Today I decided to vote for Barack Obama in the Massachusetts primary on Feb 5th. Subsequent to this decision, I read an interesting article in the New Yorker that ended up being kind of a character study of Hillary Clinton. The article made me like her more and empathize with her as a person and as a woman, but it didn't change my vote. I got more of a sense of the causes of her current affect and positions and a stronger narrative that makes her movements and statements cohesive in a way they hadn't been before (at least for me). I also got the guilty sense that it's her very womanhood (her experiences as a female-identified person living in the US, to be more specific) which has formed the opinions that I find hard to take. Her combativeness, competitiveness, and inability to show her humanity make her an unappealing candidate, one who resembles the garden-variety politician more than any sort of "new" choice. Her policy ideas and style of governance are not interesting or compelling to me and I see no reason to think that she will change those any time soon. Not to mention that voting for a woman simply because of the "fact" of her female-ness goes against all my training and belief. (Though there is definitely a political and social need for women-as-symbols in prominent political positions. See Condoleeza Rice for the ways in which this need can be fulfilled and stymied simultaneously.)

In short, it turns out that I'm just like the rest of the American people: prepared to vote not on the issues, or any concrete sense of how to change things, but rather on the emotional desire for change and the feeling that the rhetoric of hope is a good start on hope itself.

Work sucks more than usual this week. Today, I seriously considered quitting after this week - that is, if they don't let me go first :) Then I wondered what job I could possibly find that would be any better. I begin to sense why I might be looking for hopefulness in a political candidate; I get enough cynicism every day, just listening to my own thoughts. I have pretty much completely given up on the internship. I think I can trust the fact that I NEVER work on it to signify that perhaps I am not "on board". Now I need to figure out if/when I should tell Carol about this and whether I should allow myself to a) be swayed by her attempts to get me to stay, b) be offended if she doesn't make any such attempts, or c) put this off for several more weeks. If I quit the internship, do I have to start working full time? If I don't work full time, will I experience such overwhelming ennui that I will begin to miss the internship? Is change worth it? Maybe it's easier to just go along with the current program until I reach the edge of the world and fall off.