The Luxury of Serendipity

It's odd to check my email accounts and find no press releases from political campaigns or organizations. No rallys or canvasses are scheduled. My phone isn't ringing non-stop.

It's somewhat disconcerting to have time to poke around the web at a leisurely pace and be entirely serendipitous instead of obsessively scanning for info I might need to cover. It's a relief to realize that if I post only once or twice a day instead of six or seven, I no longer feel guilty, traitorous to the cause. I'm even tempted to visit -- dare I say it -- nonpolitical websites and blogs, or read a novel, or sit out back and stare at the sky.

I'm finally absorbing the fact that it's okay to take a deep breath and relax. The rats are leaving the ship of state, and they won't be back anytime soon. New Mexico's Congressional delegation is True Blue. Democrats gained important House and Senate seats in the New Mexico Legislature. Our extraordinary Bernalillo County Clerk and her team remain intact. All is well (at the moment) in Blogville. 

In that spirit, I offer a time-wasting list I stumbled on that reveals 50 things you might not know about President-Elect Obama -- including these:

• His favorite meal is wife Michelle's shrimp linguini
• He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali
• He can speak Spanish
• His favorite book is Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• His desk in his Senate office once belonged to Robert Kennedy
• His favorite films are Casablanca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• His favorite music includes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bach and The Fugees
• He took Michelle to see the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing on their first date
• He enjoys playing Scrabble and poker
• He would have liked to have been an architect if he were not a politician
• His favorite fictional television programs are Mash and The Wire
• His favorite artist is Pablo Picasso
• He keeps on his desk a carving of a wooden hand holding an egg, a Kenyan symbol of the fragility of life
• His late father was a senior economist for the Kenyan government

I love Casablanca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest too, in case you're wondering.

I bolded the one about wanting to be an architect because I know it will tickle Mary Ellen (the architect) when she reads it. Seems a really, really significant number of people have informed her over the years that if they weren't a XXXXX, they'd like to be an architect. They usually add, "Except I have trouble with math." I wonder why Obama left that out.

PS: I can vouch for the fact that the lives of most architects bear no resemblance to how they're usually shown in the movies or on TV. The firm's PARTNERS are the architects who live like that. The rest just work their asses off for not enough pay, like the rest of American's working stiffs, though most of them do seem to love the work -- except when everything cool has to be cut out of the building because of cost over-runs, or the lawsuits kick in.