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I imagine myself as Nancy Pelosi's crusty old mentor.
"I won!" she tells me, so happy. Her eyes shine and her broad smile lights up my dark, cramped, newspaper-strewn room. "I'm the first woman Speaker of the House!"
"Just don't screw up, Nancy," I tell her gruffly. "Just don't screw up."
There is to be no cutting of slack, no lightening of pressure for the golden girl.
Just don't screw up, Nancy.
Yesterday I waited patiently while a woman of a similar age to myself had a long animated conversation with the game geek at Best Buy. Well anyway, she was animated. As I shamelessly eavesdropped, I discerned that she was anxious about buying the new PlayStation 3 for her 13-year old son for Christmas. Apparently they are soon to be released and will be hard to come by.
I also figured out that the medium-sized line up of people camping out in front of the store were there for the same reason. Not the 13-year old son part, necessarily, but the game console release. The woman was speculating that many of them were there to buy one and then flip it, making huge profits from desperate gamers and gadget heads. The Best Buy guy wasn't so sure.
I was there with a question that is stumping store employees around Redwood City, which is, can the GameBoy Advance and the DS communicate? Few people other than me appear to realize that the Game Boy Advance has a wireless communication adapter, which already makes me more of an expert than many retail game geeks.
So, how many other women of a certain age are out there, rapidly morphing into game experts at the speed of their son's electronic addictions? An army of boy-mothers who can go head-to-head, swirling acronyms around with the best of them, aiding and abetting their young in the never-ending exploration of the convergence of fun and electrons.
From recently overheard conversations:
Seven-year old girl to eight-year old boy: Well ACTUALLY aliens really do exist, you know.
10-year old girl to sister, we'll call her Sophie, while standing on a very sandy beach: "Sophie! We need sand!"
Which puts me in mind of a report I got from school: "Merlin was a bit whiney in art today so he went outside to draw" because you wouldn't be drawing in art class, right?
There is a cream-coloured Volkswagon Beetle that lives on a street near my house. It looks like a kitchen appliance.
I was listening to the commentators yesterday jinxing the Democrats by predicting a big victory for them. How would that feel, I wondered, if they did win? Ecstatic jubilation, I decided. Jubilation. Now, what would that feel like? Lots of happy jumping around and shouting woooo, I guess. Giddiness, laughter, joyous cursing. But no, I thought. That's not an experience Democrats get to have. That's only for Republicans in this dark America we inhabit.
Of course, in a two party system the odds are going to eventually break for one party or the other, eventually. Not like where I come from where you reliably have at least 3 major parties, plus a collection of others. For a while, one of the major parties split itself into 2, so then it got really complicated.
In my early youth, my first blush of politicization, I was on the side of the winners as I was a rabid Trudeaumanic. That's going back a bit, when Canada was all groovy with national parties, like our Centennial Year "100 years of Con-fed-er-ation, everybody sing together!" and Expo '67, and a prime minister who was a international media star with a bold rebellious streak, dazzling intellect , long hair, and fast cars.
Then, the bloom off the rose, I settled into a life-long pattern of voting for the New Democratic Party or the NDP. To explain the NDP: if people in San Francisco could vote in Canada, they would vote NDP. The NDP occasionally win provincially, but don't hold power for long, and federally they are pretty dismal. Years of voting for these perennial losers left me bleak and hardened about elections.
I'm not used to my side winning. I feel...numb.
Surely in a day or two the gloating will set in. We have the House. A woman is Speaker. Bush and Rove are humbled. Ahhh, I feel it creeping in already. It feels...good.
