Yesterday the Scion xA and I got some street time shuttling students from Xavier to the Board of Elections building downtown and back. Who knew you could fit six people in that hatchback? From noon to five pm, I manned the “overflow vehicle” because our regular shuttle (a Windstar van donated for the day by fellow Cincinnati Obama supporter) was filled to capacity. (The other Ford Econoline vans rented for the day with Internet donations were operating out of Cincinnati State and the University of Cincinnati.)

While sweating out the afternoon heat parked in front of the Board of Elections waiting for my voters to return triumphant, I relaxed listening to tunes and took in the hubbub of the voters, pamphleteers, and assorted political workers milling about the place. One of these, a slim 40 something blond woman pulled up in front of me in her white sedan. I noticed a plethora of McCain bumper stickers sporting the rear of her vehicle, including the gracious, “Obama for Rockstar / McCain for President.” She zipped into the building and ten minutes later hopped back into her car and took off. She looked irate.

A few minutes later my voters returned to my car, as pleased with themselves as any voter should be this year. I asked them what the line was like and if there were any troubles. Smiling, they told me of this slim blond 40ish woman who was stalking the hall in front of the Board of Elections and shouting into her cellphone in frustration that the Board of Elections was swamped with college students and other Obama supporters.

Mmmmm… schaudenfreude. It is delicious.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Dawn After Golden Week” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.