Hullabaloo: Convention wisdom

It occurred to me this morning that the final night of the last convention --- the big one, where everyone was giddy with excitement over the prospect of Barack Obama as president --- was a kind of metaphor for me. Everything started out just great. I hadn't planned to go to the Big Speech and had thought to watch it on TV in a bar or at the big tent with some other bloggers. But as the day wore on I realized that it was an historical moment so at the last minute I jumped on a nice air conditioned press bus and got into the stadium quickly and efficiently. Everyone was so happy and excited. We were all talking amongst ourselves, strangers feeling part of a Big Thing together. By the end everyone around me was teary eyed and hugging one another. (As you know, I'm dead inside, so I wasn't quite that moved by the whole thing.) But there's no doubt that the feeling was electric.

And then we all left the stadium for our buses. And they weren't where they were supposed to be. People were milling around confused, I was one of them, wandering all over the parking lot like a bunch of blind salmon, wondering what had gone wrong. I couldn't find any officials anywhere. Bus drivers sent me in different directions. I walked around the stadium several times until I finally gave up and walked back to town in the middle of the night with a group of strangers.

The next morning the airport was so crowded that I had to wait in line for over two hours and nearly missed my plane. They lost my luggage. It took two weeks to get it back and from the looks of it it had been around the world as many times as I'd walked around that stadium that night.