It was 1994, and I was running for class president.

There are two major parties in third grade politics: boys and girls. In this case, the boys were the Republicans, and Ian Burris was the Ross Perot to my George H.W. Bush. Only one girl was running against us, but there were more boys than girls overall. Who would win?

Votes were cast, and I voted for Ian instead of myself because I didn’t know we could vote for ourselves. (It seemed unseemly.)

Our opponent won by ONE vote. It would have been a tie, which would have resulted in a tie-breaker between the two of us, with my assured victory thanks to my gender and.. charm? If only I had voted for myself.

Anyway, she was probably a better president than I would have been.

Life lessons were learned?