Early voting? Sure. Last-minute voting? That's for me!

I'm lucky to have a schedule flexible enough that it's no big deal to drop in on my polling place at some point during Election Day and vote. Of course, those who claim not to be able to find time to get in line no doubt would find time if it were the line for, say, tickets to an Orioles World Series, to cite a particularly hypothetical scenario.

If anything, this year's presidential campaign has shown that people can and will carve out time to engage in the election. The presidential debates drew tens of millions of viewers, no doubt many like myself who raced through dinner with friends and practically ran the couple of blocks home so as not to miss a single minute of the last one.

I've never seen anything like this - people totally riveted, moment-by-moment, to every twist and turn of the campaign. I don't know how any actual work is getting done, what with all the links being e-mailed around for this YouTube clip or that blog posting. The Web sites I "have" to check seem to grow daily.

I don't know anyone who is still undecided at this point - whoever they are, I wouldn't want to be behind them in a grocery store line as they try to figure out paper or plastic - but surely it's not for lack of available info. Maybe it's just the opposite - there's a surfeit of it. I'm abashed to say that I actually know such things as what Obama's daughters are going to be for Halloween. (For you terribly serious, issues-only thinkers, skip on to the next paragraph; for everyone else: corpse bride and bad fairy.)

So maybe that's part of my reluctance to vote early - separation anxiety from this all-consuming spectacle of a campaign. It would still be going on, but without you.