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In just under a week’s time I, like so many others, will be casting our votes in the 2024 election, and I’m not a fan.

Of politics really. Find me something that has more anxiety and existential dread attached to it than an election, especially these days where apparently we’re required to yell at teach other during the decision making process. Go on. I dare you.

Either way, we will flock to the polls and do our part for democracy, which is something we should all take seriously. However, there is also a part of this that speaks to a more traumatizing moment in our lives.

Iowa Basics.

Yeah, I’m referring to those standardized tests that we took when we were younger, and maybe are still used today. Honestly, I’m a little bit out of the loop when it comes to these kinds of tests.

I hated these tests back in the day just because of the ovals. The ovals you had to fill in for each question. It was stress inducing especially for youngsters busy flying their pencils in mock dogfights.

Ahem.

We were always told to fill the ovals in completely, and told not to go outside the oval. Well how much outside is too much outside? Some of us weren’t at the top of the class when it came to coloring.

Some of us tended to be edgy and went outside the lines, but now there were standardized guidelines at stake and in the walnut that was my mind, this meant serious consequences for coloring outside of the lines.

With each oval filled, I spent an inordinate amount of time concentrating on staying within the boundaries of the oval with my trusty No. 2 pencil.

With stakes seemingly no less than the fate of the world to my feverish young mind, each squiggle outside of the line represented a possible ouster from my grade. Banishment to a realm without my friends, even though I’m pretty sure that’s not how the tests worked and clearly was an over exaggeration. I mean, our class had 13 kids. It’s not like I was never going to see them again.

All of this was compounded by the long columns of ovals that called for some kind of order when filling them out.

The columns were aesthetically pleasing in their own foundational layout and even more, when you had overactive imagination, like I did, there was a desire to try and fill the entire thing out in a pattern that showed off a skill Iowa Basics most assuredly wasn’t looking for.

The whole thing served as a trying experiment in patience for a kid who only wanted to get on his Nintendo at home.

Fast forward to today and those same thoughts tease to the surface when filling out a ballot. Even though people will hint that one vote could make a singular difference, we have to be honest that news outlets will not look at the ballot of an oval-obsessed editor in southeast Minnesota and say, “His vote changed the course of America.”

My vote is part of the overall  difference voting in general can make, if I can only make sure I’m getting the oval filled in correctly when that all important time is about us.

I will stand there and I will use the ball-point pen (a raising of the degree of difficulty with no eraser handy) to carefully fill in the oval, assured in some corner of my off-kilter thought process, that I’m changing America if I scribble outside of the line.

It’s absolutely a call back to Iowa Basics and I blame the tests completely for my need to fill in ovals as completely as possible, without going outside of the lines.

Am I looking into this entirely too much? Probably. Most definitely now that I think about it, but nevertheless it’s there in the back of my mind that I will be removed from my class if I don’t fill out the oval correctly.

Stupid Iowa Basics.