Election Season: Casting Votes for Chocolate, the Presidency, and Academics

Combining the voting fervor of Super Tuesday with the gluttony of Mardi Gras, the online foodie magazine Culinate has launched the Death by Chocolate Contest. Anyone who enters is eligible to win a trip to Napa for the Copia Center's chocolate festival later this month. What's more, readers can also vote to send the person behind their favorite blog--in this case, I hope that's Chocolate in Context--on the same trip. Since Chocolate in Context is not (yet) among the top ten in the contest, readers have to click through to see the "Detailed Standings" in order to cast a vote for this blog. Vote early! Vote often!

I started off my day by casting a very important vote of my own--not in a presidential primary but in an English Department meeting. My limbo existence is keeping me somewhere between being a resident of New York and a resident of Pennsylvania, and while New York has an election today, Pennsylvania doesn't. The vote I participated in was for a new tenure-track faculty position at Pitt. The process was absolutely fascinating and my participation in it was almost absurd--I'm a grad student, not a professor! But our department is blazingly democratic. It was a secret ballot, a closed meeting. I won't discuss it further.