This election season has started to seem like something of an addiction — even when I’m tired of the 24-hour news cycle of empty rhetoric (because what else is there of substance to introduce into the election discourse at this point?), I still find myself constantly monitoring the TV, flipping between the cable news stations whenever one program gets too brash and irritating to continue. (How can a group of presumably intelligent professionals get by being so… professionally douchey? Although, Rachel Maddow = teh awesome. A cable-news host who actually seems to love her job and reports with gusto? Who’dathunk?) Boy do those hosts love hearing themselves talk. What did educated narcissists do for a living before television political punditry?

Even though I’ve seen all the polls and the predictions, and frequented the websites (270towin.com, fivethirtyeight.com), I still perk up my ears every time “newest poll results” are announced — as if the speculation this hour will be any different from the speculation the last hour. And it’s dumb, but yeah, I’m watching as the pollsters rejigger that electoral map every which way, as though they might just maybe possibly elicit a different answer this time than the hundreds of times they’ve simulated the numbers before.

I understand the compulsion — my end-of-month budgets tend to undergo similar number-crunching and vain hopes that simple addition will somehow yield greater figures the longer I keep redoing the calculations. Yunno, like maybe one will get tricked into multiplying this time. But psst, guys: It never works.