I tell ya, it's some sort of conspiracy...
Aravine would. not. sleep. last night. And somewhere around 2:30 am, some stupid fucker rang my buzzer at the front of my building to be let in. Not once, not twice, but three goddamn times. For aproximately 45 seconds, at which point I jumped out of bed, pushed the intercom button and screamed, "What the FUCK do you want at 2:30 am?", and marched back to bed without letting the asshole in. I don't know if it was a neighbor, or one of the neighbor's friends, but I do know it wasn't someone here to visit me, so they shouldn't have rang my buzzer. It's not that hard to figure out. You ring the buzzer of the person you're visiting, NOT someone else's, and ESPECIALLY not at 2:30 in the goddamn morning!
So by the time my alarm went off this morning, I'd had just under a hour of sleep. Since the polls here open at 7:00 am, I left the house at 6:45 and walked up to my local polling place, about two blocks away. It was 44 degrees, which is a good thing because it woke me up on the way there. As I went to enter the building, I was approached by those lovely "helpers", the fanatical picketers who decided with one glance that I was not on the fast track of the Young Republican. (Perhaps it was my buttons: "YEEHAW is Not a Foreign Policy", "My Faith-Based Plan: Dump Bush in 04", and "BULLSHIT, Mr. President".)
What really pissed me off was these pricks were playing off the confusion of the setup South Milwaukee has. Four wards (5, 6, 7, and 8)- two aldermanic districts- share the same polls. Those two districts are divided into two lines (one for 5 & 6, the other for 7 & 8) and two ballot boxes. You have to be in the correct line to get a ballot, and you absolutely MUST return your completed ballot to the correct box for it to count. In other words, if you don't know your ward, you run the risk of making your vote invalid.
So, when this jackoff in the Bush Cheney shirt approached me, it was under the guise of directing me to the proper line. "Cross streets?" he asked, consulting his clipboard. "Fifth and Marion," I said, reaching in my purse for the "Notice of Proper District, Ward, and Polling Place Location" postcard that the City Clerk's office wisely mailed out a few weeks ago. "Ward five," he directed, "First district."
I looked at my postcard, at the very large "WARD 7" and "DISTRICT 2" printed on it. "Uh huh. Nice try, asshole," I said, and walked over to the correct line. The guy didn't even have the grace to look embarassed. I waited in line about ten minutes, verified with the ballot guy that I was indeed in the correct line, and reported the picketer to the policeman who was standing near the ballot boxes. I also alerted the Voting Rights attorney that was there and informed a supervisor. And just for good measure, when I got home, I reported the incident on johnkerry.com. Hopefully no one was misdirected by the asshole. I saw several other people give him dirty looks, so apparently I wasn't the first he tried to trick.
Isn't that just like a Republican?
And just as I was typing this, my very annoying neighbor (whom I've tried not to dislike because he's in a wheelchair, before realizing that I'd dislike him if he weren't in the chair, so it's ok to dislike him even if he's in it) who's always trying to borrow money from me just knocked on my door and asked to borrow some tool that we don't have. He then asked if I had voted (I nodded) and then said, "Can I ask who you voted for?" I looked down at my shirt, where I still had the buttons pinned, then back at him. "No," I answered, and shut the door.
I am surrounded by idiots. And Republicans. And I'm beginning to think that means the same thing.