Sabra is not here to get in policy discussions with people's secretaries.

I'm hard at work in the food court. Hard at work at blog-journal-diarying. Sabra and Jason came and sat down to, hopefully, to keep me company. I like that I have friends who will work toward winning a crazy-ass vitriol-fired fitness competition, not to be healthy per se, but to win.

Anyway, today has been very hectic. My nightmare nonprofit client's special legislative day was today. There were kids all over the building, some of them really special. It's made me re-think my position on participating more with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, maybe taking on a little. Apparently, I'm getting soft.

Sadly, the Capitol Police would not give the kids a tour of the grounds, so I had to take care of that business. I did my best to make it a tour that could span kids whose ages were between seven and fourteen. I'd like to think that I was successful, but I likely failed. Kids don't care where the Supreme Court is or what it does. But they did think it was kind of cool that they really couldn't go in and tour the building, like there was some real mission impossible stuff going on in there.

When we were going into the capitol, I asked if anybody remembered the November Election -- they did not. But they vaguely remembered that somehow we had a new governor, and I told them that it was important that, when entering the capitol, they be very quiet and on their best behavior, because the Governor needed it quiet to think.

The adults laughed.

The kids who participate in Big Brothers, Big Sisters, come from disadvantaged backgrounds. One of them was telling me about how she had been to Carson "every month for as long as she could remmeber to visit [her] daddy in the prison." It was heartbreaking. Or at least it would be, if I had a heart, which you all know I do not so quit your staring already, ok?

Her telling me that made me think of the time I toured Lovelock State Prison when I was on the campaign trail -- a few years ago, I guess, now. We got to go into the yard and the kitchen and actually spnet a lot of time interacting with the actual prisoners. At the time, I wasn't think about any of those men as people's fathers so much as just people who had broken the law.

I wonder how many of them have families who visited them? Did they have kids? I also wonder, how come I didn't think of that at the time? I toured the prison, met people, complimented one guy who was showing off his cell which he had kept clean enough that the Warden gave him permission to tape some pictures to the wall.

This is a tangent -- but the prison is a really horrible place. The energy coming from the place -- and I'm sure you know I'm not one of those crazy hippie folk who talk about energy and such -- but it was so negative there. Even walking up to the place you can just feel the angst and the sadness. Or whatever it was -- maybe that's just what it's like to be in Lovelock.

Back to the point, the kids. They all seemed to have a great time. The got to talk to Assemblypeople and, even though they had little concept of who these people actually are, they thought it was really cool. One of them referred to Speaker Buckley as "the big kid in the middle," which I thought was sort of cute. Or stupid. And then, one asked me how much I made at my job. It went like this:

Kid: "Hey, do you get paid to be here?"
Me: "Yeah, this is my job."
Kid: "Wow. That's so cool."
Me: "Yeah, I really like it."
Kid: "How much do you get paid?"
Me: "I'm not sure that's polite to talk about."
Kid: "Awww, c'mon -- you can tell me. Is it more than $20?"
Me: "Um.. yeah. I make more than $20."
Kid: "WOW! More than $60? That's the most money I've ever seen."
Me: "Well, I'm not sure I make that much."

Then I changed the subject, because I don't talk about these things with kids I don't know. But then he asked me if he could have my job one day, and I told him he had to do good in school and work hard. But that's not really true -- some of the dumbest people I've ever met work in politics.

dts