Post-Election Red Tape Blues

Don't get me wrong, Harry & David are two of my best friends, but does it bother anybody else when they email you a list with presents all picked out for everyone you know?  I mean, yeah, thanks for thinking for me and all that, but I'm quite capable of deciding for myself what to send to my great-aunt, Maude, thank you very much.  And my great-aunt Maude doesn't like Moose Munch.  I'm just sayin'.

Anyway:  I didn't go to work yesterday.  The Official Reason was that I had Female Issues, which was true, actually.  Sharp pointy cramps low down and across my back.  I hurt my back recently, as I may have mentioned, and my third adventure in chiropractic turned out about as well as my first two (which is to say, really badly), so I'm wondering if that had anything to do with it.  I don't normally have very serious Issues that direction, much less bad enough to call in dead.  (Which is, I think, a first for me at this job, or maybe a second.)  But the Real Reason was that at about 4:00 on Election Day, I ran out of cope. Just shut down.  When I woke up the following morning, the only thing I wanted to do was put my fuzzy robe on, snarf down about a fistful of Advil and go back to bed.

Eventually I let Joan talk me into this.  I called my Official Boss (TM) and he couldn't get me off the phone fast enough.  Ladies, if you have a male boss and you need a day off, just mention Female Issues.  Not only don't they want to know anymore, they have an oh-my-virgin-ears moment trying to get away from you, which is kind of comical.  Well, it would have been comical if I'd been in a better mood.  Then I called the office manager, talked to her answering machine, and nosedived into bed, there to stay until the manager called me back about nine-thirty.

She was nice.  I told her I was thinking of maybe calling my doctor and seeing if she'd call in something stronger than Advil, which I may have done and I may not have done; I don't actually recall.  When I'm out of cope I can't waste precious cope on trying to remember things that are going to be irrelevant in twenty-four hours anyway. She told me to take the day off after I made noises about trying to come in later. Which was fine with me.  I went back to sleep again and stayed there until my stomach started poking me about one in the afternoon.

I got up, prowled around the kitchen, found Something to Eat (I think it was a bowl of granola) and went back to bed.  This time I didn't wake up until Joan came home from a dentist appointment about four.  By then there were some signs of returning cope.  We made a pizza and ate it.  Some frozen yogurt was shared. We both went to bed early and this morning, when I woke up, my cope tank was filled back to normal.  And my cramps, while not gone, were once again responding to Advil.

Now, this is not  a scientific theory or anything, but I can't help but notice my being out of cope happened right around the time a lot of people that would normally know better were making fools of themselves in public in various ways.  A lot of them were pretty excited and a fair number of them were also angry.  Angry because things weren't going their way, because people that they had counted on to do one thing were doing another thing, that all those naysayers they were going to show up on this particular date were instead committing the ultimate crime of being right.  I wasn't there and I have not seen the video but I understand that Karl Rove even raised his voice. 

Now, I'm a rather sensitive type, and I tend to pick up other people's feelings whether I want to or not.  Hence my love of horror films, though they're not nearly as much fun unless I'm actually in a crowded theater, freaking out with everybody else.  I notice anger and tension way before anyone's willing to tell me what's going on.  I even pick up on people dying halfway around the world, and I've been known to do a pretty good job of locating recent dead bodies.  (Yes, folks, I'm the psychic equivalent of a corpse-sniffing dog.  Too bad I can't turn it on and off at will; I'd have my own reality show.)  So I'm thinking, if I'm in a country where half the electorate is angry, excited, disappointed, freaked out, thinking about moving to Canada or otherwise perturbed, I might very well run out of cope just trying to stay balanced.  A country's a big place, folks, and there are a lot of people crammed into it.

So that's my theory.  The United States of America made me sick.  That, and bad cramps.

Oh, and hey, we had an election, didn't we?  Did the black guy win again?