The RNC is giving me a rash

So we interrupt their unhinged, desperate rants (School desks? WTF?) to bring you this heartwarming story:

I was in Iowa visiting my family over the holiday weekend. I took Tuesday off to make it an extra-long weekend. Also because I have seven vacation days to burn off before the end of October. But that's not the heartwarming part. Neither is the part where Sarah Palin let her underage, uneducated pregnant daughter borrow her banana clip and her scrunchie. But not her diaphragm.

The heartwarming part is where I got to walk my niece and nephew to school on Tuesday morning. They wore their little school clothes and their little backpacks, and as we worked our way through their bucolic little neighborhood where a school bus stopped and put out its little stop sign so we could cross the street in front of it, my little six-year-old niece reached up and grabbed my hand. Bliss!

And then she launched into her lecture about architecture. It seems that she's landed on some pretty specific preferences in the kinds of houses that meet her approval: Red brick. No screened-in porches. (They look "messy.") No hanging plants. (They make a house look "bumpy.") And the final mandatory: Symmetry. Symmetry! My six-year-old niece knows what symmetry is. In sharp contrast, Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter doesn't know what abstinence is.

And when we get to the school (I'm back on the niece and nephew here), it seems ... tiny. When I went there in the early 1970s, the playground was a massive span of asphalt in the crook of an L-shaped building the size of the Louvre. Or Sarah Palin's stack-of-pancakes hair. Or the $750 million in earmarks she so valiantly fought against receiving. The lying cunt. But the Iowa sun must be harsh and cruel, because it's shrunk my sprawling grade school into a tiny little lean-to the size of a shoebox. Or Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience. (I mean beyond the vast experience she's gotten living in a state that's this close to Russia.)

Of course, the architecture and the hand-holding were completely abandoned when we got to the crowds of classmates. In fact, I had to hunt down my niece and nephew amid the teeming sea of under-four-feet-tall people just to get my goodbye hugs. And then they shrugged and turned to their friends and we adults made our way home without them. Which, I suppose, is as it should be.