Meatspace Encounters

Between being out of town and cramming my paid gig work into what's left of my Ohio time, the blogging suffers. But I do actually get to see more folks up close and personal.

Two interesting folks:

1) A young woman standing across High St. from the Statehouse who kept repeating that she was "an independent contractor" when I asked if she was working with Citizens for Community Standards, Progress Ohio, etc. as she gathered my signature to put the stripper bill repeal on the ballot. I asked her who gave her the petitions to circulate. She repeated again that she was an independent contractor. Oddly enough, the way in which women are stripped of nearly all typical employee safeguards and protections at strip clubs is by being labelled "independent contractors" as opposed to club employees. I signed, as I like to see petition drives for ballot access succeed generally, but the evasiveness really turned me off. I still don't know exactly where she came from.

(I've heard a lot about where volunteers for the GIRFOF drive are recruited, but I've never been approached by one other than at the meeting last month. Sure, a score of 1 to 0 is pretty meaningless, but anecdotally, the strippers seem to be outhustling the teachers.)

2) Anyway, the other encounter happened at a bit of a distance in Burlington, Vermont. The Church St. Marketplace is a pedestrian mall with high-end boutiques and hippies selling hemp jewelry. In amongst the brunchtime crowd on Sunday Morning was a campaign table set up for Obama '08, staffed by two middle-aged women. They had signs for free bumper stickers, and they had other literature, but I couldn't really tell what, because both times I passed the table there were too many people crowded around the table for me to get a good look. Vermont's primary is on March 4,2008. Same as Ohio's.