The ringer on my phone is broken. It buzzes on the table or in my pocket, but I seem to miss a constant stream of messages. I look down and again, someone has called and I missed it. Of course sometimes I can not pick up. In committee we get in trouble if our phones ring, like in school we are supposed to pretend we don't have phones, much less whole e-mail, texting and web browsing systems right there in the palms of our hands.
The amount of paper we get in a single day, the envelopes and folders we open, the words addressed to and handed to each of us as legislators in a single day is staggering. We get more paper each day at home. Then of course there is the e-mail. My legislative e-mail in box is so active that on a week day in the course of answering a single e-mail I may get five more. I try to answer all the e-mail addressed to me personally. It is getting harder so I get up earlier or stay up later. Still I miss e-mails. In years past interns have tucked them in folders to keep me organized, folders i didn't know existed. I find letters there, speaking to the dark inside of a server, never read, never heard.
I say all this calmly because I have to. Panic doesn't fix the stream of information that comes at you in a day. It still comes.
Like standing in an anxious crowd of people so large it does not end and you can not imagine each of you reaching your destination on time or perhaps at all. You stand shoulder to shoulder smiling in the cold air, slowly shuffling together along. I might try to learn the name of every person passing, hear the end of every story they start, let all of those more worthy pass through the gate ahead of me again and again. But I can't. I do the best I can, trying to get somewhere, anywhere productive, trying to laugh with those I can, picking up a glove off the sidewalk, offering a bit of my pocket full of food to someone on a street corner, knowing that panic does nothing for any of us at all.
