THINGS I AM THINKING ABOUT

Yes, you. You right there. Maybe you hate politics. Maybe you hate the Democrats. But I am here to ask you, a person who leans at least vaguely left, to consider the strategy of the next few years of state electoral politics and register yourself as a NY State Democrat. (You can print the form at that link, or pick one up at the library or post office.) Why? Read on.

First, some fun facts: NY State allows for closed primaries. This means that political parties do not have to let anyone vote who isn’t registered in their party, and that the party gets to decide how long you have to be registered before you can vote. And that lead time is very long - in order to be able to vote in the 2018 primary as a Democrat, your change of affiliation needs to be received by October 13th, 2017. 

So why care? Well, folks, in most of NYC, the Democratic primary is the de facto election - the candidate that wins that race is the one that wins. In the state at large, the Democratic race is still the closest thing most of us get to a real choice of candidates; the people reading this are not going to be considering the Republican ticket. 

2018 is going to have some big races: governor, a federal senator, federal representatives, state assemblymembers, and state senators. If you live in NYC and not in Staten Island or very-south Brooklyn, your federal representative, state assemblymember, and state senator will be a Democrat. So if you want to weigh in on the people who will actually represent you, this is your moment, and PS: you do. 

Say what you will about the stupidity of electoral politics generally: on a local level, this actually has a concrete impact on your life. Minimum wage? Controlled by the state (even if you don’t have a minimum wage job, it’ll affect you too; minimum wage applies upward pressure on other wages close to the minimum wage.) Rent stabilization? Controlled by the state. Healthcare for all? Controlled by the state. Weed legalization? Downstate, we live in a pretty liberal wonderland; even if everyone is close to the same, you can still see real differences in candidates’ relationships to developers, the police, labor rights, taxation, weed legalization, and other issues on what I suppose is best discussed as the liberal-to-progressive spectrum.

So yes, it is the master’s tools. No, it won’t dismantle the master’s house. But for those of you who want that house to be livable for as many people as possible while we’re waiting for it to come down, these elections do in fact matter. And to participate, you have to be a Democrat.

Ok y’all. Strap in, this is a long one: ENDORSEMENT TIME. I gathered this from reading a lot of things: posts on local FB political blogs, friends’ posts, lots of interviews and articles, a few voter guides. I wish I could cite my sources better but I accidentally closed my window with all the tabs I’d been saving. I’m less well-cited than usual. I apologize.

The primary is tomorrow, but to participate you have to be enrolled in a party having a primary (aka, the Democrats or the GOP.) If you’re not, and you lean at all to the left, I highly recommend you consider enrolling in the Dems if you want to be directly involved in electoral politics in NYC. New York State has closed primaries, which means that if you aren’t registered as a member of a party, you can’t vote in its primary. But NYC is a Democratic town and the Democratic primary is the de facto election for most city offices. On the one hand: fuck a closed primary! Change the system! On the other hand, if you’re into electoral politics, you might as well participate where the action is.

Don’t know what or who you’re voting for? Go here: http://www.whosontheballot.org.

LET’S SEE WHAT WE HAVE HERE.

Mayor: Bob Gangi, but mostly NOT DE BLASIO: De Blasio, you had such promise. De Blasio, I liked you so much. De Blasio, your housing plan sucks rocks and your financial conduct feels off and you never lived up to your promise and while I agree Andrew Cuomo is a jackass you really lost that fight. But you’re the mayor, and though I wouldn’t be surprised if you lose in the general to some fiscally-conservative-socially-liberal Republican, the Democratic machine chose you. As such, I don’t think any of your challengers are going to win, but I can’t recommend voting for you. I picked Bob Gangi because he’s hella to the left and two young women of color handed me his flyer at the mayoral debate I went to. That made me like him. So vote for him.

Public Advocate: Tish James: I continue to really like Tish James. The Public Advocate is a funny job and is designed to be a power check on the mayor, and I admit I don’t have a great sense of how effective she’s been at this outside of the spin machine which makes her seem pretty great. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there is some blog post I can’t find talking about the machinations behind the scene that make her look less rosy, but what I can see I support very much (housing rights, equal pay work, bad landlord lists, etc.) Additionally, the other guy’s campaign is basically “Tish didn’t have an adversarial enough relationship with the mayor, and also I’m a history professor from Columbia and I know things.” He has no elected experience. BZZT. I wouldn’t vote for him even if I didn't like Tish.

Brooklyn DA: Anne Swern: A lot of what I’ve been reading has been marveling at the fact that this DA race is about reform rather than being tough on crime. A lot of this can be attributed to Ken Thompson’s legacy and his move towards more progressive choices around how the DA works and the power the DA has in setting bail, choosing or declining to prosecute, and the options defendents are given. So who’s the best reformer?

 Unlike a lot of people, I like Eric Gonzalez. I appreciate that he comes from a community impacted by policing and the criminal “justice” system. But word on the street is that public defenders don’t like him and he has repeatedly failed to come out against some systematic reforms I think are important (bail, discovery rules, etc.) I don’t think he’s bad but I don’t think he’s the best. Anne Swern is better rated by several progressive orgs, has committed to ending cash bail, and wants to reform discovery rules that currently favor prosecutors. She’s also worked as a public defender, at least briefly, which to me proves she has had to understand and defend the humanity of defendants over the course of her career. I feel unsure about endorsing a white woman over a person of color, given the borough and who is most affected by the criminal justice system, but I think she will be a good progressive voice; the 5 Boro Defenders’ #KnowYourDA committee, which is entirely POC, ranked her highly in their guide.  Why not Mark Fleidner? He just hits every button for me: a far-left white guy with a lot of privilege without a lot of proof of a visceral understanding of how it all goes. Also reports show him as mansplaining/whitesplaining Black Lives Matter to Patricia Gatling, a black woman, and just no.

Civil Court Judges: Consuelo Melendez, Isiris Isella Isaac, Ellen E. Edwards, Fredrick Arriaga, and Patria Frias-Colon. I understand, abstractly, the reason why we elect judges. I don’t think we do a good job of it, though. The above slate is suggested by my genius friend Jen Abrams: (http://mailchi.mp/e46598afcde0/dont-forget-to-vote-on-tuesday-sept-12). She does her own endorsements, including straight SENDING OUT A QUESTIONNAIRE this year, and I trust her judgement. You should trust her judgement too. She goes a lot more into it at the above link, including the complicated politics around this different, better group of “Independent Democrats.”

District 6 Judge: Rupert Barry by a hair, via Jen as well. I’m going with her endorsement; Elena Baron is also a star in the race. I think we’d do well either way. 

City Council Races other than my own: I haven’t paid much attention to the other races, for the most part, but people I trust have - Make the Road NYC, the Arab-American Association of NY, friends who pay attention, Tenants PAC. If you want to vote by endorsements, here’s a big list from the Gotham Gazette. But if you don’t, or you just want someone to tell you what to do, here are the few races where I feel I know enough to weigh in.

District 2: Carlina Rivera

District 5: Patrick Bobilin

District 6: Mel Wymore

District 8: Diana Ayala

District 35: Ede Fox

District 38: Carlos Menchaca

District 39: Brad Lander

District 43: Rev. Khader El-Yateem

Well here we are again with round two: what happens after the polls close.

So, starting around 8-8:30pm, the guys who were our fearless leaders came over and started circulating the forms we were supposed to sign, in the name of pre-working. There was a lot of emphasis on getting things done ahead of time, which makes sense - remember, at 8pm we’ve already been there for 15 hours, and the coordinators even longer. Everyone wants to go home and I assure you that the voters rolling in at 8:59:45 are disliked even more than the ones who show up at 6:00:01. 

In a system so byzantine, you can imagine how intense the audits are. Tabulating the vote was the most intense reconciliation process I have ever conducted. As election table workers, we have to account for every ballot we have given out. So we add up how many ballots we gave out total, and that number better total the number of ballots scanned + the number of voided ballots voided by voter error + the number voided by pollworker error (oops they mentioned tracking that during training but I sure didn’t remember it) + the number of special types of ballots and so help you lord that needs to equal the number you gave out. For the primary, there were three ballots - the Democratic primary, the GOP primary, and a special second ballot. We had to come out exactly for all 3. 

I have spent years reconciling accounting at various jobs down to the penny. I am really good at this. And I was off by 2 Democratic ballots. Where did they go? No idea. The guy in charge said it was fine. We take those totals and it all goes in a little pamphlet, the Election Forms Booklet. This booklet is the sleeper master of the election universe, although it looks like nothing - it’s your timecard, your returns log, the number of the seals sealing your cart, all the little details. It is the audit log, essentially.

This form goes one place, the seals we use to close the carts goes another, we seal and sign envelopes, we put some things in the Grey Transport Envelope and seal that, other things in the Orange ED Return Bag, still others in the ED Supply Cart, we seal the cart, and then we go to put everything into the forms booklet only to be reminded that we already signed everything and the coordinator will handle filling it out from there, it’s so late, we can just go home.

And we do, because like every hourly worker, we are not in a position to push back at the boss, not even and perhaps especially to challenge them on a principle as large and as noble as THE FATE OF DEMOCRACY IS IN OUR HANDS SO WE HAVE TO DO IT RIGHT. The guys running our site were rad - kind, smart, fair, generous with the breaks, and I do not say this to denigrate them or call them out specifically. The poll workers I was working with were smart, awesome people who were not necessarily very good at arithmetic, and it took a while to close things up. It should be noted that these are not the things that control the vote itself - shutting down the scanners involves a whole other process, even MORE intensely detailed.

Fundamentally, again, it is about incredibly rigorous checks and balances coming up against a system run by humans who have been working for 17 hours and awake even more than that. And this human element is in fact the check on this new and computerized system - that the number of ballots accounted for equals the number of ballots used; the scanner counts equal the ballots used; the scanner counts on the tape equal the scanner counts on the PMD (Poll Memory Device?) and so on and so forth. But again, these humans are balancing an almost ridiculous number of rules and subrules, and going through the checklists as we are presented with them requires working much, much slower than time actually allows. It is very easy to miss steps, or to go with your supervisor’s judgement, even though the whole training manual makes it very clear THE FATE OF DEMOCRACY IS IN OUR HANDS.

Last week, I was a poll worker in the NYC Primary Election. I did it for two reasons: one, because it paid $200 (plus a $100 bonus for attending the training); two, because democracy is a giant bureaucracy with poll workers as its face and I wanted to see the view from the ground.

The training itself was 4 hours with an older white guy who was clearly impeccably dressed in the 70s and had stuck with what worked. He had a PowerPoint and very forcibly emphasized the points that were going to be on the test. We got to see a ballot scanner and a voting booth (cool), talked about what to do if the scanner jams, and spent a lot of time on the BMD (the ballot marking device for people who need physical accommodations to vote.) The test was thorough, but it was open book, and there were a lot of friendly helpers around to assist us when we had questions or were unsure. When I say “assist,” I mean, for the record, tell us the correct answer.

Pollworking in NYC is a 17 hour day: 5am (an hour before polls open) to 10pm (an hour after they close.) When we arrived at 5 we entered into a 1 hour sprint to set up the voting stations, the layout of which is specified by diagrams of justice. Unwrap the ballots! Set up the ED Identification Sign! Prop up the Election Information Holder! There was no briefing ahead of time about what was happening, issues we might be facing, how to handle expected questions. It was a race against the clock. My first voter showed up at basically 6:00:01am, because of course there is always someone like that at the party.

Here’s how it worked. Someone comes in to vote. We look them up by name, which is sometimes easy and sometimes (multiple last names or someone who uses both an English name and a name in another language) it’s a mess since there is no rhyme or reason to how that works except for the thinking of the data entry clerk who entered your name. Democracy, you remember, is enacted by people. 90% of the time, we have you, you sign, theoretically I check your signature but I don’t really check your signature that hard, I give you your ballots, and away you go. 

Sometimes there’s a mistake - these ballots can be confusing - and so we mark your first ballot void and give you a new one. The woman I was poll working with had incredibly shaky hands. She ripped a lot of ballots and so we had to void those and hand out new ones (no shade; she was hilarious, old, and had a lot of stories about how she liked to party.) Pretty straightforward.

But if anything is not right in the voter registration book, we can hand you an affidavit ballot. That’s it. Not there despite thinking you’re registered? Affidavit ballot. Think your party is wrong? Affidavit ballot. Not in the books at all? Affidavit ballot. You can also go to the court in your borough and get a court order to vote, but from where we were there was no way in hell anyone was ever going to go down to the court, wait on line to see a judge, come back, and then vote. So you can fill out an affidavit ballot, in which you give a reason why you think you should be able to vote and it goes into the envelope for affidavit ballots. No one ever explained this form to me so I hope I did it right. At my table, we handed out something like 170 ballots and had another 30 affidavits in the end. The guy running my voting site said temps count them. Of course they do. It’s America!

BUT HERE IS THE THING: THERE ARE A MILLION MORE PARTS TO IT THAN THAT. If someone is marked SHOW ID in the polls, I need to see ID, check the correct box on the registration book, put the right number ID code on the right line (where is this code list? No one mentioned this at first), and initial. If someone votes by affidavit, I log that too. If someone’s signature doesn’t match - if they sign “Sandra Martinez” but their signature is in the book as “S Martinez” - we are supposed to challenge them, meaning they have to sign an extra oath saying they are who they say they are. This didn’t happen. There are tons of tiny details and they don’t really cover it in pollworking class and they certainly don’t remind you as you’re doing the work. You are supervised by a few people who know more, and they clearly do know more but in the way where there is a lot of “oh, that doesn’t really matter” and “don’t sweat it, you can just do it at the end.” I at least caught the part in the manual where it said to log affidavit ballots, so I caught up around noon instead of being stuck writing them all in at the end. 

The nominal point of this system is that it is detailed in order to ensure that everyone has the same experience, and in the name of that the whole system and process is very carefully laid out. Of course those narrow prescriptions don’t cover everything and failure is inevitable. Voting booths should be 5 feet apart, but the whole space we had was only probably 10x50 at most so that was physically impossible. People aren’t supposed to go into voting booths together but of course I am not going to tell a 85 year old grandma that the younger person she arrived with can’t go in with her because of Her Right To Democracy, even though for all I know that person will vote for her. There are an impossible number of rules, and these technical failures are where you put party lawyers with thousands of hours of experience and incentive to win against pollworkers with 4 hours of training and incentive to be nice to people.

I am going to be working as a pollworker tomorrow for the primary. I’ve been assigned, mysteriously, to be a Republican table inspector, which means that I am the guy who will actually be handing out ballots - in this case, to some of the Republicans of lower Manhattan, of which there are 160 in the district I will be working. Here are some pieces of misc trivia - while I am 100% sure I am not allowed to tweet at my table, I will be thinking of the internet fondly and hope to report back with MANY MORE FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS.

1) My handbook is a step by step guide to how to be a table inspector on the order of “Lay the items for your table out on the table according to the diagram,” and “confirm the contents of the Grey Transport Bag (grey), the ED Supply Envelope (manila), and the ED Supply Cart.” The whole point is to make sure that no one starts improvising so everything is fair in that way where the system defines fairness as “exactly the same for everyone.” So if something sucks, either they didn’t follow directions (which can carry penalties up to and including legal action) or the directions suck. 

This is what democracy looks like (taken right from my handbook):

2) Who is stuffing these Grey Transport Bags and ED Supply Carts? I have no idea. If it is consonant with the rest of America, probably underpaid temps brought in for just enough time to do the work. Somehow that feels very American: the most important logistics of our democracy (the ballots, the voter roll books) are quite possibly being handled by underpaid workers who don’t have any job security. I DON’T KNOW THIS IS TRUE, OKAY I’m just speculating based on years of living in this country and watching our labor practices.

3) Poll workers work a 17 hour day (arrive at 5am and if I’m lucky I can leave an hour after the polls close, at 10pm.) That is a long-ass day full of the possibility of contention and likely also boredom (see: 160 total Republicans for my table.)

4) For this, I will be paid $200, plus another $100 for my 4 hour training (which I only get since I’m working.) $300/21 = $14.30/hour. If I didn’t count the training, it would be $11.77/hour. 

5) If you are not in the rolls correctly, I can do 2 things: offer you an affidavit ballot or a court order form for you to go to the judge. You are welcome to take either, although if you come back with a signed court order you get to do a regular ballot. But just vote either way. Remember: democracy is made by people who are sitting and typing shit into forms for hours a day and they make typos or can’t read your handwriting or hate the world because they’re doing this 8 hours a day and don’t have a window.

(Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a free-to-use photo of people of color working at computers, since that is who is probably doing this work? Very hard. Stock photography is super racist. But that’s another discussion for another day...)

5) There will likely be lines. If you have to go to a judge, there’ll be a line. If your neighborhood is particularly passionate, there will be a line. If you look up your district ahead of time, you won’t have to wait in the address lookup line, and that will help. You can do this here: https://voterlookup.elections.state.ny.us/ - you’re looking for your Election District and Assembly District numbers. Did you know that if you will have less than 4 hours to vote both before and after work (so let’s say you work a 9-6), your job has to let you give you up to 2 hours paid to go vote? You had to request this in advance, but it is the law. (Warning: that’s a PDF link.)  

6) If you think your party registration is wrong, you can vote by affidavit ballot. I’m not sure if you can go get a court order or not because my step-by-step booklet doesn’t say. But you can take your affidavit. Note: if you were registered, but not as a Democrat, you had to switch your party affiliation last October to vote in this primary. LOL. Democracy is run by private parties with no formal regulation by the government as a whole! Hey! Remember that part! Public-private partnerships rule!

7) Anyone can challenge you at any time. If this happens, you sign the challenge oath, which varies a little depending on what the grounds are but you solemnly swear you should be allowed to vote. Then you vote a normal ballot. Lying is a misdemeanor. Please note that (as far as I can tell) your vote would still be counted, because they can’t tie your vote to a specific ballot. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’m wrong.

OK SO YOGA TEACHER NOTES. These are very rough.

First I have to be honest and say that I feel like this was an enormous ideological challenge in the same ways that I feel a lot of ideological difficulty with a lot of plus size exercise. The rest of the world is like HARDER BETTER FASTER STRONGER and then the fat world is like do what you can! do your best with what you have! make it work for you! Adapt adapt adapt! And I understand that part of that is that some fat people have really restricted ranges of motion and need to build strength. But is some of that also some kind of latent fatphobia, the unwillingness to allow fat people to push themselves? Is that in itself me being fatphobic by making assumptions? I know I carry a lot of shit around and I know that it is not at all easy. I come from a movement world that is not at all up for that: you do what you are supposed to do. That is your job. So this is ideologically somewhat difficult for me.

Some anatomy/general notes he mentioned:

-       larger people tend to have problems in their low back, glutes, and front of hips and tend to supinate the foot (aka walk on the outside), which leads to a relatively weak inner thigh, which can in turn lead to knee problems.

-       the scale of movement is larger. Fat people need more time to arrive in a pose, arrange themselves, et cetera.

-       The floor and gravity are hard for a lot of fat people. You should demonstrate ways in and out of the floor.

-       Let people use two mats set next to each other. Wider body needs a wider space.

-       Fat people have to work harder to keep from toppling backwards because when sitting on the ground with your legs in front of you (aka dandasana), fat people’s abdomens are not adequately counterbalanced by their legs, so it is harder not to grab.

-       Fat people are going to have a really hard time asking for help in mixed-size classes so you should watch their breath for indications of distress (which is true for everyone, but still)

We did a lot of talking about props. I hate props generally speaking. He talked about how a lot of people hate props because they think they’re cheating. Well. Bring me up short.

What he said was smart. People can use blocks to create stability for themselves if the blocks are big enough. Bolsters can give people a chance to relax into poses and open that they couldn’t do if they had to hold themselves stable at the same time. Straps can help stabilize the legs. Blocks can help engage the inner thighs. There is no reason not to use chairs for both seated poses and stabilizing standing ones.

This is SO HARD FOR ME. Because it does feel like cheating. I am not sure what to do with the idea that this should be easy or at least not hard. Right now, because of some sacrum stuff I need to get more serious about addressing, I have really unsteady warrior/triangle/etc poses with my left leg front. Oh right! I could just use a chair! Or blocks! But somehow to admit that feels a) like cheating and b) like how will I ever be able to do it again if I don’t do it with the prop? Why would I make this easy?

However, this basic idea is on point and also I need to chill the fuck out. How often do I see people in classes who aren’t able to do things in a well-aligned fashion, but who can get their bodies close, and so they get away with it? How often do teachers give harder variations and everyone does it, even people who can’t yet? I mean, I do that. It is very interesting to think how this point of view might play out in a “regular” yoga class. What if everyone used chairs for a day? To really go into the alignment of poses?

Some of what we did:

1)    a series opening up the ribs/chest with bolsters (d & e were largely separate but I am putting them here for organizing’s sake):

a.     lying with the bolster along the spine

b.     lying with it in the lumbar curve perpendicular to the spine + a block to hold the head up (ie the shoulder blades are off in space)

c.     lying with two bolsters perpendicular to each other, one long ways lying on top of one short ways, and lying on the top one a la the first version, and rolling back and forth along the bottom bolster.

d.     Lying on your stomach with the bolster along the belly, bringing the arms slowly overhead. (superman style)

e.     Lying on your stomach with the bolster at the thighs, bringing the arms slowly overhead. (superman style)

2)    A seated/standing back and forth sun salutation using one and two chairs in various ways.

(standing – forward bend onto chair – flat back with hands on chair – lift R leg - bring back to a lunge – move front foot so you can just see your ankle under the chair – lift up to warrior 2 – bring arms forward from lunge – step together – repeat)

3)    A seated/standing series on chairs moving through a low lunge a la crescent lunge (the internet tells me this is called anjaneyasana) and a variant on a half moon (ardha chandrasana) (thanks internet!) – this one is hard to describe so I will try later.

4)    Some cool strap stretches that are not thaaaat different from anything I’ve done before (stretching hamstrings into a large twist while lying down, etc).

5)    Generally speaking some cool variations/ideas about how you could work with bodies and props to make them easier (how to build comfortable childs poses with bolsters under the joints, etc)

Again, the most striking part of all of this was the thing that I fight with all the time. What is it to become virtuosic in this work in a different way, one that I find more foreign because it is less about complicated movement tricks? What is it to demand excellence and push your students, and can you do that in a way that is not at its core shame-based given how mean the world is?

1) a bad performance

2) a lot of forward rolls, backward shoulder rolls, aikido rolls

3) daily unicycle practice (so far, no good)

4) lots of theater games

5) based two-high and a bunch of new fun partner acro flips, etc

6) decided i really, really need to keep going to the gym

7) learned i am not as weak as i think i am

8) still no pushups. :(