Today I voted. It was kinda fun, and it was even better that I didn’t have to wait in line for two hours at a senior center or elementary school with a bunch of other losers to do so.

I was only allowed to vote for three things: President, Senator, and Representative. I guess that comes with the territory when you’re using a mail-in ballot and you’re located “overseas” (Let’s call the Gulf of Mexico a “sea”). That may have been an advantage, too, because I didn’t have to take the time to be a Well-Informed Voter and read through all the other ballot issues. I also didn’t have to tolerate months and months of ads about how Amendment X will take your guns away and give your children to the state; or, how Candidate Y is really a mass-murdering Feminazi, and therefore soft on crime… and she’ll raise your taxes!

One interesting thing about the ballot (spoiler alert!): Whoever said that the US is a two-party system was a bit off. Sure, there are only two parties that matter, but there are actually 16 different choices for President. What a country! Play some 1950s-style shopping music and have a look at these parties you can choose from:

-Republican
-Democratic
-Constitution
-Libertarian
-Green
-HeartQuake ‘08
-Prohibition
-Socialist Workers
-Boston Tea
-America’s Independent
-Socialism and Liberation
-U.S. Pacifist
-Unaffiliated
-Socialist, USA
-Unaffiliated
-Objectivist

This is great! I couldn’t make up some of these parties’ names if I tried! “HeartQuake ‘08”? “Boston Tea”? “Prohibition”? I love it! Pure comedy gold, guys. I also love how there is evidently so much disunity in the modern American Socialist reality that they need three parties to represent them. Also, isn’t Objectivism somehow related to Literary Theory? I know I wasn’t the best student in that Grad School Seminar, but I’m almost expecting the next election to have a tight race between the Semioticists, the Neo-Hermeneutics, and the Post-Structuralists.

Basically, it seems that any whackjob with a bit of a grudge against the “gub’mit” can form his or her own party and run for President. In fact, don’t be surprised if you have the option of voting for the Whackjob Party’s candidates in 2012: President Ryan Sitzman and Vice-President LaToya Jackson (a shrewd political move on my part designed to get out the lady-vote and the African-American vote).
Now that’s the American Dream!

Anyhow, my friends, this was the easiest voting experience I’ve ever had. Now it’s just up to the Correos Postal Service of Costa Rica and the US Postal Service to quickly and efficiently get my ballot to the County Clerk’s Office in Boulder, Colorado.

In no time, my ballot should be in a cardboard box in a shed behind the San Ramón Correos building, and I can be sure that by November 4th, I’ll be a newly disenfranchised voter.

Vote or die, kids.

PS-I think “Votation,” the title of this post, may actually be a word, but I just put it up there as a tribute to some of my old elementary school students. Whenever they wanted to say an English word that they didn’t know, they’d just use a Spanish word and add “-ation” to the end, thereby making it “English” somehow; ie: “Mesation,” “Pegation,” “Chunchation,” or “Lapization.”
Thank God I don’t teach Elementary School anymore.