Fork in the Road

It's hard to believe that we've endured 4 years of the Bush administration. Yes yes, I did vote for that [insert expletive of choice here] in 2000, but I'm not dumb enough to make that mistake again. I just finished filling out my absentee ballot, and for the first time in my life, I'm pretty much voting democrat down the line. The only exception I made was with Mike Balboni for state assembly, he's the republican incumbent, and the other guy had no information available whatsoever. For the past week or so I've been driving myself nuts trying to visit the websites these candidates maintain to get information about them. It's a huge pain. luckily a friend told me about http://www.vote-smart.org/, which lists the candidates for you when you plug in your zip code, tells you their voting records, where they stand on certain issues, all that useful stuff. So for the second time in my life, I'm casting a vote in an official election, but for the first time, I'm actually voting as an informed citizen.

Next week, America will be at a fork in the road. Do we continue into the endless quagmire pretending that everything is ok, or do we vote for the other candidate to bring us the remote, but nonetheless realistic, possibility that we can go back to normal. I hate what the Bush administration has done to our country. We used to be an open and optimistic society. Now we're a bunch of mindless flagwaving drones. We used to take pride in what our nation accomplished in terms of peace and prosperity, now we're scorned for our ruthlessness and apathy to the plight of the rest of the planet. We once had a booming economy, now we have the worst job situation since the depression. What happened?

So pessimism aside, this week was pretty decent. I got a lot of rest, got a lot of reading done. I went to Party City earlier and got my haloween costume... I'm going as the Monopoly Man this year. I even got white face paint. Now all I'm missing is the monocle. I remember when we were little, my sister and I used to go trick or treating. But since my parents weren't in the country for all that long at that point, nobody told us we were supposed to say, 'trick or treat' when we ring the doorbell. I remember there was this other Indian family that lived across the street from us all those years ago, and when we rung their doorbell, the father answered. My sister and I just held out our bags with the silent expectation of candy. Luckily, this Uncle was a good natured fellow, and he told us we have to say "Trick or Treat." He even said something like 'now I'm shutting the door... ring the bell again, and when I open it, you have to say, "TRICK OR TREAT" very loudly.' And he did. Just another random memory of childhood that popped up.

So tonight I'm going to visit the Northeast Jamatkhana. Hopefully I'll run into more Al-Ummah kids I havn't seen in a long while. That should definitely be nice.