Via Jessica Hopper, a really fantastic description of voting from Miranda July:
Here's why you should vote: you are going to really love it, the whole strange procedure. You get to walk right into a building that you would never normally be allowed in, often an elementary school. You can pause in the hallway to look at all the weird school-art and feel the eerie vibe of hundreds of kids living their endless kid lives right nearby. Then you follow the arrows to the voting room and look at the faces of the volunteers - who are these people? There is a hush of secrecy, the voting booth is clunky, the whole thing seems fake somehow. You consider filling in all the bubbles, like you did on the SATs. But you don't. You vote. You walk back outside feeling like you just gave blood or something, lightheaded from citizenry. You are wearing a sticker that says "I Voted" and you wish you could continue to get stickers like this throughout the day: I Ate Dinner, I Went To Sleep, I Got Out Of Bed, I Went To Work.But alas, it is just this one thing that we all do together, savor it.
Last time I went home to Chicago I went back to where I used to wait tables and the owner and I got to talking about my new gig in D.C. He asked how it was, I told him I was burnt-out and ready for the primary to be over. He looked a little surprised and said, "Really, because I've never been so excited about an election. This is great. Everyone is talking about it. Everyone's got an opinion. Record numbers of people are voting." And that's when I felt like a jerk. I'd guess that I'm reasonably typical of many of the journalists I know; we're fed up with covering the horserace. But most voters aren't fed up because they don't follow it as obsessively as we do. People are getting newly excited about "this one thing we do together" and that is worth savoring.
--Phoebe Connelly
