I’ve flip-flopped. I dropped the writing class.

Today was the last day I could do it without forfeiting my entire tuition. I get credit toward another class (minus the $25 registration fee and a prorated tuition for the one session I attended), which I have to use within a year. Hmm… nonfiction writing? Fiction writing? Sketch comedy? Who knows.

I just didn’t like it, on a gut level. I rarely trust my gut, but this time I decided to do so. I’m so bad at quitting things; I usually feel like a) I’m wimping out and b) the thing from which I quit will turn out to be wonderful. (The Party After You Left, perhaps.)

One summer at camp, I was on the age cusp between two different living arrangements. I got placed in the tent units, for the older kids. These were platform tents, with room for four beds each; except for canvas roofs and rolldown flaps, they were exposed to the elements, and it was recommended that you sleep with a mosquito net over your bed. The bathrooms were in a separate structure outdoors. I hated the idea of this, so I complained and made them switch me to the cabins, for the younger kids. These were your traditional multi-bunk cabins, each with a bathroom, et cetera.

After I switched, a couple of people in the tent units made fun of me. They called me “cabin boy.” And you know what? That July, all the boys and girls in the tent units wound up majorly bonding. At the end of the July session, when everyone gathered for a goodbye ceremony, the camp director said that she’d never seen the campers in the tent units become so much like a family.

There was a big changeover between July and August, and I decided I wanted to be cool again. So I switched back to the tent units. But most of the cool kids had left, and it wasn’t the same.

To this day, I have always feared quitting.

But today I did it anyway.

On the up side, now that I won’t have class on Monday nights after all, I can continue going to trivia, and the Jews For G-Strings won’t have to change their name.

To save you all the trouble, here’s a nice summary from The Note of all the conventional wisdom that’s been floating around about tonight’s debate. I could have just read this instead of the reams of political commentary I’ve been ingesting in the last few days, but it wouldn’t have been quite as fun.

Kerry has to “win” the debate to win blah blah blah.

Kerry has a tough challenge — to go on the attack but still be someone Americans want in their living rooms for four years blah blah blah.

Both these men are champion debaters blah blah blah.

What the news coverage says immediately after the debate is just as important — maybe more important — than what happens in the debate itself blah blah blah.

Kerry will acknowledge that he’s changed his mind occasionally and can be unclear at times, but will needle Bush by saying it’s better to be flexible when things go wrong than to be stubborn blah blah blah.

This is the first time both candidates will appear together before the American people free from the influences of handlers and aides blah blah blah.

The president — after acting confident for days — will “surprise” everyone (and de-fang Senator Kerry) by being suddenly contrite and yielding — less “times are tough,” or, even “mistakes were made,” than “I have made mistakes” blah blah blah.

In a nation of several hundred million people, why does Jim Lehrer get to keep moderating these things blah blah blah.

It will be interesting to see if the candidates choose blue or red ties blah blah blah.

How they look and act will matter as much as what they say, blah, blah, blah.

John Kerry sure better have a good and tight answer to that Iraq question, blah, blah, blah.

Boy, Republicans are more organized and on message than Democrats are blah blah blah.

Al Gore lost the first 2000 debate by losing the post-debate spin wars blah blah blah.

How about those wacky, restrictive, detailed campaign-negotiated rules that make this less a debate and more a joint appearance blah blah blah.

The first debate historically has the largest audience blah blah blah.

John Kerry must sound more bar room than Brahmin blah blah blah.

Ralph Reed really HAS been to the fountain of youth (or perhaps DID make that deal with the devil) blah blah blah.

And most important, as Democratic pollster Paul Maslin — with characteristic understatement — told the Los Angeles Times about John Kerry:

“If he can make this election about Bush, Bush in all likelihood will lose. If this election is about Kerry, then we’ve got a rougher row to hoe.”

And there isn’t any blah blah blah about that.

The American presidential campaign process has become a parody of itself. There’s nothing new left: the conventions aren’t real conventions, the debates aren’t real debates; “October surprise” and “post-convention bounce” are practically scientific terms. The process is so ossified it practically sits in the American Museum of Natural History where commentators can pick over and anaylze the dried-up bones.

I read a few political news roundups every weekday — first and foremost, Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes and ABC News’s The Note, the latter of which is all media-insider-ish and fun. Sometimes, my extensive tour of the daily political media universe leaves me with an overriding theme or impression. Today’s is a big meta-thing about the first presidential debate: the debate itself is not as important as how the post-debate spin is picked up by the media. It’s the meta-debate that matters.

Howard Kurtz:

When John Kerry and George W. Bush step off a University of Miami stage at 10:30 tomorrow night, the battle will just be getting under way.

Just ask Chris Lehane, who was Al Gore’s spokesman when quickie polls showed his man winning the first debate against Bush by as much as 14 points. But Bush operatives began highlighting small errors Gore had made — such as saying he had visited Texas with the federal disaster director, not the assistant director — and calling the network morning shows with examples. By the time the New York Post ran the headline “Liar! Liar!,” the media consensus was that a heavy-sighing Gore had blown it. …

The post-debate debate “can influence things in a major way,” says Scott Reed, who was Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign manager. “Most people watching aren’t sitting with pad and paper keeping score, except for the media. The 72 hours after the debate are when all the decisions are made, both at the water cooler and on the front pages of papers.”…

Slate political writer William Saletan calls the post-debate analysis “huge,” noting that the average person probably doesn’t watch the whole hour and a half, or raids the fridge in the middle, and goes to bed without a fixed view of the outcome.

“What are you going to remember? You remember what’s repeated to you on TV or in the papers. It decides everything.”

And from the Los Angeles Times (courtesy of today’s The Note):

Four years ago, instant polls conducted by the media after the first debate between then-Texas Gov. Bush and Vice President Al Gore showed a narrow Gore advantage. Furthermore, respondents indicated in these initial measurements (taken among 500 people over the telephone in the 30 minutes after the debate ended) that the debates had almost no effect on their choice for president. Those who were for Bush before the debates remained in support of him immediately after. The same was true for Gore’s supporters.

Yet, within a week (a week during which not much else of substance happened in the campaign), Bush had gained 8 percentage points. In addition, polls showed that the American people had changed their minds and were now convinced that Bush, not Gore, had won the encounter.

How did this happen?

The Bush campaign had persuaded the media, and hence the American people, that the vice president was overbearing and presumptuous in his manner during the debate. And so even though some people had initially said Gore offered more elaborate answers during the debate, by a week after the encounter, the tide of public perception had shifted and Bush was believed to have won. With that belief came a significant narrowing of Gore’s margin in national polls. …

So each campaign’s real work will begin immediately after the debate, as both sides work to provide reporters with documentary evidence that the other side made mistakes, flipped-flopped and offered answers that were lacking in depth and specificity.

The candidates’ surrogates and operatives will try to draw the media’s attention to scripted sound bites each candidate has delivered in the hope that reporters and commentators will treat these comments as representative of what really happened and was most important in the debate.

The other theme I’ve picked up today: the debate format sucks. These are not going to be debates but “parallel press conferences” or a “joint press conference” or what have you. From NPR:

“A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue,” Rice says. “Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent’s points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions — that’s not a debate, that’s a news conference.”

Anyway, that’s my political-digest digest for the day. As if things weren’t meta enough already.