my mind is so full these days. i want to write it all but i don't know where to start. [surprise, i'm posting!]

i'm home now after what feels like a very long time, and in fact was a long time. i also slept a respectable last night for the first time in even longer - saturday night i had four hours, or possibly five (i'm not sure when my cellclock registered the time change) but the two previous nights it was more like three. that lack of sleep was definitely a part of what made yesterday so only-semi-explicably frustrating and difficult - i was near breakdown for large portions of it - which is in turn a large part of why i didn't go out to work (=volunteer) today.

really, really, i should not have gone in yesterday, at least not as early as i did, briefly a) because there was maddeningly not enough or not relevant enough work to be done where i was and b) because there are many things it would have been better for me to have been doing in other places. so, instead, today is my sunday. i'm still going to be volunteering today: i had wanted to do some work - canvassing and event support - with melinda's young voter alliance, but i'll probably end up phonebanking for pavictory instead because of the legal murkiness of my volunteeering with a 527. but still the day is and will be a healthful respite, and i think that is the best thing right now because it will make me as useful and effective as i can be tomorrow, the day of days.

there are some regrettable aspects to the way the election day efforts are being organized, specifically as pertaining to me and my coworkers, and i could spend a while ranting about them, but i will save that for after the fact or never, because at this stage they're really beside the point.

still, there were some lovely moments yesterday, in particular the long meandering stockingfooted walk i took around coatesville in the morning, singing soul and soaking in the glorious sunshine and of course the foliage, and thinking my thoughts.

this whole week as a unit has been a massive whirlwind of thought and activity and wonderment. i want to record all that has been going on, and i will, on wednesday or some point after, but more importantly i want to preserve some of what i've been thinking about, about politics partly, but especially about people, and the mindblowing diversity of perspectives they have, and how my own perspective affects how i perceive and respond to people, and to what extent [the belief and practice that stem from my personal perspective] can be summarized as "charity" as liz was saying. and other things besides - many of which i've been discussing in conversation with ben last night and with tara over several days and nights - it's so good to have the chance to talk about ideas as well as write, those two activities are so nicely complementary.

i also have a lot to write about tara, with whom i spent almost precisely forty-eight hours straight, from nine-am friday (shortly after i finished that last entry) until nine-am yesterday. the funny parallel occurred to me last night to around halloween-time last year, when i was glowing like jack-o-lanterns just from knowing… and mostly kept blog-silent about it or was obfuscatory and terse - plotwise there are some similarities but really this is a different situation with wholly different emotions involved, and this time i feel like recording every detail, here or somewhere, even though it's probably imprudent or something. of course a lot of that writing will tie into the other things i already mentioned (life-events-chronicle and thoughts-about-people, for which she's both an impetus and a kind of case study) and i'll get to it in some form soon. in the mean time, i will encourage you not to make assumptions. (on general principles and also because this is a story about those principles in action.) but i will try to post a picture of us in our halloween costumes, since it's a new month and i have new uploadability. [okay, no time to figure out how to put it here, but it's here

now, i will stop this, and do some or all of the following things before i go in to phonebank:
•shower, get dressed (sunday pants? is that sacrelige?)
•eat some food
•buy tickets to the arcade fire concert
•put in a job application

things i won't do now, but will do lots of after tomorrow (to convince myself that i'm not using up all my bored-free-day activities now):
•clean my room, which feels truly lived in at the moment despite how little living i've been doing here
•read all these books
•blog more
•deal with bills and stuff
•write letters! call my friends! see movies! play music! take trips! etc.

we learned more from a three minute record baby than we ever learned in school