Wow

I am happy and stunned.

Sucking it up

I have planned my blue outfit for tomorrow. I've already voted. I don't feel calm about anything, but for now there is nothing to do but wait for results and hope that there are results by tomorrow evening. Please vote for Obama if you haven't already. A Democratic presidency might help decrease the number of wars our country wages and restore some small ounce of fiscal responsibility. I'm not holding my breath for universal heath care though, or actual money spent on education. I wish, though.

I am trying to finish my statement of interest for the MFA program.

It's getting dark, and Lester has fallen asleep on my knee.

I've been thinking about my least favorite asanas. I have two: Urdhva Mukha Svanasana (upward facing dog) and Dhanurasana (Bow Pose)--both are upward facing backbends instead. I'm not a big fan of sticking my chest out. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana in particular makes me feel like I'm a bust carved into the prow of a ship. Or a hood ornament. I never feel like it's actually opening my chest or shoulders. Instead, I feel like my shoulders are up around my ears and my wrists are going to pop off. Dhanurasana makes me feel heavy. Instead of opening up the front of my body, I feel like my knees are going to pop off.

I find it interesting (to use the blandest, least specific word possible), that my two least favorite asanas are poses that are meant to open the heart chakra, build courage and stamina, and create energy that encourages us to reach out toward others.

~

I am back from yoga. We practiced my third least favorite asana: Virasana (Hero Pose)--yet another asana that opens the front of the body. I have eaten a nice pear. I have made a list of all the good things about being in an MFA program and having an MFA. I have congratulated myself on...I forgot was I was going to write, so that means I have forgotten about what I congratulated myself on.

We got our ballots in the mail today.

I want to get my hair cut shorter into some kind of bob. But I don't want to look like Paris Hilton or Posh Spice, and I don't want to look like I work for CNN. I need something a little asymmetrical, a little inverted with the right amount of layers and razored ends, and maybe longish side bangs.

But it can't require blow drying to look good.

And where to get it cut? I haven't gotten an actual, styled haircut since I lived in DC. Nope, it's been Supercuts all the way. Big decisions.

No one presses their audience appreciation button

during the second verse. They push it during the chorus. Or the guitar solo.

My point is that those CNN graphs are addictive, but not necessarily telling. Everyone goes for generalized, soaring rhetoric about American families sitting around the kitchen table, etc.

I was supposed to be meditating and focusing on my breath, but when I did that, all that happened was I saw the word "breath" in various fonts

I'm grumpy.

Today during savasana I tried to list all the ways that my life has been/is/was materially affected by the Bush Administration. I can think of numerous ways that other people's lives have been drastically changed. But truly, I can't think of very many ways my life has been affected.

• My job outlook is poor, but it's always been poor. I do well enough somehow anyway.
  
• Now that it's even more difficult for students to get visas to study in the US, more students go to Canada, and so enrollment is lower at the places I teach. However, it hasn't really been lower than usual. I have fewer students from Africa, and more wealthy students from Europe, especially Milan.
  
• Real estate is messed up, but I never owned real estate, and even with prices "low" now, they're still way too expensive.
• The price of gas is still high. I don't really drive much, and have structured my entire work life around not driving whenever possible. Mark and I share a car, which he drives 15 miles to and from work three or four days a week.
  
• I suppose we've taken less road trips than we might have otherwise taken.
• The rising cost of living in DC coupled with increasingly unstable and unpleasant work possibilities would have caused Mark and I to leave DC, even if he hadn't gotten the job at CSUSM. Mark's job at CSUSM and the general growth of this area has a lot to do with suburban development based on 1) the military and 2) real estate. These two things are at least partly responsible for our move to San Diego county.
• 9/11 and post 9/11 Bush policies really enlivened the careers of anyone working in international security, as I was when 9/11 happened. Several people I worked with wrote white papers and press releases and were promoted. A few went to work for the DOD or defense contractors, one went to work for the Millenium Challenge Corporation (which, despite its name, is in fact a government agency). I promptly left my job and got an MA at Georgetown. I didn't do an MFA because Georgetown gave me better funding and Carolyn Forche was more or less gone from George Mason. Aggravatingly, it would have been a better professional choice for me to do an MFA. But who cared about MFAs then?
• The dollar is down. Going to Europe is harder.
• Health Insurance is worse. However, in California, it is still possible to get free birth control, even in a county where Planned Parenthood is always surrounded by anti-abortion protesters.
  

I'm thinking about this list for several reasons. I feel all overwrought about the elections, as I always do. I care about U.S. politics and think it matters who wins, but this feeling isn't personal--it's very abstract and vague, which is part of why it's so aggravating.

I get annoyed with friends who talk about not voting because they can't bear to compromise their moral values, or voting Green (as I used to do when I was a DC resident, since voting in DC is nearly like not voting at all). I rehearse my argument that a Democratic president means Democratic bureaucrats and Democratic interns doing the fact-checking for all the documents and all the research that informs policies, and that this slight difference in perspective is important, regardless of whether or not the actual President is effective.

I think not voting in any election year would be idiotic, and also a sign of just how materially irrelevant a change in administrations actually is for many of us. Maybe if the cost of gas were $9 then voting would seem less about abstract values and feelings and more about basic things like eating and living.

Not that that would be especially good, either.

Without Nuance

Probably many of us who vote aren't significantly affected by the government to have enough of a perspective on the very real differences between a Democratic and a Republican administration. I don't mean that we aren't affected. I mean that we feel like we aren't.

I don't worry so much about the President (though I worry about that plenty) as I do all the low and mid-level bureaucrats who will loose or get jobs based on the next election. I don't want Republicans as heads of the various foreign policy desks at the State Department, for example, and I don't want someone fresh out of an internship with the Heritage foundation to be doing their fact checking, either. Oh for the days when people with PhDs in German literature were on staff at the NSA.

CNN just advertised the next "Larry King Live" with the tagline "Sarah Palin, Up Close."