I'm on the road this week, doing first-hand research. Which means a wide array of cool things - new places, new people, long stretches in the car with the iPod on Shuffle and life's random playlist timing itself to the vast landscape of 'Merica. Another thing that this sort of road trip means to me is sketchy hotels and motels. The cheaper and more poetically located, the better. I stayed at a tip top version last night here in western Iowa. Without boring anyone with the details, I rolled into the parking lot just in time to head up to my room for the GOP Candidates' debate in Florida. I thought I'd timed it perfectly after a long day on the road. I opened my assigned room's door with barely a minute to spare. What I found bore the indistinct feel of a recently cleared crash scene. A vague sense of recent death might even have still lingered in the air. Or I'll just paint with the picture with that and ask you to skip over the details. Save one thing - my damn TV didn't work. It was, in fact, upon close, antic inspection missing most of the buttons. Cue the scene of me dashing to the front desk, where I exclaimed that "I need a new TV or a new room or could someone please help me because the Debate was starting?" Don't believe it when you hear that everyone in Iowa takes the nomination process seriously, because the slow walk back upstairs to test the TV ("oh, that doesn't look good" was the prognosis) and shuffle to the next room took what seemed like four of five insults worth of prime debate clock. But I'm pleased to report that the replacement room was, well...better. Not quite lovely. Certainly less murder-y. I caught the lion's share of the debate (even a junkie feels good after a fix). Recharged overnight. Woke up to single-digit temps. Which is better than what was forecast. And after a morning of getting what I hoped for on the interview circuit, I'm heading back East. Maybe I'll be in another hotel room tonight for the President's State of the Union. Here's hoping it will be just as random and delightful in the way it offers safe harbor. Or at least an equally entertaining snapshot of a completely different State, with a similar state of mind.

Newt Gingrich has me thinking about my ancestry. The stepping off point for that bit of randomness was his performance in last week's GOP debate on CNN. I watched it while in Wisconsin, where my family's roots were firmly set over 130 years ago thanks to the Homestead Act. All those people who live perfectly good lives without ever manifesting the troubling signs of political obsessive disorder surely missed it. Specifically, I'm pointing at when Newt waded into unusual waters for a GOP candidate by responding to a question about immigration with a measured embrace of amnesty for non-citizens. For my almost entirely Scandinavian family, it brought up something I now find fascinating that I'd never given much thought. I'm now aware that one of my grandmothers never became a citizen. It just wasn't that big of a deal way back when - especially since women couldn't vote prior to 1920. To up the ante of weirdness, I'm now focused upon the fact that the trippy little country she came from in Scandinavia ceased to exist in the late 1930s. Blame the Soviets, I think. Her husband naturalized, which was the norm to afford the benefits of citizenship to the whole family. Her kids were all born here. She lived into her 90s, and died in the 1980s surrounded by family and property. But in terms of our modern view of citizenship, she was effectively a woman without a country for most of her life. I'm still sussing this all out. I can't even find the country she came from listed anywhere to make sense of what citizenship she might have been able to claim. Say what you will about Newt. Loudly. I, for one, have never been a fan. Even though he married a former small-town girl from Sconnie on his third try at, um, lifelong party affiliation. But the guy's politics inspired me to take a new look at my own past. Now if you'll excuse me, I think my irony bladder just exploded.