Get Out the Vote Day 1

I actually got home early today, and thanks to Daylight Savings, I have a few minutes to write an update (and just to be clear, by “early” I mean around midnight).

All I really have to say is: Being in the field is awesome!  Granted, I am exhausted, and my legs hurt from standing all day, and I had to drink four shots of espresso (altogether, not at one time) to make it through the day… but I had fun, and I felt like I was accomplishing something all day.  I’ve been assigned to be a Canvass Coordinator for a staging location near U Penn (in the University City neighborhood of Philly, so near where I am staying).  A staging location, for those who don’t know the jargon, is where canvassers and phone bankers come to be put to work.  It differs from an office in that it is only open for GOTV, and it’s set up solely to move people through as quickly as possible.  To that purpose, there are no chairs anywhere in the office – we want people to come in, get trained, and go out, not to sit around.

As Canvass Coordinator, I am one of a couple people training volunteers on what to say and how to record their results.  I also replenish packs of literature for them to take with them, answer questions, etc.  It’s fun, if slightly repetitive, and I think a good position for me as I’m pretty good at explaining stuff and also energtic and upbeat (at least when I am pumped full of caffeine and GOTV adrenaline).  We had an amazing day – our office sent out volunteers to knock over 3,000 doors, and the state as a whole knocked on around 900,000 doors, which is almost three times what we did in the entire last weekend.  It’s game time.

I landed in a good place.  The people I’m working with are mostly Penn students, who have stopped going to class.  They’re smart and fun and super organized.  Our office runs very efficiently.  When I left – early! – tonight we had everything laid out for tomorrow, so all we have to do is get there and start handing out packets to our volunteers.  It’s a lot of work, but there’s a lot of excitement, so it doesn’t feel as arduous as I thought it would.  It’s possible that I’m just coasting on the first day high and will crash tomorrow, but I’m going to bed now and will actually sleep a decent amount, so fingers crossed tomorrow is another good day.

(I like how this was supposed to be a short note.  I am incapable of writing just a little.)

Three days!

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.

three worlds, one day

I woke up this morning in New Jersey, spent a lazy half hour reviewing my dreams, thinking about a story I am working on, and generally drifting in and out of reality. I took a shower. I read the front section of the New York Times. It was too hot to read in the greenhouse, where my grandparents usually eat dinner, an airy glass room off the study with wicker chairs and two passionflowers currently on the vine.

Near the end of the front section, my grandmother came in and we discussed the use of her car. With a little negotiation about how she would complete her errands, she agreed that I could use it to come to Philadelphia if I wanted to. I checked on housing: I have a place to stay tonight and tomorrow, at the least. Nothing was holding me back. So I packed a bag, and I drove to Philadelphia.

The second world was the Obama state office. This is not the office that people can walk into – or the one I originally walked into. This is the serious office where the serious business of running the Pennsylvania campaign goes on; that is, it is the office where everyone is very very stressed out and has a Blackberry. I am being overdramatic – there are lots of young, cool people – but it felt very different from the environment I have been in, or even from a work environment in California. Everyone just has too much to do and not enough time or brains to do it – which is why I am here. So I stayed until 10 pm and then snuck off (my boss, the Youth Vote coordinator, just emailed me at 12:30).

I got half-lost on the way home and called my host for directions. He directed me home but added that he was going to see some Brazilian music that was on my way if I was interested. I was feeling exhausted and wound up, and I thought: a drink and some music might be nice. The music was upstairs in a bar – an Ethiopian restaurant was downstairs. The upstairs space was tiny, with the musicians crammed into a corner, a little bar, and four or five tables. There were probably fewer than 30 people in the room total. It was dark and the walls were painted dark pinkish red, with white Christmas lights and funny signs hung around them. The people looked like those I would encounter in the Mission (in San Francisco): a collection of overgrown beards and skinny jeans, thrift store dresses and funky earrings. I squeezed into the back, by the fan, and watched the white twenty-something musicians sway and shimmy and sing. My host showed up a little later, and knew everyone at the bar, but made a point of chatting with me and introducing me around.

This host is a friend of a friend, and they (there are three roommates) have an extra room in their house – filled almost completely with a double bed. I am staying here for a few days at least, and he said that I could make this my home base though they had other people coming once in a while and I might have to shift around. He left me a public transit map, and a schedule of events at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (he is a photographer, and obviously embedded in the indie art scene). I think I will like to be here, swinging between the intensity of the campaign and the different intensity of a new city, a new place to explore.

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.