Suffrage

This weekend I decided to change the template of my blog. It’s not that I didn’t like the old one; in fact, I think I like it a little more than this one. I liked the dark blue and beige, and although teal isn’t really my style, I thought it was a decent color scheme. But I felt like a copycat or someone who follows the crowd when I found out that everyone and their mother was using the same template. Perhaps it’s a tribute to our collective good taste, but Toasteroven, CGNU Grad, and Trueblat all have the same template I used, and I’m pretty sure at least one of them had it first. So I went searching for a new template. The ones Blogger provides are really pretty decent, to be honest. With the possible exception of the very pink template, I would be fine with any of them. Except now that I’ve spit out a dozen or so random thoughts in paragraph form, I feel somehow motivated to make my blog unique. Never mind that I followed the crowd in getting a blog; now that I have one it’s gotta be mine and mine alone. So I started looking for templates with all the pickiness that I use when purchasing ties and shoes.

I first went to all the Web sites Blogger mentions as other sources for blog templates. If any of you have taken a look at those sites, they are largely unhelpful. They’re all too cluttered or focused around a theme that I don’t want. If I wanted a blog about Hello Kitty, I would have been set. But since Hello Kitty isn’t my thing and I cover more topics than one, I just wanted something simple, clean, and good-looking. Which was apparently too much to ask. I expanded to a Web search that ended up taking way too much time and still left me with nothing better than what I already had. And the ones I did find had complicated instructions to use them, and I wasn’t sure if I could get them to work. So I went back and picked from one of the Blogger templates, and although it wasn’t my ideal choice, it is good enough for now.

This weekend I also voted. I got my absentee ballot in the mail a few weeks ago, but I waited to actually vote so I could make more of an informed decision. I asked my mom about some of the candidates, particularly the local ones, to see if she knew anything about them or their history of service. I also got a flood of campaign ads from various candidates and the two main political parties. Some of these were rather uninformative, but many had platform issues and helped me decide whom I wanted to vote for. So Saturday I sat down and cleared off the “kitchen” table (the one in between my bed and the oven) and spread out the campaign mailings and got out my voting packet. First of all, I must comment the instructions on how to fill out the absentee voting card were about as confusing as the instructions of how to use a template for my blog. And my great and enlightened state still uses punch card voting. In fact, it uses more punch cards than any other state except Utah. (Smart people with too much time on their hands may deduce from that statement what state I’m from, but it really doesn’t matter for my narrative.) If the vote is close (which it inevitably will be) I predict an army of lawyers will descend upon my state and replicate the Great Florida Fiasco of 2000, which I missed because I was out of the country. I will probably be glad that I’m out of the state this time, which is why I voted by absentee ballot. Which brings me back to my story.

It’s no secret that I’m more of a Republican than a Democrat. My views on states’ rights, the federal government, moral issues, and fiscal policy are all more similar to the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. However, I do vote Democrat in lots of local elections because I vote on the candidate. So I started punching out the chads from the punch cards and I immediately felt just like when I was looking for a new template for my blog. In some ways I didn’t like any of the choices. This holds true for everything from the presidential elections down to county sheriff. I found myself looking at things along party lines, which made me feel like a sheep. There’s a ton of choices out there, and none of them is exactly what I want. I even looked into a few of the independent candidates, but nothing was what I wanted.

So I did the same thing I did with the blog templates. I went back to the beginning and picked the one I liked best, even if it wasn’t ideal. I ended up leaving a lot of them blank because I didn’t feel informed enough to vote one way or the other. Just like my blog, I had to be a little different: I actually voted for the independent guy for county sheriff. But for the most part I just picked from the limited set of choices. That’s what voting is all about, right? You’ll rarely get a perfect fit, but almost half of the voting population isn’t going to agree at all, so you take what you can get. Even in my closely contested state, I suffer no illusions that my vote will actually matter. I did it more as a matter of principle and because I wanted to vote. As I carefully inspected my voting card for the perilous “hanging chads,” I felt good for having put my two cents in on the big voting mess. And when it really comes down to it, that’s what my blog is all about: putting in my two cents.

At least my blog doesn’t have chads.