the VP (still no text message though! boo Obama campaign!) I am OK with this choice though not super excited. I think Biden balances out Obama’s inexperience with foreign policy/McCain’s experience. I also think that Biden is good at attacking Republicans (remember how he dismantled Giuliani with the “noun, verb, and 9/11″ thing?) Both of those are good things. But he is a little conservative in other ways for my tastes, and he has a tendency to say really stupid things. So I am OK but not ecstatic. That’s fine – I was ecstatic when Barack won the nomination, and one super exciting person on the ticket is enough.