<p>I just wanted to share some of the valuable opportunities that being a Rice student has given me. I was lucky enough to be one of only 70-ish undergraduates selected to go to the John McCain Town Hall meeting tomorrow morning. Needless to say, I am very excited about this opportunity. If I get to ask a question, this is probably what I’m going to say, unless any of you have any better ideas:
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<p>But that’s not all. Last Tuesday, my friend Quique and I went to the Obama rally downtown, and we managed to get in on standby. I just think it’s amazing to see two presidential candidates in two weeks. Perhaps this is needless bragging, and perhaps it doesn’t have so much to do with being a Rice student at all, but I wanted to share with you some of the opportunities that I never would have gotten if I were going to a bigger school in a smaller city. Also, I’m trying to procrastinate while writing a Chaucer paper, and I haven’t slept in two days. Okay. Sorry.</p>
<p>Here’s the email I sent to my family after going to the Obama rally:</p>
<p>Hello to all the Doctors,</p>
<p>I haven’t spoken to some of you since Thanksgiving, but I feel that this merits an email. I wanted to share my story of going to a rally for Barack Obama yesterday night. Regardless of your party affiliation, who you’re voting for in the primaries, who you voted for, or aren’t voting for (in the case of the Florida Doctors), you must agree that this was a cultural opportunity worth taking advantage of.</p>
<p>Anyway, on Saturday afternoon, Obama announced that he was coming to Houston for a rally at the Toyota Center, which is where the Houston Rockets play. I was at a retreat for all of the Orientation Week coordinators this weekend, so I unfortunately didn’t hear about it until Sunday night. I went online to secure my tickets, and I wound up with a standby pass (which I didn’t actually need, since I could just show up and wait in the standby line).</p>
<p>Yesterday afternoon, I was debating whether to go to the rally. I figured that I wouldn’t get in, since there were probably people who skipped work and showed up at 8 a.m. A number of my friends were going, but they all had tickets, and I wanted someone to wait in the standby line with me. At 5 p.m., I decided to go, since the worst that could happen is that I wouldn’t get in, and I would be kicking myself for weeks if I didn’t at least try. I found Quique M., a close acquaintance of mine, sitting in the commons. He was also on standby, so we decided to go together.</p>
<p>The lightrail (kind of like the METRO for Houston, except it only has one line and only serves downtown) was packed. At each station we stopped, the METRO police had to cut people off from cramming in because the doors wouldn’t close. The train nearly emptied at the Bell station, which is the stop closest to the Toyota Center.</p>
<p>The line for people with tickets wrapped around the arena twice. We saw some of our friends in line; they were lording over the fact that they had tickets and we didn’t. Quique and I crossed the street to go to the back of the standby line. The crowd was incredible. There were people from all walks of life, all ages, all races, and everyone was acting like they had known everyone else for years. There was a woman from Kenya behind me in line; we chatted about living in Houston, what this election means, everything. People were playing music, selling hats, and everyone was united with a common purpose: to get in and see Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Periodically there would be someone coming through the line and passing out flyers. Quique and I would stop and ask them questions that they clearly didn’t know the answers to. We asked one woman who was campaigning for Diane Trautman for Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector what her platform was. She was stopped dead. My favorite, though, was the Lyndon LaRouche flyer about how Michael Bloomberg is going to buy his way in to the White House. Here’s an excerpt: "That is the only way I foresee the significance of May or Bloomberg’s firm intention to seize the Presidency, to ends pioneered by both London’s puppets Hjalmar Schacht and Adolf Hitler, or the fascist economic and social policies associated with Lazard Fr</p>