Every day I wake up.
I brush my teeth. I check the FiveThirtyEight election tracker. I eat breakfast. I check the FiveThirtyEight Election tracker again. I leave my apartment. I check the FiveThirtyEight Election tracker again.
SEE ALSO: Finding humor in an absurd electionBy the most conservative of estimates,USA I check the FiveThirtyEight Election tracker 600 times a day.
It doesn't even update as frequently as I check it! At the time of writing, it's 78.8 percent Hillary Clinton to 21.2 percent Donald Trump. Where will it be in 2, 20 or 40 minutes? I'm not sure. But I need to know.
When I close my eyes, I see the colors of the states. Quiz me. Minnesota, currently? Light blue. Nevada? Even lighter blue. Alabama? Blood red.
When it started, I treated it like a new social media platform I had to look at when I started and ended my day. But soon, I was looking at it more than I ever looked at Instagram or Twitter combined. Now it's my entire world.
I was trying to sound impressive, earlier, when I was bragging about brushing my teeth and leaving my apartment. I don't do anything anymore. I just check the tracker, and write posts on Facebook and Twitter about where the tracker is at.
This, of course, comes at the dismay of my colleagues and supervisors, because I haven't shown up to work in several weeks. I don't exactly understand why they're upset, since I completely explained myself. However, I still receive emails like this almost daily.
But no one's taking this harder than my family, because I've locked myself away in a room with only internet access, Smartwater and Fritos until the election so I can just focus on tracking the election. And yet, I receive emails like this twice daily.
I will stay in one place, checking the tracker and making posts to the same group of people until the election. I'm registered out-of-state, so I won't even need to leave my home to vote because I've already completed my absentee ballot.
That is, unless we all agree to stop checking the tracker. I can either wait it out another month, or I can try to get my life back together starting now.
Either we all have to stop checking it or no one stops.
Either we all have to stop checking it or no one stops. I am not strong enough to stop on my own. Because even if I return to my typical life, and I leave my home and I go to work, I will, at some point in the day, encounter someone who brings up the tracker. And then I will spiral once again.
Because I know I'm not the only one! I might have taken it the furthest, but I'm not the only one who checks FiveThirtyEight more than three times a day.
So please, can we try to cool it? I need to go to work because I've run out of Smartwater and Fritos and my family refuses to buy me more, and I need to make some money first.
Topics Donald Trump Elections Hillary Clinton
“Mating” Book Club, Part 4: Socialism vs. Capitalism. Fight.Judas: No One’s Favorite ApostleListen: An Archival Interview with Horton FooteOn the Pleasures of Escaping YourselfOn May Day, Read Tennyson’s “The May Queen”Remembering St. Nicholas Magazine for ChildrenSea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan by Nana AsfourHemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Sexual Anxiety of the Lost GenerationRemembering St. Nicholas Magazine for ChildrenHans Op de Beeck, Night TimeIn “Take a Girl Like You,” Kingsley Amis Got SeriousThe Gym as a Historical Temple of FitnessHow “The Pickwick Papers” Launched Charles Dickens’s CareerGoya’s Funny, Disquieting Drawings of Witches and CronesNabokov Knew How to Hate a PartyGunter Grass Is Dead at EightyNobuo Okano, Book RepairmanJudas: No One’s Favorite ApostleThe Paris Review of the Air—and Land, and SeaMeet the Man Who Translates Karl Ove Knausgaard Radical Chic by Lucy McKeon Heal Thyself by Maureen Miller Watch: Nicholson Baker Sings About Jeju Island by Sadie Stein All in a Single String by Maria Konnikova What We’re Loving: Stridentists, Oblivion by The Paris Review Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 2 by Katherine Bernard What We’re Loving: Watkins, Rothbart, Footman by The Paris Review Man Pulls Sword over Badly Treated Book: Happy Monday! by Sadie Stein What We’re Loving: Cocktails, Borges, Color by The Paris Review Letter from Portugal: Sonnets from the Portuguese by Sadie Stein Infinite Bikini, New Fitzgerald by Sadie Stein I Am the Artwork: Ai Weiwei on Film by Jillian Steinhauer Introducing Our Fall Issue! by The Paris Review Rare Books, Sharks, and Ink by Sadie Stein Kubrick, Steinbeck, and Stine, Oh My! by Sadie Stein “Thule, the Period of Cosmography”: An Illustrated Panorama by Jason Novak The Iliad, Improved: An Illustrated Panorama by Jason Novak Signatures, Notes, and Lists by Sadie Stein The Dark Lady, Potter Gowns by Sadie Stein Gurley Girls by Sybil Sage
2.3792s , 10138.6953125 kb
Copyright © 2025 Powered by 【USA】,Co-creation Information Network