Nablopomo Day 4

In which our hero stays glued to CNN for the evening, watching the election, and constantly feeling like “How are they going to steal it this time?”  Spoiler alert for those of you who TiVoed it: It wasn’t stolen, and Yes, They Did.

I’m not feeling 100% today.  Little sore throat, a tiny headache in the side of my neck (?) but other than that a good day.  Hard to complain when the good guys win, for once, though, woohoo!

Oh, and just in case you’re American, and voted, and felt like it didn’t matter much?  Mr. Saul Williams would like to have a word with you (hat tip to DreamPepper) about the whole idea of history.

Click here for more videos from Vote For Change

My fave piece from this video is this chunk:

Dear History,
You are behind us and we are no longer looking back. We are standing on the threshold of new times, new days, new worlds, and charging forward without battle cry or trumpet, while cynicism, apathy, and cowardice take their place beside you, behind us.

Also, the HipHop-For-Thinkie-Types guy over at Ill Doctrine had some smooth stuff to say about voting, ’cause you’d feel like a real heel if you have to tell your children you sat at home the night Obama almost won.

What else?  Today I figured out how to make Ubuntu perform badly on a network.  Seems like the sort of thing one should avoid, but in this case it’s something we’re TRYING to create.  Some “real world” networking stuff is needed to see what our all-multiplayer-online games are like when you don’t have $50,000 worth of networking gear between you and the server.  I’ve been using Ubuntu as my surfing box for a year or so now, but it’s nice to actually have to learn something at work with it.  Makes me push that much harder/faster to figure out how to make it do something I want to do.  Good times.  No, really, I enjoy that.

Now we’re watching the Daily Show’s Indecision 2008 thing, and it’s sorta surreal to see them doing their show while they don’t KNOW whether or not it’s all going to go wrong.

Had a bad parental teamwork moment this evening.  On Tuesdays, Arwen takes Ripley to his HipHop Dance class at the West End Community Center, and they get home a little before 6, so I assembled the crazy natchos extremeganzo that Arwen made some time today and chucked them into the oven to melt.  Sat around for a bit, kinda chilling, and trying to figure out if I needed to drink some coffee.  Ripley hits the door at a run, which is his usual thing, and Arwen’s right behind him and Tate’s… Tate is uh…

Tate’s still at daycare.  The sound of a car crash happens in my head.

I bolt out the door, haul ass to the daycare place (thankfully it’s actually ON THE BLOCK) and arrive at the door to see another parent picking up their kid, and there’s Tate with his jacket on, and his backpack on, looking out the glass door, and most of the lights in the place are out, and it’s dark outside, and my heart breaks.

I mean, I was there before six, and if it’d been another five minutes they would have phoned us and said “Um hellew?” and so it’s not like he was sitting alone in the dark for an hour or anything, but omiGOD did he seem small and uncertain about the world, and maybe this daddy guy doesn’t have a freakin’ *clue* what he’s doing.

Maybe the second or youngest kid feels like they don’t get as much attention, but they also don’t usually have to see the parents screw up quite as much.  We usually have our act together way more than that, which is probably part of why it hurt to see him looking so little and scared.

I carried him home, hugging him, and telling him “No matter what, every time, mommy or daddy will come get you.”

He was sad for a bit, but by the time we got home (less than a block, remember) he was all good.  I wanted to barf all over my socks for the next 20 minutes.

It reminded me of the day we had a largish (for Vancouver) earthquake.  Like, things FELL DOWN and stuff in Seattle collapsed, and you could actually watch the Internet re-route around damaged areas, just like it’s designed to (I’ll tell you all a neat story about *that* some time).  This was before Ripley was born, and two things happened that day that make me take notice:

FIRST: During the quake, I was working in the Director’s Guild of Canada offices in Yaletown, which is an old brick building four (I think) stories up, and we got shook pretty good.  Weird instant drunkeness feeling, lots of people getting away from the windows (oh, and the skylight), and standing in doorways near the copy room, since that area was the most open, but had structure, I guess.  So yeah, we’re all standing around, holding on to things, and half-panicking, half giggling.

In that moment, one of the women working there locked eyes with me, and I knew exactly what she was thinking.  It was this primal “You need to make sure I get out of here, I have kids out there.”  I didn’t know she had kids before that day, but I knew she did in that instant.  I also knew that she was selecting me to get her out.  I felt the immediacy and surety that I would get her out and back to her kids.  It took less than a second.  I don’t remember her name, I probably didn’t know it then, either.  I remember she had two kids, maybe one of each, but can’t remember that for sure either now.

SECOND: As soon as the shaking was over, and people were sure nothing else was going to happen that moment, I unholstered my cel phone and called the house.  Arwen picked up the phone, sounding a little groggy, I asked her if she was okay, and told her that I was okay, and then said (without sounding TOO melodramatic) “If something else happens, stay where you are, and I’ll come find you, just stay alive, and I’ll find you, okay?  Okay.  Love you.”

I think I’d either already heard something like that in a movie, or saw it a year later.  Maybe in “Deep Impact?”  Can’t remember.

I then handed the phone to the lady with the kids, so she could call the school and make sure everything was okay.  All good.

Why am I talking about this?  Dunno.

Maybe it’s because tonight our area of the Earth moved a little to the left, and we’re all hoping we’re gonna hang on to each other a little tighter, and get everyone out alive, if we can.  Watch for the folks with the kids, who are scared, and give them the ability to reach out and connect to someone (maybe you) if you can.

Be good to yourselves in the US tonight, and hang tight, help is on the way.