I’m on vacation. Sort of. I’m visiting Idaho, a state in which I spent a great deal of my childhood; I was the daughter of a Christian pastor. I’m visiting a portion of my family before I fly out of San Francisco to Heathrow in London where I’ll stay for a year pursuing my Master’s degree. I started writing a different post today, not the one you are about to read. It felt disgustingly flat, so I did what I usually do when I don’t like what I’m writing: I turned to googling my various curiosities and ignoring my minimized Word document.

While googling, I came across several Labor Day articles, blurps, and posts; and it occurred to me that this past Monday was the first Labor Day in several years that I have observed while actually not working. (I sort of wish I had been. I spent more than my daily travel allowance at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Music Festival. I did see a great deal of fantastic music and my new straight crush, Miranda July, however.)

The Department of Labor website’s “History of Labor Day” page concludes, “It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.”

Yet, many American corporations, as well as government agencies, do not pay tribute or compensate on the day set aside for its workers. The history of the holiday is completely disjointed according to internet history. It seems to have risen from the efforts of at least three different workers’ unions: a carpenters’, a machinists’, and a railroad union, each from different states.

However, it’s not just a union holiday anymore; it’s the official end of summer (I hope you’ve put your white shoes away, you bad-fashion gays). If the holiday’s indeterminate history can make any single statement, it’s that America is built on extremely hard work (or at least its origin was), and those responsible deserve to be celebrated. Now, though, that hard work is braided with the unceasing circulation of dollars. Most business owners are aware that in order to capitalize on other people’s vacations, it is essential to stay open on these days. This requires workers. I have spent at least a third of my breathing Labor Days laboring.

I’m at a café in Moscow, Idaho since I’m not picking up a wireless network at my brother’s house nearby, and — surprise, surprise— there’s a singer/songwriter singing about how St. John’s Wort isn’t working for “these girls” with so little money. It’s a boring story here. It would be even more boring without the worldwide web or even the archaic print media of the Lewiston Tribune which is faithfully covering Senator Larry Craig’s woes.

A couple of hours ago I realized that I actually was working on this past Monday, Labor Day. It completely slipped my mind. In the morning hours before the music festival I was writing an essay about an 83 year-old woman I recently met, an artist who exhibited with Judy Chicago in the 70’s, a fascinating woman, a “hussy” for her day, a scandalous divorcee, and lifelong painter. I forgot that I was working because it’s precisely what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be googling Judy Chicago, and I wanted to be writing about the painter, CeCe Milder. When I googled Labor Day, I came across an interesting post in Seth Godin’s blog:

“More and more people are lucky enough to have a gig like mine… work you’d do even if you didn’t have to, even if you didn’t get paid to do it. This is a bigger idea than it seems, because it changes the posture of what you do. Different motivations ought to lead to different results.”

They ought to. Yes. I’m finally doing the thing I want to be doing. I’m writing. The results are great. But…I’m wondering about the others. Writing leaves a wide open platform. I could put down on the page that I want to crucify my mother; and, as long as my syntax was kind of fresh, it might sound great to my readers. What about Mr. Craig? I’m worried about him. He’s had a great gig for years, probably the gig he’s dreamed of since before he had his first gay boner. What could be more innocently motivated than the naïve urge to run for office and, well, CHANGE THE WORLD. I don’t doubt that he’s a great fellow.

I came out when I was nineteen. My first girlfriend, whom I met in Idaho, was the daughter of another Idaho senator, a democrat. I remember driving by a Larry Craig billboard with her in her Volkswagen in the mid 90’s. His enormous face and arm were sprawled across the sky just off of I-90 in Coeur d’Alene, near the headquarters of the Aryan Nation. She told me then, thirteen years ago, that Larry Craig was gay and that it was common knowledge in Boise. She said his marriage was a facade. It was the first time that I felt any “gay pride.”

Obviously, he had a great gig. It was probably the thing he’d always dreamed of doing. He was making some money, but Idaho is definitely a red state. Larry Craig could never have been a gay Senator in the state of Idaho. I can barely be a gay from here who returns here to visit family. He compensated, in bathrooms, in whatever places he could, I’m sure. He would not have survived as a gay senator, pushing gay values on a very conservative state.

Seth Godin also said in his blog:

“It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable. It’s hard work to tell your boss that he’s being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It’s easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It’s hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It’s hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.”

Larry Craig seems to be standing by his paycheck still, denying himself for the face of his employer. His paycheck is about to abandon him as is the state of Idaho. While on vacation, I’ve asked the average citizen about him. The answer: He’s a fuck-up. Yes, he is; he’s a Republican after all.