Today’s soundtrack: should have seen his face when they were slapping on the cuffs!
Today at 12:02pm: participating in society



There are donkeys, elephants, and...penguins.

My polling station is at an art gallery called The Puffin Room. A “puffin” is a type of penguin, apparently. There are pictures of penguins on the sign. Our democracy is so sophisticated.

The space is crowded, and as per most places in downtown Manhattan, looks like a human Noah’s Ark, with at least two of every ethnicity. If you’re from out-of-town the last place you’ve seen that looked like this was the Star Wars Cantina. Greedo could walk into this place and no one would bat an eye.

“Are you the end of the line?” I ask a blonde SoHo-style woman. The Puffin Room is midway between SoHo and Chinatown, but this woman’s address is clearly more Greene than Mott.

“There are all different lines,” she says.

I look around the room, hoping they’re doing it in height order for the sake of ease--“To use this voting booth, you must be taller than this red line,” etc.--but I’ve no such luck. It’s line chaos in here; people are going every which way, like in an M.C. Escher drawing. Some people are upside down and queued up across the ceiling.

I find a polling official, who looks at my voter registration card and directs me to desk #38. Sitting at the desk are three more polling officials: A large black woman, a dimunitive Asian woman and a medium-sized white woman. You wonder if they plan these things.

Ahead of me on line, on the voter side of the table is a medium-sized Chinese woman, with bad teeth and perfect English. “So I fill this one out,” she says, holding a form.

“Yes, because you only get one vote per household,” says the dimunitive Chinese woman behind the desk, in thickly accented English.

“Umm...yyyyyeah, that’s not how it works,” says the medium-sized Chinese woman, patiently. In my belly, horror and laughter battle for control.

“You register in your husband’s name?” asks the smaller woman.

“Nnnno, I’m registered in my name,” says the medium-sized woman. “So I can vote.”

The smaller woman seems unimpressed.

The black woman takes my registration card and checks it against a list. She fills out a small ticket for me. “Take this over to your booth,” she says, pointing.

In the middle of the room are a series of booths with dark curtains. Some of them are attended by long queues of people. I see a tall black man striding towards the back of the room, and the familiar jacket and beret reveal him to be my Sabumnim (Hapkido master).

For some reason my booth has no line in front of it at all. It’s labeled BOOTH #38 but it should be labeled RAIN’S BOOTH...BYATCH.

A disaffected high school girl sits next to it; you can almost feel her dying to IM somebody. I hand her my ticket. She does something to the side of the booth, then motions that I should enter.

I step into the booth and draw the curtains shut, quelling a sudden urge to try a pair of jeans on. In front of me is a printed grid of names with little black switches next to them. At the bottom is a large, red-handled lever, oriented like a metronome needle, currently cranked to the left. Above the names are instructions in big black letters.

STEP 1: MOVE THE RED LEVER TO THE RIGHT. I grab the handle and crank it to the right, holding onto it tightly and suspiciously, half-expecting a trap door to pop open beneath me.

STEP 2: [MOVE THE BLACK SWITCHES TO SELECT YOUR CANDIDATES.] I do as told.

STEP 3: [MOVE THE RED LEVER TO THE LEFT.] I move it back with a wary eye on the floor.

That’s it. I’ve just helped select the next President and it took all of twenty seconds. I’ve spent more time on the phone ordering #34 from Excellent Dumpling House.

(“We don’t have Szechuan Chicken.”

“I said Sesame Chicken.”)

I step out of the booth, wishing I could hand the high school girl three sweaters I have no intentions of buying. These don’t fit right, and the blue one is itchy.

This is my first time voting, and I feel I need documentation. “Is there some kind of receipt, or ticket I can take?” I ask.

“Um...no,” says the high school girl, who sounds less convincing than Bush during the debates. Oh well. She probably thinks you only get one vote per household, two if you live in a duplex.

So I walk out of the penguin joint satisfied I have helped select the next leader of the (mostly) free world. My vote counts, like Helen Keller in chapter three.