• Two CRT TVs sitting on the curb, waiting for garbage pickup next to raked leaves.
  • The bumper sticker for a restaurant: “Has Lil’ Fat Gretchen Fed You Lately?”
  • Canvassing with Casey for the Democratic Party of Outagamie County (Wisconsin).
    • The energetic, competent, all-women team at the field office.
    • The household of two ay-runs: one Aaron and one Erin.
    • Another voter, H, who started out friendly and kind but who got unfriendly and unkind when I asked her one too many questions (admittedly, I was off-script, but I was curious and thought I had been respectful). It felt like the warmth and humanity between us drained in the space of a second. It was jarring.
    • The dismal astroturf-y suburban development they sent us to. A lifestyle I don’t want to arrogantly dismiss, but which feels somehow wrong to me. They shirk the diversity of cities without even the nice architectural patchwork of older (yet still homogenous) rural towns or a guiding ideal other than property sales. Of course, cities and older rural towns are partly built by money-focused developers, too. But at least they have the decency to have been built up by many money-focused developers over a long period of time.
    • How the second sweetest person we talked to was a Republican. The first sweetest was a Democratic mom who warned us that the neighborhood was super Republican-y.
    • Suffering only one door-slam rejection.
  • Going to the bathroom in a nice-ish Italian restaurant and walking in on a maybe ten-year-old kid throwing pebbles from the fancy-ish sink into the trash can, and him yelling, “SHIT!” presumably because I had seen his crime.