A Venti day

While I’m sure I must have been awake long enough to get up and turn my alarm clock off this morning, my first memory of today was rolling over in my warm bed and looking at the clock, which read a bold 7:03. Which meant I had to be ready in twelve minutes.

So glad I had the breakfast shift in college.

I was in a haze through getting to work and putting the final touches on, and then printing, a Dear Colleague. (Gotta love the smell of toner in the morning!) Once all 625 double-sided pages were prepared, I made my way down to the tunnels, where more staffers were finally starting to appear. Most had this in common: they looked exhausted, and many had giant coffee cups on their hands.

It was a Venti day because the budget vote didn’t close until 1:40 this morning. I know. I stayed up to watch it, curled up with my laptop tuned to CSPAN, almost exclusively for the purpose of going through that great Hill rite-of-passage that is watching a vote until insane hours of the morning. It was worth it just to be able to say, “wasn’t it so great when Barton voted and the crowd went wild?”

For the record, I consumed no coffee today.

I did, however, wear about every hat there was to wear in the office. The scheduler was sick, so I found myself working with an administration official’s scheduler to change the time of her boss’ meeting with my boss. The staff assistant was in and out all day, so I was also keeping tabs on the phones and the front office. It wasn’t until around noon that I remembered, “that’s right, I’m paid to write letters. I wonder if I’ll get to any of that today.”

The fun surprise was being asked to sit in on the aforementioned meeting with my boss and an administration official. Given my exposure to healthcare policy of late, I was very interested in this meeting and was terribly interested in being a fly-on-the-wall, but I was not there for decoration and certainly not for any sort of policy reason. However, my debate skills came in handy: my job was to flow the dialogue between the respective powers-that-be. I can’t even tell you how close I came to folding a few pages of my notepad into columns and holding my folio horizontally. If only I’d had more than one color of pen, I very well may have felt like I was in any given NEDA tournament… but I also quickly came to remember that I wasn’t going to be giving any speeches, so all the questions I was writing to the side of my shorthand statements were completely superfluous. Oops.

And then, since the budget vote debacle(s) apparently weren’t enough trouble for leadership to get into for one week, we decide this afternoon, right before our Thanksgiving recess, to tackle a couple easy conference committee votes… and a resolution on withdrawing from Iraq. Oh, yes, because we’ve not had anything else controversial going on lately… not like I’ve received about five hundred new letters this week… and I’ve so been itching to write yet another letter about Iraq. Oh goodie.

For those of you who really believe my optimism is untouchable: that was sarcasm.

Considering my complete lack of anything else of worth to say, I will close with two brief movie reviews from this week.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Coming to this story with little knowledge of Douglas Adams' literary world (if it is actually coherent enough to be referred to as such), I thought this was great. Purists, from what I understand, think the movie is too structured and story-like to accurate reflect the book(s), but for the rest of us, it’s just wonderfully funny. A pinnacle of mindless entertainment especially geared toward the sci-fi geek in all of us. Best thing about the movie: Alan Rickman as the despondent robot Marvin. Worst thing about the movie: the dolphin song. It was stuck in my head for days. But remember: you don’t need to panic as long as you bring your towel. You never know when you’ll need it.

Batman Begins – the world should be heartily glad that Warner Brothers decided to capitalize on the success of other comic strip based blockbusters. Compared to its Spiderman-Fantastic Four-and-company counterparts, this is clearly a dark film. However, it is an awesome dark film and raises some excellent questions about what justice is, the role compassion has to play in justice, the rise and fall of civilizations, what constitutes a vigilante, and why the Batmobile is just so darn cool. The all star cast makes it an even bigger hit (if nothing else, due to that moment of realization: “Batman is the guy from Newsies!!”). However, the local jury is still out on which character was most attractive: Bruce the predictable or the (okay, a little more than) slightly creepy doctor character. I appear to be the swing vote on this one, so stay tuned. :-P