Today is the last day at work for a co-worker of mine. Around lunchtime this afternoon, I realized that about seven of my colleagues weren’t in their offices, including all five of my colleagues who are in my age range. I soon figured out that they had all gone out to lunch together.

Nobody ever tells me when these things happen. Nobody stops in my office to invite me along. I always have to make the effort myself.

When I first started this job three years ago, I realized that lunchtime was the main time when people got together. For a few months I joined everyone in the small lunch room, eating my lunch with them, males and females alike. But although they were very nice people, I was never very into the conversations, most of which revolved around work, or pop culture, or sports, or whatnot. I also tend to be an introvert, which doesn’t help. After a few months I finally gave up and started having my lunch by myself, usually in my office, while either surfing the web or reading a book. That was fine with me.

Unfortunately, when you do that, you miss out on the group dynamic. Whenever you do try to hang out with the other folks, you’re behind on what’s been happening, and it’s hard to catch up without spending time with them regularly.

I don’t really want to hang out with them outside of work or anything — not because of any faults in them, but just because it’s the way I am. But I don’t like being left out, either.

This is so reminiscent of past social situations in my life. Law school, college, high school, middle school, summer camp: I’ve never been good at hanging out with the cool kids. It makes me nervous, and I’m not all that interested in it anyway. But on the other hand, I don’t like the consequences of being antisocial (e.g. feeling left out). Socialization with certain groups of people often feels like a duty — something I do to avoid negative consequences — rather than something that flows naturally out of my personality.

I want to be liked without having to put in the time required, and it doesn’t really work that way.

I stayed over at Matt’s place last night. When I got home this morning to change for work, there was a voicemail from my mom. My parents fled to California this week to escape the Republican Convention; my dad works in Penn Plaza (right above Penn Station and right next to Madison Square Garden), and my mom works near Union Square (which turned out to be the site of many protests). My mom’s message said, “I’m just calling to say hi… We’re sitting here watching TV, and I’m watching George Pataki speak at the Republican convention, and it’s probably the worst speech I’ve ever seen someone give at a political convention. Just wanted to know what you thought of it.”

I love my mom.

Anyway, yes, Pataki’s a horrible speaker, and although he’s been elected three times as New York’s governor, he’s the quintessential mediocre machine politician. As for last night’s speech, the only states whose citizens he praised as helping New York in the aftermath of 9/11 just happened to be swing states: Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania. That was artless. And watching him ask each of those state’s delegations to stand up made me feel like I was watching a high school graduation ceremony.

After Pataki’s speech, there was a long pause of several minutes while the convention waited for the TV network coverage to kick in, and then they showed the traditional introductory video of the candidate. Except they must have lost the footage, because it was replaced with an oatmeal commercial. Was that former Senator Fred Thompson narrating, or was it Wilford Brimley? I wasn’t sure.

As for the main event, my main impression of Bush’s speech is that it went on about 20 minutes too long. He led off with a recitation of domestic plans, which I actually found interesting, because I’d never heard it before. It was transparently Clintonesque, though, and there’s no way to fund all these new programs he proposed. While he spoke, I watched the backdrop behind him: all these little boxes, each filled with an image of an American flag, bringing to mind the divided America that he’s helped foster over the last few years.

Then he turned to foreign policy, during which I largely tuned out, especially once the clock in Matt’s apartment ticked past 11 p.m. and I was hearing nothing but more empty rhetoric.

I was surprised that two protesters managed to get past security. And they even made Bush stumble over one of his lines. How did they get in? I wonder if there are Republican Convention credentials available on eBay? Oh look, there are. (Okay, that pass was good only for Monday. I don’t know how the protesters got in. But if you don’t want that, there’s the RNC Macaroni and Cheese, so you can, redundantly, “have a part of history which is currently being created right now!”)

About an hour later, Kerry gave a speech in Ohio that was, as usual, painfully inarticulate.

So it’s over; the delegates and protesters go home, we New Yorkers get our city back, and the fall campaign season officially begins. It’s still summer right now, but soon, lawns across America will crunch with leaves, high school football teams will practice outside in the chilly air, kids will plan their Halloween costumes, the pundits will parse what happened during the presidential debates, and we’ll obsess over daily tracking polls.

It’s going to be nerve-wracking and depressing. I love it.

The New Yorker is helping restore my sanity with its description of the Bush Administration:

its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is family planning or capital punishment), its partisan exploitation of our city’s suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into worldwide anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamist terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it.

I haven’t heard about any of that at the convention this week. It’s nice to escape from the fear propaganda and be reminded of the truth. Now, is there a way to boil it all down into a Kerry campaign slogan?