All this Republican delay is killing Christmas on the Hill. But I don’t care too much about that (except for the staff and police officers). What I care about is that people down there are threatening to stop reading blogs.
The marathon debate on health-care legislation has become the “era of the unexpected,” Lauren Gilchrist said. As the top health policy aide to Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Gilchrist has been working on overdrive. “You don’t want to be that crazy person who e-mails at 3:30 in the morning, but sometimes you are,” she said.
Gilchrist said she has been clocking so many hours that she long ago stopped cooking her meals and hasn’t been to the gym since August. “It got to a point where there was a bag of Halloween candy and I’d eaten everything except those really gross candy corns,” she said.
When the voting is finally over, Gilchrist, 33, plans to fly home to Minnesota and stay for a while. “I’m going to cook, hang out with my friends and family, exercise again, read novels and things that are not blogs, and be normal again.”
Am I wrong? Is she saying I’m not normal? Well, at least I didn’t buy all my relatives a United States Senate mug for Christmas this year. Who the hell wants one of those after watching these idiots squabble and lurch about ineffectually all year. The only people who don’t hate the Senate and most senators are the people who don’t even know who the president is. And, by the way, those people exist. I met someone the other day who didn’t realize we had a new president until sometime in March. They weren’t even ashamed to admit it. It was like a badge of honor that they managed to remain so out of touch.
Sometimes I wish I could be like them.
