5 Easy Steps to Avoiding Primary Fatigue

There are many reasons to be thankful you live in Palo Alto. There’s the stable (if not booming) economy, the fantastic schools, and an unusually high density of fro-yo places. And every four years, you get to be thankful that you live in California, a state that is a comfortable distance from the quadrennial Presidential Primary Circus.

That said, you can’t swing Mountain Lion in this town - or any town - without hitting a constant stream of live updates about fairly arbitrary poll numbers on TV, radio, and the web. And then there are the tweets - my god, the tweets. You can't run, but you can hide. Here’s a helpful list of ways to keep your head clear of the rhetoric, and focused on whatever App is currently distracting you.

5. Avoid stumps. This may seem like a no-brainer, but let’s be cautious: where ever there’s a stump, you can bet your solar-charging fanny pack that some one is going to hop on it and start giving a canned speech about job creation and health care vouchers. The City of Palo Alto is consistently removing trees for a number of reasons, and you can keep tabs on these “Stump Speech Danger Zones” at the Tree Removal page from the City of Palo Alto.

4. Community Theatre. If you’re going to watch local drama unfold, you might as well make it your own local drama. The Palo Alto Players have a few productions up their sleeves, and so does TheatreWorks. A community actor may not squeeze out tears as convincingly as a seasoned politician, but I think local arts need your support more than cable news conglomerates.

3. Bowling Green Park. Because why wouldn’t you? Palo Alto is one of a few places I’ve been that actually has a bowling green, so you might as well take advantage of it. And unlike a bowling alley, there are surely no large TVs in which you may inadvertently catch a glimpse of the latests cliché-filled stump speech by Joe McCandidate. Check the Bowling Green Park webpage for lane prices and shoe rental information (that's a joke - the park is free).

2. Bottom Dollar Concert Series at the Media Center. As part of our goal of serving local teens with creative and performance spaces, we’ll be hosting another concert featuring local bands from Gunn High on January 21st at 7pm. While these punk-rock kids are far from politically apathetic, I can almost guarantee you won’t hear the words “Hashtag,” “Ron Paul,” or “Caucus” coming from our studio. You can find out more by following the Media Center on Facebook.

1. Silence. We’ve all heard the phrase “Silence is Golden,” but how often do you experience it? Give yourself enough silence every day to remember that you don’t actually care about all those things the media tells you to care about, and that the distance between where you are and where they are used to be pretty dividing. Angry Iowans and (New Hampshurians?) aren’t going to be storming University Avenue and forcing us to pick a side any time soon, so just sit back, relax, and enjoy the thriving little city that high taxes, big-business, and socialized services came together to make for you. Just be careful not to hurt your brain trying to figure out how they could all exist together, happily, in the same place.