Hope and History

I'm useless today... absolutely useless.

Today feels like Christmas Eve (circa 1976), the night before I took the SAT, my birthday, the morning I took my driver's test, the day my god daughter Sofi was born, the morning I hit I80 to move to NYC, and the night PULP opened all rolled into one. I feel ecstatic and anxious, thrilled and terrified all at the same time... and it's almost more than I can bear.

I haven't written about the election here --- mainly because every time I start thinking about it, I feel like I'm on the verge of having a massive panic attack. This feeling's been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few months --- and now that it's finally Election Day, I can do little more than sit at my desk and obsessively refresh CNN.com in hopes that there will be some new shred of information.

This past weekend, I came home from a birthday party early on Sunday morning, to discover that someone had gone up both sides of my very democratic block and knocked down/destroyed every Obama yard sign. I think that was officially my breaking point... I was running from yard to yard at 2am, in tears, desperately trying to piece those signs back together again -- when the magnitude of this election settled on me. Everything changes today... everything! One way or the other, we'll be waking up to a new country tomorrow and I am overwhelmed by what that will mean.

I truly believe that today might be one of the most important days -- if not THE most important day of my life -- of all our lives... it's really that huge.

I went to vote first thing this morning... and I was, honestly, shaking while I stood on line. When I was done (and after I had a spell of mind-blowing OCD that forced me to check my ballot 20 times in this crazy ass fear that I may have accidentally voted for McCain) I went to turn my ballot in and this older black woman was collecting them.... I leaned into her as she went to take the pencil and ballot and asked if I could, please, keep my Ticonderoga Laddie No. 2 pencil. She winked at me and whispered in my ear "Baby, you go right on ahead and take it. I won't tell nobody. You made history with that thing today." I left my polling place in tears..... and am getting weepy all over again just thinking about it.

No doubt about it. Today really is the biggest day of my life.