Hat, Meet Ring

I've complained about election season before, and the main reason for my disgust with the whole process is that while I have no right of suffrage over here, I get a big ol' heaping of noise pollution served up on my doorstep every weekend.

I like to sleep in when I get the chance, and I'm the polar opposite of a morning person.

And then those campaign cars come a'rollin' by.

Grrr.

The funny thing about those cars is that they only thing they're blaring out is gibberish. A whole big mess of "Thank you"s and "Vote For Me"s, but not a single word about what said candidate will actually DO once elected.

Probably because in most cases, the answer would be "Live off of your tax yen."

Ahh well.

Anyway, in reference to the title of the post, I threw my proverbial hat into the proverbial ring yesterday. Proverbially, of course.

Not that I decided to run for office or anything that fancy (although it has been brought up in conversation before). I went on the campaign trail.

Today is the election for the mayor and city council positions here in Matsue. The challenger to the incumbent mayor is none other than Dai Kawakami, one of the people responsible for hiring me to work at the school I currently teach at.

I was asked to give a short speech yesterday to warm up the crowd before his final campaign speech.

Those of you who know me can pretty well understand what I thought about this...

"Why the heck not?"

So, I went and gave a speech.

A lot of it had to do with the theme of change and connecting that to President Obama's campaign last year, especially in that I closed out my speech with a "Yes We Can" for full effect.

(Psst...don't tell anybody, but most of my speech was scripted out beforehand...as in "Here's what you're going to say.")

But that was cool because I agreed with most of it anyway, and the whole Obama thing was more for pumping up the crowd and playing off the fact that I'm American, so...no harm, no foul.

I guess we'll find out tomorrow whether Matsue's mayor for the next four years will be the guy I went and stumped for or not.