Under Construction

As you can see, I'm working through some changes on my blog. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to do it all at once, and unlike Zimm and others I'm not smart enough to make all my changes offline and then load the whole thing at once. So you'll have to deal with what you've got and I'll have to hope that it wasn't just the aesthetic that was bringing you back to the site, but rather my wit and charm. In that vein, I haven't fixed the comments yet, so go ahead and leave them, but either the ones you make here or the ones from the past may be lost. We'll see.

Conversation in the faculty lounge just gets more and more interesting with each passing week. Since I teach at a school in an affluent, conservative, and largely white part of the South. Yes, I'm deep in the heart of Republican land, but I, as you may or may not know, am not an Elephant. Compound with that the fact that Mitt Romney's presidential run has brought Mormons into the political limelight as never before, and you can see there are a lot of assumptions made regarding what I feel about politics.

Today I "came out" as a democrat to my bishop's wife, who also teaches at the school and is the definition of conservative. She wanted to commiserate with me about Mitt's Florida loss, so I said, "Well, I'm actually a democrat, but my current favorite candidate lost too" (I'm leaning Barack right now, though it's not 100%. Needless to say there was an awkward silence. Oh, and did I mention that her husband is a politician and ultra-conservative/old-school? Of course, there's something fun about defying expectations, so I enjoyed it.

Lunch, on the other hand, gets fun when the oldies get going. I thought my co-English teacher, who is a die-hard Obama-nite and actually not old at all, was going to punch the math teacher in the face for some pro-Huckabee comment the latter made. Then everyone settled down into talk of celebrity mishaps and local gossip (because everyone knows everyone here) and we were able to move on.

I'm more politically aware and active than ever before, but politics in this country still stumps me. It's not about policies and ideas, but personalities and hairstyles. I guess that's just the way it works in the you-tube-media-frenzy era, but it seems a lot more like a circus than an election.

Still, I'll bet they were saying the same things one hundred and two hundred years ago. "I say," they probably said, since in my mind people from the past who aren't cowboys speak in British accents, "I say, this Van Buren fellow has my vote, since Daniel Webster has not the foreign policy experience, and William Henry Harrison was discovered with a lady of the night last week. Plus, you should totally see what they wrote about Hugh Lawson White in Sunday's Doonesbury. Scandalous!"*


*Special thanks to Wikipedia for the assist on the previous joke.