coming soon: champagne & cosmos

just took the "culture of entitlement" quiz on the ndp website. adorable exploitation of an obvious political moment, and for me, a brief and amusing distraction from all this last-minute campaign crap. i've spent most of the day engrossed in sexy tasks like preparing scripts and slips for use on e-day.

i have been popping motrin all day in an ongoing attempt to calm a dull headache hungover from my first ever sleepless night on this campaign. i wasn't tense about anything in particular, just held hostage by the mind-racing and check-listing that will play non-stop until i'm sucking on cosmopolitans sunday evening. the phone started ringing pretty early this morning - most of the national capital region awoke to aggressive winds which had apparently manage to batter several of our campaign signs. part of me cared a little, most of me didn't. i think i'm suffering from too much info in the brain syndrome. my expansive mental filing system has reached full capacity. names of intersections where signs are in need of a soldier with a nail gun are hard to hold.

i just hope i sleep some tonight. i imagine tomorrow is going to be a pretty strange day. things are fairly well organized, but i can't shake the feeling that i have forgotten something big. it's a niggling feeling like the one that tickles you all day while you wonder if you left the iron on. i know it will be tedious and mind-numbing to pull together all the zone lists containing the contact data for our supporters. i worry about the integrity of the phone numbers. i wonder if they will wind up properly organized, with the queries done the way i want. there is a simultaneous beauty and danger in successful delegation of tasks: you feel great that you found enough people to cover off all the various pieces, but you nurse a baby ulcer until those pieces come back safe and sound, handled correctly, with no need for do-overs. you worry about someone fucking it up - all the time wasted to fix it - double the time it would have taken to do it yourself in the first place. i am unapologetic about this kind of control freakiness. it comes from years of those aforementioned do-overs. but you delegate anyways, hope for the best, and try to navigate life with lowered expectations.

all of that to say that my day will be assaulted by lists tomorrow. i will have one final meeting with the team and we will go over the plan. i will do my best to get all the t's crossed and i's dotted. i will remind myself to maintain some perspective and not treat this, as i do every campaign, like it's the biggest deal in the entire fucking world. through all of tomorrow's inevitable fuckery, i will be buoyed by the faint taste of the cheap champagne that i hope someone will pour unceremoniously down my throat starting at 8.01 sunday night and that i will consume with reckless abandon, regardless of whether our guy wins or not.