This is a Kinda Grouchy Post Food Poisoning Post

And it starts like this.  

Lobbiest says, as I wait patiently for my Senator to finish talking outside chambers (My honing abilities for locating her in precise moments is really quite good). 

"Smile!"

So, I say:

"It's only female assistants who get told to smile right, not the male lobbiests"

and he says 

"What?"

I genuinely think he could not (chose not to) "hear" me.

"Oh, I said the secretaries can smile but the Senators can be grim right?"

"Oh, Yeah"  he looks at me slightly cross-eyed.

Later I see him again.  "Oh, now you're smiling!"

The smiling thing has been a steadfast way for creepy folks I don't know to act like they know me this session.  It is just because I like my job and am generally happy.  Not because I don't think you're a senseless egomaniac with a fetish for blonds and a cackling laugh.  Might I add terribly misguided in your choice of political persuasion.  

And the toothpick guy?  Come on, they let him vote?

So, that's been educational.

When SK and I talked about Eliot Spitzer I concluded:  You know in politics guys are always trying to get in women's skirts and we are always trying to get them out, and be taken seriously.  It is a strange set of conditionings.

Shifting, shifting.

and someone else:

"Tough work huh?" when he sees me un-collating copies.  (Who would do it if I didn't?  A machine?  No.)

"Yeah, its really testing my intellectual capabilities."

Something does boil.  In my system.  

And the body will manifest stress as disease given the context of power that it is part of, and subjected through.

So, I was poisoned, and tired of smiling, and being kind, and just watching the sharp elbowed game.  I was it for a few moments today.  And I witnessed the three stooges clamber around together, thrilled with inexuberant euphoria, with all they had giveth and taken away.

Yuck.