Despite showing early promise for efficiency, the meeting devolved down into the lower circles of tedious craziness to which we always knew it would descend. It kicked off so innocently, with introductions and a rousing pep talk by one of the Washington freshmen from a Denver district. Then the bulk of the morning was spent debating a document explaining how delegates would be chosen to go to the presidential candidate nominating committee next summer. It's super complicated now that we have both a caucus and a primary system, the latter for the top of the ticket, and the former for the rest. If I am going to meet my goal of going to national convention, I'm going to have to work a whole lot harder than I expected to.
The guy who drove us down and I were there as alternates. We did get seated, but we weren't sure until right before meeting time. One of the agenda items was the resolution to eliminate alternates and replace them with directed proxies instead. I really didn't want to support that part, but it was lumped in with a bunch of other rule changes, and it was more popular among the rest of the group. It won't take effect until the next re-organization meeting, in 2021, so I can continue to be an alternate through this cycle.
After "lunch" (They had only breakfast burritos and tamales that weren't gluten-free - what's up with that, Dems? Do better!) the debate got even worse. Maybe I was extra cranky for not having anything to eat all day, but I was getting frustrated with the idealists trying to change the language of the platform. I'm much more of a pragmatist, and I agreed with others like me that the pie-in-the-sky language was going to undercut us to the point of losing in places where we desperately need a pick-up.
By 1:30 in the afternoon, I was tired. By 2:30, I was sick at my stomach (my empty, empty stomach). By 3 I was sure I was dying, and I desperately wanted to leave. I had started to spike a fever, I had a headache, and my whole body hurt. I had already started whining at my driver that I was losing patience with the process. By 3:08, I was holding up my phone to my partner, saying that if we weren't voting on the platform resolutions by 3:15, I didn't give a damn anymore, I wanted to leave. I think we started voting at 3:13. Really hard to care about points of order and technical word changes when you're tired, sore, and cranky. We bailed right after that. Tomorrow is going to be a down day to compensate. I decree it. I have made a motion, seconded it myself, and the motion has passed unanimously on a voice vote.
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