I had quite a morning today… I stayed up too late (pursuing Arabic music videos on the Internet) last night, and ended up spending an entire hour lazing in bed listening to my clock radio playing NPR. Normally this might be a guilty pleasure, but they were so gleeful about what they thought was the imminent withdrawal of all the US troops from the Middle East that I found myself extremely irritated, and growing more so… though did I get up? No. I just lay there getting more annoyed. However, once I started arguing with the radio (now and then radio commentary will do this to me), I decided it was time to get up.
I was tired, though, and on the way into work, I think I may have run a red light. I’m not sure, though. I was waiting at the base of a hill for a stoplight (there was no one going in the other direction), and I saw it turn green and the cars around me start moving, but when I pulled through the light (with another car following me), a couple of the stopped cars in the other direction started honking… and looking back in my rearview mirror, I realized that none of the other cars there had begun to drive. That particular light has done this to me before–the cars to my left start to move and, registering green, I move, then catch myself when I realize it’s only a left-turn signal. I probably ran that light. Thankfully no one was legally going through the intersection… and selfishly, I’m thankful too that no police were right there, though if they’d ticketed me for it I really wouldn’t have had any excuse except that I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
Once I got my coffee, though, things started looking up. In the morning meeting, I suggested doing something in a way that saved everyone there a lot of trouble, and they all agreed to go with my way of doing it (and then assigned me the task of developing the presentation–take that for speaking up, captain!). This afternoon passed by super-quickly as I worked on that self-same presentation, doing (if I say so myself) a great job of it. And this evening, when a wild thunderstorm moved through, I noticed it soon enough to roll up the windows of my car and shut the sunroof so that the interior didn’t get yet another dousing.
So maybe an OD on politics in the morning just ruins a few hours of my day. Who knows?
And in the spirit of politics, here’s a cartoon that encapsulates something that I have been baffled by for the past few weeks, too:
Posted by Kjirstin 
