Finally ready to start participating in protests.

The things I want to say, too. Only better.

Calloo! Callay!

We have a new president!

It's so elegant/So intelligent

Bridger: You know who's not fazed one iota by all this?
Westphalen: Lucas.
Bridger: His generation grew up expecting this. It's not a revelation; it's a confirmation.

That's from an old show that nobody outside my family admits to liking, SeaQuest. (Yes! I am old! And no, I did not have a crush on Lucas because he was kind of annoying, though I always had the vague feeling that I ought to. Ahem.) In the relevant episode there are aliens aboard the ship (okay, maybe there are reasons nobody admits to liking it) and, as the characters are discussing, everyone's shocked and amazed except for Lucas, the teenage genius on board. He's not shocked and amazed because this is the way the world is supposed to be.

This is how I feel about electing Obama president. I'm getting uncomfortable, progressing to slightly irritated, about all the happy, weepy, I'm-so-proud-of-our-country, it's-so-historic, my-children-will-never-know-what-it's-like-not-to-have-a-black-president (which doesn't even make sense, but I know what they mean) posts and essays and letters-to-children I've been seeing in the past several days. I'm glad they're happy, but I think their reason for happiness is kind of weird. In this way, I am not old. I know it's historic, but I don't honestly feel any amazement that we've elected a black ("black") president. There's nothing wrong with that. This is the way the world is supposed to be.

Two sides of the same coin

"What's that?" Eric said when I was looking at this. I scrolled up to let him read the start. "Does it go into gay people eventually?" he said.

"No, it's just black and white," I said. "The other issue of today."

"But it's not a different issue."

"No, just a different group," I agreed. We're donating to this, too. Giving for causes we believe in it so much more fun when there's sarcasm and ribbing of appropriately ribbable people involved.

You can't go to bed on Election Night

Ohmigod, we're going to have an intelligent and articulate president! Hooray!

In other news, 55% of Californians (11% reporting) are pathetic, shriveled, bigoted wastes of people. Dammit. At least Colorado was sensible.

I like that Obama didn't downplay how bad things are right now. I'm liking the "spirit of service" theme in the speech. Sensible and realistic and good. Great speech. McCain's was good too. Eric said, "Where has he been for the last four years?"

I must go to bed now; I have an ultrasound in seven and a half hours. I'll look up how to donate to the get-rid-of-Proposition-8's-results fund in the morning. Eric was looking up comments on Free Republic about Obama. Please, Secret Service, do your job well!

And while we're at it.

She's a female candidate. FEMALE. She is NOT a "woman candidate." "Woman" is not an adjective. Get it right, people!

Gas, and also hot air

Gas is $1.99 outside work. The gas in my tank is $0.49 per gallon more expensive, and I bought it a week ago. Wow.

I remember the first time I bought gas for over $2 per gallon. It was in Dayton, so no later than 2004, and I was driving to Columbus to catch a plane for work early the next day so I didn't want to take the chance on finding something cheaper on the way. I found a receipt in my car for $4.07 per gallon gas from July. These are funny times.

I'm anticipating that very late tomorrow people will start talking about "our first black president," so I shall say now how much that annoys me and get it over with. Unless he identifies completely with black people, Obama will not be our first black president. He'll be our first mixed-race, partly-black president (or at least I hope he will).

I do realize that to most people in this country, any black means black. He's not white enough for most white people. I also strongly suspect that at least when he was growing up, he wasn't black enough for black people, either. I have a book at home that examines mixed-race children in America. It's mostly on black/white mixes, since that's the major, and most emotionally charged, mix around here. At the time I was vaguely annoyed by that because I was looking for something that related to me, and that doesn't. But now that I live in a city that concerns itself with this kind of thing, and hope to shortly live under a mixed-race president, I'm glad I read it. And it says that a mixed-race child is too white for the blacks, and too black for the whites, and generally only finds refuge in the people who actually see him or her as an actual person. I've long since forgotten the race issue except when reminded because I know enough about Obama now to consider him as a person. I wish more people could do the same.

Eric and I talked recently about how his dad routinely talks about his black students and his white students and how that bothers me, and Eric's stance is that though he personally doesn't use the same language, he doesn't see his dad as wrong because, statistically speaking, there are differences in the two groups. --But then he went on to discuss theories of teaching, and how there are theories that a group of mostly females should be taught differently from a group of mostly males, and he doesn't believe in that either. We were also talking about how I grew up always believing that "liberal" was a good thing, and that Republicans were mostly wrong, while he grew up thinking "conservative" was a good thing, and that Democrats were mostly wrong. "It's like we lived in different countries," he said. There are no black-white issues in Seattle as there are Toledo. The major minority (hmm) there is Asian, and there isn't as much tension, or the same kind of stereotypes, so it's a different dynamic--and as far as I ever noticed, a nonissue.

People who say they're afraid that Obama will "take care of his own people first" don't know what they're talking about. They're trying to say, "He's black, so he'll give special favors to the black people." Presumably they believe the same is true of McCain but in reverse, but that doesn't bother them because they'll be the ones being taken care of. Maybe they assume the candidates would act as they themselves would--or implicitly realize that that actually is what already happens, with the people in power--mostly white people--taking care of their own.

Probably there are lots of people in the country about whom that would be a reasonable fear, but none of them would become the likely winner in the American presidential election. There's an old saying that women have to be excellent just to be recognized as competent, and I expect the same is true for black, or partially-black, people. I'm hopeful about having Obama as president because he's had to do very well in everything else in his life to get where he is, and he has the intelligence and capacity to keep on doing it. I'm not very hopeful that America's race issues will get significantly better anytime soon, which depresses me very much. "Maybe when that generation is dead," I think, but then I assume that people my age--or even most intelligent people--are like me, and that's not true either. Eric's mom says, "Obama scares the shit out of me, and I don't know why. There's just something about him." I think I know what the something is, but it's something about her, not him.

I'm glad I can cast a vote in a swing state, but I wish I didn't live in a city with such a divisive attitude. Alternately, I could wish I had a "people," but I don't, other than the friends I choose and the family I love. I'd have to ask him to be sure, but I don't think Obama has a "people" either, any more than I do, or than most people do. (If I am ever elected president, all left-handed half-Asian non-high-school-diploma-possessing master's-degree-bearing vegetarians named Jennifer shall get preferential treatment. I don't think this will tie up much of my presidential time.) He has a family, and a hometown, and a country, and so do we all. And I hope that in January he has a presidency.

(With that said, I am not voting tomorrow. I voted two weeks ago. Eric voted yesterday and the line was three hours long.)

Next you'll tell me books don't have search functions.

I never watched West Wing but I still thought this was totally awesome. I was disconcerted, though, when I wanted to post a comment or e-mail the author and couldn't. Isn't this the Internet?

Crumbs

Obama's race speech was really good.

I was working on Eric's rye bread the day before yesterday and ended up solving four equations for four variables in order to get the mass and the hydration just right. It wasn't long ago that I didn't grasp the whole hydration thing; now I know some theory behind bread, and I find that pretty cool.

It's Thursday already. Thank goodness. And this is Eric's last day of work for a week and a half (he gets Good Friday and Spring Break off. Did my spring breaks always coincide with Easter? I don't remember them doing so. Certainly we never got Good Friday off) so I can sleep later in the mornings, which will be marvelous.