Up From the Roots/Things Fall Apart

I was up at 4am after getting back home close to midnight. The stretch run is exciting and even though I've had a few problems over the past month I'm still grateful that I got the opportunity to work to elect Barack Obama for President; it's something I'll be able to tell me children. For posterities sake, my prediction is that Obama will win 333 electoral votes, although in our war room pool I put 353 because the guy who created the pool put 333. Putting down duplicates for an office pool is lame, so I added Ohio to my mix even though I don't think he will win Ohio. No real bother really, I think it'll be much closer to a landslide than people predict. A great site to look at is fivethirtyeight.com. It's from Nate Silver, the guy who made Baseball Prospectus, only the top statistical baseball research site in the world (well that or Baseball Reference). Into politics and baseball, sounds like a great guy to have a beer with.

Looking back, it's been memorable being part of this team, even when I let my frustrations get the best of me. It's always fun building something up from the roots, for better or worse I basically lived with these people for a month. Everyday, I was with them for 12-18 hours and I am proud of what we accomplished. And now we sit and wait and read Loaded Questions, or at least I want to, I don't think people are particularly in a boardgame mood. I can feel the anxiousness, ready to morph into excitement if (when?) we win. I feel we have it in the bag- you never want to get overconfident though. But I seriously can't help it, we're about to have the first Black president in United States history.

Building, all the way up from the roots. When you do that, you take your materials from whatever is around you. In the case of me, that means you pour in energy from your other activities, your other obligations, because out of necessity, nothing else is as important as your new project. What's going to be there to fill that voids you left? They never stay empty, something always has to fill them. It's like those square puzzles where you have to put the numbers in order, when you move a piece to the right another piece has to come and replace it. Something has to die for something else to live, you know. As we built this, this entity, this massive 4 day event, the rest of my life suffered a little. What can you expect when you average 14 hours a night? I didn't think about what would be there to fill my place, because I could coast with half the effort. Some people are talented enough, Randy Moss can play with a quarter of his effort and still be the best wide receiver. I'm realizing I can't.
History will say that John Mccain lost this election when he said the fundamentals of the economy were strong when they were clearly not. I sympathize with the man, because I actually know where he's coming from, and I think to some extent his comments were misinterpreted (he didn't make it any better with his terrible, "I meant American workers" explanation once he was dinged on it). McCain's problem was that he was mistaken about what constituted "the fundamentals," he didn't understand the extent to which FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) WAS the economy. He didn't understand the extent that people like him and Phil Gramm (his economic adviser) helped to create the environment where FIRE was our fundamentals. I sympathize because, sometimes I feel like I don't know exactly what my/our foundation is made of. Scratch that, I think I do, I have a pretty good idea. But then again, what happens if the foundation we laid is fundamentally different than what we thought? What if there's a hole there which allows something, someone, to slip in unnoticed at first until its too late.
When you build up from the roots and you fear that something is wrong with the foundation you have a myriad of options. You can check it out, at what could be great costs, only to find that there's nothing wrong. You can check it out, find that something is wrong and try and fix it. You can check it out, find something is beyond and repair, kiss and say goodbye. Or finally, you can do nothing and hope for the best. The last one is not a real option, nothing man-made, not even the best insitutions/relationships inherently work; things naturally fall apart unless you put in the energy and effort. After the election, I guess I can again.


My life use to revolve around a song.