On Super Tuesday

Today is Super Tuesday, and I am Super Excited.

It may seem like this is an odd post to be writing, considering that my blogging has been so absent for the last year, and there are far more interesting things going on in my life at the moment.

I don't really want to say that this is the most exciting day of the year, because obviously that'll be Election Night. And then it'll be Super Tuesday. Also, Jalyss and I are having a baby so I imagine that'll be in the top 5 or so.

For those of you who aren't aware, Super Tuesday is part of America's horribly convoluted political process, whereby citizens elect their President by first voting on a candidate for each party in each state, which then sends a certain number of delegates based on an archaic algorithm sorted by population, state size, and which states each party finds most important. Each candidate tries to get enough of these delegates to secure the nomination, but delegates can switch to support other people, even if they're only really there on the basis that the people of their state voted for them to support a certain person, and some of them aren't democratically selected but are literally just people whose opinions are considered to be more important.

It's somehow both too democratic, and not democratic at all, culminating in a situation where someone can win the popular vote, or the majority of states, or even more delegates, and still not get the nomination.

And the cornerstone of this hastily built edifice is Super Tuesday, when roughly a quarter of states and a third of the delegates are selected. Basically, it's where campaigns to become to the Presidential nominee live or die. Lose big on Super Tuesday and you should probably drop out; win most and you're likely to win it all.

It's incredibly fascinating, especially because this year it's likely to lead to the coronation of two candidates who will somehow be both the most and least popular politicians running. Donald Trump, a hairpiece with a mouth, is hated by 60% of the population, to the extent that his own party is currently trying to work out how to run against him, while Hillary Clinton is loathed by 59% of the country, including a significant proportion of the population who believe she should be in jail for "crimes" she committed while Secretary of State.

Behind them come Marco Rubio, a young (-ish), Latino Republican running on optimism and compassionate conservatism, who would seem to be exactly what a party with historic difficulties in attracting minorities would want to be able to win an election, were it not for the fact that those difficulties steam from a significant part of the party who are just out and out racist.

That isn't hyperbole, by the way; 31 % of Trump supporters (and 21% of all Republicans) think that White's are a "superior race", a third support banning not just all Muslims from entering the US (74% support that idea) but also all gay people. 38% wish that the South had won the Civil War, and 20% disagree with the Emancipation Proclamtion, Abraham Lincoln's Presidential decree that freed Southern slaves during the Civil War. By any measure, those are pretty extreme and pretty racist, positions - sourced here).

This week, in an amazing display of pandering to racists, Donald Trump refused to disavow the former head of the KKK, then said he didn't know about the concept of 'white supremacy', then blamed a microphone for not immediately distancing himself from them. In fairness to him, this may simply be down to the fact that Donald Trump is convinced of his own personal supremacy over everyone else in the world, and his own skin tone is default Terracotta, with a tinge of Oompa Loompa.

Unsurprisingly, Marco Rubio is struggling despite being the choice of the majority of the establishment Republican Party , because it turns out having million of dollars, dozens of endorsements, and an actual coherent policy platform, as well as wide appeal to a broad base, and a photogenic, articulate charm, doesn't mean much if you're a little bit browner than Edward Scissorhands.

Scissorhands for President, 2016

Behind him, or sometimes in front of him, and this is where it gets difficult, because at some points all three candidates have claimed victory in a state where only one of them has actually won, is Ted Cruz.

There's a bit in Shrek where he inflates a toad to act as a balloon, and Ted Cruz looks exactly like what I imagine that toad to look like now. He looks like someone has deflated a fatter man.

Ted Cruz looks like a cheap rubber Halloween mask of Ted Cruz's face came to life, and is running a Presidential campaign on the platform of unending winter. I would not be surprised to learn that Ted Cruz is actually an animatronic being controlled by a small slug floating inside his watery centre.

Nearly 40% of people can't conclusively tell you that he wasn't a serial killer who operated years before his birth (source), which is a good indication of how little people like him. His own colleagues have refused to endorse him, and he's running on the campaign slogan of 'trusTED' whilst facing charges of sending potential voters fake letters from the state to vote for him or face fines, and of lying about whether other candidates were even in the race anymore.

Tell me, does that this looks like an actual human being? Or does it look like what an alien visitor to Earth might think a human being looks like having intercepted our radio signals for decades.

He's the Christian candidate. Actually, he's one of the Christian candidates, but Ben Carson is so irrelevant to this process as to not warrant anymore mentions than this single sentence.

One the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton has been forced to remember that she's supposed to be on the left of the political spectrum, as uber-Pensioner Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist who joined the Democract's 6 months ago just to run for President, has run a grass roots campaign based around reminding people that Capitalism is a bit shit if you let a few people keep all the money for themselves.

Now, Sanders has about a 0% chance of actually winning the nomination, but it's now got to the weird point of Republicans being able to legitimately call their potential opponent a socialist, a word that's thrown at anyone who's a bit left of Eisenhower in America. He is 'Boy Who Cried Wolf'-ing it, in that it's actually probably part of his appeal that the word socialist has been so undermined by years of using it to describe anyone at all, that now an actual Socialist is running, everybody assumes he's just another liberal.

He's the kind of raging extremist that would look fairly standard anywhere else in the world, what with his calls for such un-American abominations as paid maternity leave, free public education for all, and regulations on banks to prevent future financial crises. The maniac.

So this is what I'll be doing all night - following along with the updates as they come in on who has won what. And probably crying at who has won what.

On Everything That I Haven't Written About Over The Last Six Months

Jalyss and I have now been married a little over ten months. That means we've passed the marker of when we could have had our first baby, which is important to note when you're a young Christian couple in America. Forget cleanliness because fecundity, here at least, is next to Godliness.

In fact, when people meet you and find out you're newly married, they immediately start looking for the baby. "How many babies you had?" is their way of measuring the time you've been married. So now we measure all units of time in terms of how many children we could have had, with actual calendar anniversaries being of significantly lesser importance.

This is all just a long winded way of saying that we're not pregnant yet. Definitively. Jalyss took a pregnancy test on Father's Day, just so I could see whether I needed people to make a fuss of me.

This kind of fertility update is exactly what I imagine most people are interested in about our life, but just in case you were actually hoping for more than a gestational confirmation that we're still without any additions to the family, here's what else has been happening.

Jalyss and I continue to compete to see who can work the most jobs. For a long time she was winning, as I couldn't work legally in the US. I got around that by doing some babysitting and writing reviews of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; a show with too much punctuation in its title, and too little characterisation or plot in its episodes. Neither of these roles made me the primary breadwinner, as I only earned $2 a article.

Fortunately I am now able to work and the jobs arms-race has really taken off, as we now have three jobs each. I work part-time at a local independent coffee shop, the delightful Mocha Monkey, where my main role seems to be confusing customers who think that I'm Australian. I've just started working two days a week at The Blessing House, which is hard to actually describe other than to say it's someone who has opened her home so that anyone can come in and relax there at any time of the day, and they need volunteers which I'm helping them find.

Finally, I work overnights at a crisis centre for disabled young-adults with behavioral problems. My first day there involved me being locked in the office by other staff to prevent a client from attacking me, so it's got the sort of whimsy that means you can't predict what will happen day-to-day, and frequently don't want to try. Usually, however, it's not that exciting; I'm there solely to support the main members of staff should there be a behavioural or medical emergency, so I go downstairs and sleep in the games room, which is a fair-sized space whose homeliness is undermined by the persistent stench of urine (a consequence of working in a place where people combine their responses to stress, displays of anger, and favorite activity into one ongoing attempt to find exciting new places to piss).

We've started to build some great new friendships with a few local couples which has served us well as through them we've got hold of an air-conditioning unit. This is essential, as I am already starting to wilt from Minnesota's summer. As fierce as their winter is, their less talked about summer is proving more of a burden for someone who is unused to temperatures in the double digits. Actually, it turns out that A/C has an exciting history in Minnesota, as the worlds first in-home unit was installed in Minneapolis in 1914. Of course, there's also the horrible correlation between the rise of air-conditioning and Southern Republican presidencies which is startlingly direct.

The VISA process continues, as glacial as ever. Entire civilisations have risen, fallen and risen again (although, it should be noted, not here in America) in the time it's taken for my four month VISA approval to happen, but I've finally been accepted as a 'Conditional Permanent Resident', an oxymoronic statement which says I'm able to live here indefinitely unless they decide I can't.

This is great news though because it means we are hopefully going to be able to come back and visit the UK this December. I couldn't leave until my VISA was at this point (or rather, I could leave, but I couldn't reenter). I'm looking forward to a real English Christmas; i.e. one without any snow.

On Winter

Forget war and other people, to listen to the people of Minnesota, winter is hell. The French learnt it in 1812 when they invaded Russia, the Germans learnt it in 1941 when they invaded Russia, and Minnesotans let me know all about it from the moment I moved here, months ago,

Minnesotans have a proud tradition of hyperbolic apprehension about the onset of the winter, and whilst they love to emphasise their ability to overcome the obstacles that the treacherous weather will bring, they also want you to know that you will get frostbite and die should you ever step outdoors between November and May. This slightly schizophrenic traits of describing a terrible, all consuming threat whilst also acknowledging that it won't actually make that much of a difference to their day-to-day lives is essentially the opposite of England's approach to the inclement climate.

We, after all, will readily accept that our weather is probably best described as tepid. Our summer is lukewarm but rarely scorching, and our winter is best described as 'nippy'; a word containing all the threat of a teething toddler. The worst we're expecting to face is a day of sleet, followed by three days of ice on the pavement and a national decision to take an ever increasing series of snow-days. Ditching work to go sledging is helped by a transport system that's crippled by a brisk nor'easter, let alone an actual cold front. We're a nation moving around on trains that can't navigate the wrong kind of ice, cars that collapse under a blanket of snow and entire airports abandoned for fear of frost.

But we take a perverse pride in our inability to deal with an annual event, as though every time it somehow comes as a surprise to us that the seasons have changed. The fact that it only happens once each year seems to be enough of an excuse for us to greet every snowfall as an excuse to just surrender to the weather and not go take part in our actual life commitments.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota it snows a foot overnight and nobody even notices.

Wampa Cave, Hoth Minneapolis, MN

Jalyss sent me out to shovel the snow a few days ago, A shovel isn't the same as a spade, I've learnt. You have to scrape the pavement, shattering through the lower layers of permafrost in order to shift the snow above. It's deep, compact stuff, forming the kind of strata usually reserved only for geology. On the top is a fine powder of fresh snow which blows around in the constant gusts, creating an icy fog that drops the line-of-sight to a few hundred metres and freezes the hair on your beard.

A beard is essential in Minnesota. It's not just a hipster affectation (like my record player), but a facial necessity. It constantly astonishes me that women make it through the year, because the extra cover of coarse hair is sometimes the only thing that prevents my face from sloughing away and my entire jaw dropping off, like a sub-zero approximation of the Nazi's at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, with less melting and more straight up shattering. When I say that my beard freezes, that isn't hyperbole. In the time it took me to clear the drive, my beard solidified, and the really crazy thing is that I didn't even notice until I came back inside and the heat melted it down the front of my chest. You know you're acclimatising when you no longer feel the need to keep track of whether your facial hair is forming it's own snow cone.

All of this is observed by the locals to be the hallmarks of an exceptionally mild winter, and whilst it's true that I haven't pulled a Captain America and woken up totally encased in ice more than two or three times, I don't especially appreciate the assumption that it gets worse than a wind chill of -40. That's -40 F, by the way. In C, it's - 40. - 40 is the temperature at which temperature conversion apparently just gives up and stops bothering.. Frankly, I don't know how to deal with double digit temperatures in either scale. I didn't even know that temperatures went down like that in anything other than a theoretical way. Meanwhile, everyone here seems quite disappointed by how easy this winter has been, as though all their doom-saying and warnings have been in vain, and the inevitability of my awakening to the harsh reality of life here has been lessened. It's as if I'd gone out on the moors during a full moon and come back the next day without having been attacked by a werewolf, and everyone is bitterly aggrieved about it.

It's like I won't be truly accepted until I've lost at least three digits to frostbite. Fortunately, it's only January, so we still have four more months of Winter to go. So I'm just going outside, and may be some time.