October 30, 2008 | Filed under: Good Things Come to Those Who Are Impatient Whiners, It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It.

You know that commercial for Comfort Inn, I think, with that baritone guy Johnny Cash singing “I’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo…”? That’s pretty much me these days, except that I stay in much nicer hotels. (Like this one, where, I kid you not, the bathroom was at least half the size of my living room.)

I’ve managed to experience three seasons in one week, as DC was resplendent in fall colors when I left town last weekend. Yesterday featured a 60-degree swing, as I got on a plane in Arizona, where it was 87 degrees out, and landed after midnight in New Hampshire, where it snowed Tuesday and felt like 29 degrees around the time I took off from Phoenix. TWENTY-NINE. With SNOW. (No, really, together we’ll conserve body heat.)

Thankfully, in my suitcase right next to my swimsuit and flip flops are a down jacket, hat, scarf and gloves. I thought I might be going a little overboard with the winter packing, but as it turns out, nope. I’ll need ‘em.

In similarly shocking-to-the-system news, 2008 is the year of identity politics, and apparently I did not escape its pervasive reach. While the Phoenix trip was for work, spending the next week in New Hampshire is entirely my own doing. As with the last election, I took a look around for exciting races where candidates could really use the help. Unlike last time, the candidates that really spoke to me were all women. Yes, of course I’m helping with the Presidential contest, too, but the big draw for me was down-ticket races in a place where the Presidential race was also competitive. My motivation is pretty straight-forward: the more women there are in the House and the Senate, the more likely it is that one of them will eventually be elected President. While we’ve made great strides in the last four years increasing the female membership of Congress, a paltry 32% of Senators wear suits by Donna Karan, not the Brooks Brothers.

It is this sentiment that led me to New Hampshire, a state I’ve never been to and where I know exactly zero people. But, in the way that DC is the biggest small town around, a friend of a friend is working on my front-runner campaign, so an e-mail introduction and one phone conversation later, I was slated to spend the week leading up to the election on the ground in New Hampshire. Snow and freezing temperatures notwithstanding, I’m super excited to be here. I just hope I brought warm enough clothes.

October 22, 2008 | Filed under: I Run Therefore I Am, Is She Still Talking?

I like to cook. It relaxes and soothes me. I often find myself cooking at high-stress times, or when I’m trying to fend off upcoming stress. Occasionally I cook because I need to eat dinner soon, but that’s often not the case. I know plenty of people who are stress eaters, and it’s probably a good thing they don’t live with me, because that could be a dangerous symbiotic relationship there. Cooking (or baking, my stress doesn’t discriminate) allows me to be creative and focus on a project and shut everything else out. This explains why, when leaving the office tonight, I had to beat back the overwhelming urge to come home and make chocolate chip cookies. Not only do I not really have the time for that sort of thing, I don’t have any chocolate chips.

I could be cleaning the house — another of my stress management techniques (now you REALLY want to come live with me, don’t you?) — but I’m blogging instead. I know I’m woefully behind here on the fascinating life updates, but I haven’t done a faceplant in front of strangers recently, so it’s been challenging to make the time to sit down and write. If it’s any consolation, there’s no doubt that I’m further behind at work than I am here.

As I mentioned a long, long time ago, I signed up to run a half marathon. It was…good enough.  (2:27:54, for the record.) Not great, no personal records, but a solid performance — only a couple of minutes slower than my best half. I’m OK with that, especially considering that the race course looked like this:

…a wee bit different than the half marathons I ran in Sacramento, which had roughly the elevation change of a straight line. Seriously, the program guide describes miles 6-12 as being “Boston-like.” Thanks, guys.

At any rate, it was a beautiful day and other than my stomach not enjoying the water and Gatorade I cruelly forced into it, I felt pretty good. There’s still plenty of room for improvement at this distance, so I won’t be tackling a whole marathon any time soon. (My training partner is trying to get me to do a marathon at our current pace; I’m angling for us to do another half at a faster pace. We’ll see who wins.)

Regardless of the outcome of the race, the training experience emphasized for me the fact that (1) exercise is really important to my quality of life, no matter how little time I have and (2) I like having a tangible goal to work toward. These are things I know, but every once in a while need to be reminded of. I like working hard. I like pushing myself, even when it doesn’t seem like much fun. And I like how utterly STRONG I feel after finishing a 12-mile weekend run.

October 4, 2008 | Filed under: Because They Pay Me, Good Things Come to Those Who Are Impatient Whiners

You know that $700 billion financial bailout package the House failed to pass last Monday?  That the Senate voted out on Wednesday?  That the House DID pass on Friday and the President nearly immediately signed into law?  Well, somewhere in those 400-and-some-odd pages are about five pages dedicated to my organization’s top priority.  A policy we’ve been working on getting enacted for nearly two years.  (To be fair, that’s pretty decent turnaround time.  Some groups have fought for policy changes for better than a decade, without success.)  A policy which commands the attention of much of the staff and sucks all the air out of the room whenever we consider tackling other projects.

One 15-minute vote, and just like that, the whole world changed. 

We high-fived and hugged and drank champagne and went to the roof deck to smoke cigars.  Somebody thought to order pizza.  When we ran out of booze, we went to the bar downstairs.

My role isn’t to be the office cynic — someone else has that title wrapped up — but I am, at best, “cautiously optimistic” when it comes to this sort of stuff.  I know the many, many, many ways in which things can go wrong, so I take a firm stance of not counting one’s chickens before they’re hatched.  Thus, even yesterday morning I was unconvinced this bill would actually pass with our policy intact.  Blame it on my conservative Midwestern upbringing, where even deserved celebrating is frowned upon, let alone premature celebration. 

It’s slowly sinking in, but I don’t think it will be real for a week or two or maybe not for another couple of months, when our Board sits down to identify next year’s priorities and we have to find something new to put in that #1 slot.  It’s somewhat frightening to realize that the issues I work on are leading contenders, but that’s a good problem to have.