Day Trippin'

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Finally.  I could log out for the weekend.  Wow, what a long week.  I remember the days twenty years ago when Friday night meant being in the office until midnight at the earliest, but now, at 7:30 PM, I felt sort of worn down like a stubby pencil ready for the trash.  I don't know if it's the age or the mileage, or if it's just because I don't want to do the 80-plus hour weeks anymore so my mind won't let me go there anymore, even if my body could.  Those long hours cost me too much all those years ago and I'm done paying.  But this week's been a little more arduous than most, so that final logout seemed like an especially long time coming.  For one thing, I'm battling sinusitis and something with a complicated name that I was too busy coughing to catch that is essentially like asthma, but not asthma.  Whatever it's called, it scared me enough to cause me to go to the doctor for the first time in 14 years, and that took a lot.  And that's all on top of the whirlwind trip my daughter and I took to Harrisburg that stirred up old memories all for a cause that I'm not sure we did much to help win.  But, we did it and we were the only two from the whole entire western part of the state who did, so bully for us.  But, now, come Friday night, there wasn't much left in my tank, so I could do one of two things:  sit here and tell you about it or fold the laundry I washed a week ago.  Guess what I opted for?

But first I have to set the stage for the Legislative Action Day by taking you all the way back to the previous Tuesday.  There was so much stuff floating in the air during the day that I actually had a moment when I thought it was snowing.  It wasn't, it was actually a rather pleasant spring day, hovering in the 50's.  So it was cool and a little crisp when Marissa and I went to our first baseball game of the season and sat out in the coolish air breathing in whatever that was floating around for the next five hours.  By Wednesday, I was struggling a bit to breathe.  By Thursday, I wondered if I was getting sick.  By Friday, I had stopped wondering.  By Saturday, I wondered just how sick I was, and by Sunday, when we had tickets again, I was really hurting.   Come Monday, every ounce of me hurt, I was cold, tired, achy, and exhausted constantly because I couldn't really get my breath.  Ever.  Walking up my stairs had become an arduous experience.

The game plan was I would get up Tuesday morning at 5:00 AM, get ready for the trip to Harrisburg, pick Marissa up at 6:30 when she got off work and we'd take off from there.  I slept straight through the alarm until the regular 6:00 AM alarm.  Yikes!!  I had a half hour to shower, do my hair, make-up, take care of the dogs, cats and pull all my stuff together.  All while running a fever and not able to breathe.  Believe it or not, I did it in 35 minutes.  All of that.  But it's a good thing I didn't see a photo of myself until the next day or I would  have had a meltdown of some kind.  I did NOT look good.  So, there I was, advocating for the most important thing I can think to advocate for and looking like I could barely dress myself.  It's no wonder we weren't swaying our audiences like I thought we might.  But, anyway, we had a tight window to get to our first meeting, which was with my local representative, Hal English, so running late at all was not a good thing, and we're women so there's no way we were going to make a 3 and a half hour drive without a rest stop.  We had to have two.  Therefore, by the time we pulled up to the massive capitol complex, it was pretty much time for our first meeting.  I threw the car in a space on the street, fed the meter, and we hustled up the very long, long walk to the very long stairs to the front of the building, all the while my lungs refusing to cooperate and let in air.  I can't even imagine what poor Marissa must have felt like, after finishing up an eight hour overnight shift all on her feet and now hustling along with me on no sleep at all.  What a pair we must have looked as we burst into that mad, bustling building, which is really a gilded city within a city.  But we were there.  Which is more than I can say for Representative English, who was late to the meeting.  And the other team members who were supposed to be with us who never showed up at all. In fairness, he was caught at another event, where he had a photo op, I'm sure, and he gave us a fair amount of time to make our case, even though we could tell we weren't convincing him about the importance of the legislation we were there to pitch.  And what was that, you ask?

We had put ourselves through all of that for HB1959 and SB 1248, concurrent bills pertaining to the dissemination of materials to Pennsylvania parents annually from the school districts about eating disorders.  The bills also allow for guidelines to be developed for screenings and staff education.  That's a harder row to hoe in a state like this one, but they are optional, so they should not be large roadblocks to passage of something both so simple and inexpensive, yet so important.  Yet, as we went through the day, meeting with various staffers of various legislators from various parts of the state, it was easy to see that not everyone sees it with quite the same clarity as we seem to.  We touched some people, that was clear.  Others were barely polite, merely taking the meeting because we are voters and it's part of the gig.  In the meantime, the massive building was literally alive with all manner of other groups, lobbyists, school kids, staff and politicians.  It's a crazy quilt of humanity all vying for attention under the silent watchful eyes of beautiful art and statutes.  I can imagine it's hard to filter all that out to focus on the things that are truly important to your voters, when sometimes they don't even know what that it themselves.

And I also get why it's hard to make your voice heard above the din:  it's hard to get there.  The only way to drive it is on the tollway.  Forty-five dollars in tolls, thank you very much.  I looked at the train, but the times weren't right.  If I go there again, that's the way to do it, I've decided though.  But flying is out.  I looked at a little hopper and the cheapest flight I found was literally $875.00, and would have taken three times longer than driving.  Free access to our government is not free it would seem.

If I can do all of that as sick as I was and Marissa could do all of that as tired as she was, it should tell you it's important, so take a moment to write your local representative and tell them to please add their support.  Contact me if you need to know why.  Or just consider what we lost that made us willing to take such a hard road to try and see it through.