Suzy Says

You know how I had the great mail day a couple of weeks ago? Yesterday, I had the hell mail day, brought to me by our friendly government, local and federal: a summons to jury duty for the Superior Court of California, made extra scary by including a form to be filled out and brought with me (suggests to me a case that will go on for months); and an extremely invasive and personal census form which I’m supposed to fill out and return to Big Brother.

I had jury duty 4 or 5 years ago for the first time, and I’m still recovering from the horror of it. In the City and County of San Francisco, you have to serve five days, whether or not you actually sit on a jury. I have heard of people who have been called for JD and only had to call in, but my own experience was quite the opposite.

Report to the waiting room (which I call the pit of despair, because that’s where you sit for hours before possibly being called into a courtroom — or not) at 8:00 and sit around, waiting, waiting, waiting, like the beginning of Casablanca. A couple of times I did get called into courtrooms, where you can’t read or do anything other than participate in a scientific experiment to see whether it is actually possible for a human being to die of boredom. I am extremely boredom-intolerant, and on the third day, after going home in the pouring rain after 8 hours of this, I sat on the floor of my living room and cried from the horror of having to do it again the next day, and the day after that.

I never did get on a jury. Also, that spell of JD coincided with our busy time at work, and so does this one, slated for April 22. I don’t know if I can stand it.

As for the census thing: I can’t believe we have to tell the government what our mortgage payment is, how much our monthly bills are, etc. They probably ask for bra size and frequency of sexual intercourse somewhere in the questionnaire, which is approximately the length of War and Peace, though I didn’t finish reading it. I’m under no illusion that the government doesn’t already know frightening amounts of information about every one of us, personal and otherwise, probably including bra size, but I just can’t make myself complete that document and send it back to make their invasion of what little privacy, or illusion of privacy, I have any easier.