start your engines

today, i turned on the computer to begin my journey. if i am to run for office here in sarasota, i need to start making some serious moves. as google came up on my screen, i sat wondering what to put as my search. i decided that i needed to speak to someone, but i didn't know who. so i did a search for the state of florida and obviously i was brought to stateofflorida.com. i clicked on contact us and came to a page with a bunch of links offering me different groups of phone lists that i could click and see. unfortunately, everything that i clicked on did not load, so i was back to the drawing board. in the back of my head i made a mental note that when i had the power to do so, i would fix that webpage.

after a moment of perplexion, i decided that if i was going to do this, i would start with the most basic question. i typed into the computer: how to run for office. i pressed enter.

the first link that i saw was for a website that was called runforoffice.org. jackpot! i went to the page and filled out some basic information and was able to see what was available for me to run for this november. they included: governor, state senator, state representative, lieutenant governor, attorney general, commisioner of agriculture, chief financial officer, state attorney, justice of the supreme court, circuit court judge, and school board member.

a couple of these i threw out right away since i haven't passed the bar exam. i was left with governor, state senator, state representative, commisioner of agriculture, chief financial officer, and school board member. i then realized that i am going to be doing this locally so i could throw out governor and state senator since i wouldn't be able to campaign all over the state.

even though originally i am from the garden state of new jersey, i know absolutely nothing about agriculture except what old macdonald had on his farm, so i dropped that effort and seeing how i am not skilled in the art of bookkeeping, i stopped considering chief financial officer. i was left with two choices: state representative and school board member.

i had a decision to make. i had to figure out if i was going to go for it really, or was i just going to keep it extremely local. a school board member is admirable because you can shift the lives of tomorrow's leaders by making good decisions, but i just don't see myself being taken seriously by parents since i don't have children myself, or ever even attended the schools in florida as a youth. i think i can do better with getting a younger vote by just going for the gusto and trying to become a state representative. so that is what i chose.

what are the requirements was my next question. well, i saw that right off the bat i had to be 21. check. then it said that i have to have been a resident of the state for 2 years prior to the election. check.

the next two were tricky. i have to pay as a filing fee 6% of my annual salary to the state to declare that i am running and i have to receive the certified signatures of 1% of the registered votes in the state. now, i am not sure if that means in my district that i am running, so i have to find that out. the filing fee is going to be a tough task. i might need to see when the deadline is to pay that fee, but seeing how i don't have a high paying job at the moment, that fee could be minimal. also, it says that if i don't get all those signatures i might be able to pay a qualifying fee. i need to see how many people exactly would have to sign and how i certify them.

hey, i am on my way!

while perusing the internet, i went to craigslist to check out some part-time jobs because my dad was saying that he would help with some classes in september if i got one on the weekends or something. i stumbled across the u.s. census bureau and decided to click on what they were hiring for.

i called up the number and a woman named nancy answered and told me that they were looking for help going door to door this year to help calculate the actual census. cool, i thought. she asked if i was interested and i said that i definitely was, so she told me that tomorrow morning there was going to be a test administered at an office building near where i live. it is a two hour test on who knows what, but she gave me the link to a practice exam that i am about to tackle. she said that if i do well on that then in late february i could be hired to do the job!

i thanked nancy and closed the laptop. it was a productive morning. i bundled up my things, i grabbed my lunch from the refridgerator, and i drove myself to work. let's see what tomorrow brings.