4 de noviembre

tuesday when i got home from class i did laundry and watched cnn. but of course, nothing much was happening before polls closed, so there wasn't much point, except to see wolf blitzer and anderson cooper say the same things over and over. lou called shortly after i arrived, to say that she wasn't going to grant park as planned. i told her i was disappointed because i wanted to live vicariously through her.

but at 7:30 i went to julie's to watch the returns. the truth is though, i wasn't paying much attention to the tv. rumagin, ezra & i made some predictions as to timing and electoral numbers, but mostly i was concentrated more on my whisky and a conversation about umphrey's mcgee.

then ohio went to obama. and florida. and virginia. i had said to rumagin earlier, that if ohio goes blue, i'd be pretty convinced of victory. but somehow when the cnn powers that be announce such things with 14% of precincts reporting, it just doesn't feel real yet. so we continued to watch. the crowd of 15 slowly dwindled until it was just julie, phil, ee, and I.

and then mccain conceeded. i had a bottle of champagne that dvine gave me for my birthday, which we opened during his speech. However, we had to sort of work the cork out. no popping across the room. which is, unfortunately, how the announcement felt. but we toasted. it looked like obama wasn't going to speak for a while, so ee and i hopped in my car and i started to take him home.

but as we neared his place, the streets were getting crowded and we decided we should probably head down 16th street. we got to M and we were seeing more and more people, so we parked and walked to the white house. and there was a small crowd. there's a fence along the back side of the house, across the street from Lafayette Sq. and we worked our way through a few hundred people to it. there wasn't much going on other than chanting and singing and really we were both sort of tired and just taking in everything around us.

we stayed for about an hour, both running into students in the classes we TA. But things weren't too crazy. when we decided to leave, we realized the crowd had grown exponentially around us. by the time we got back to the car, and npr, they were announcing that the crowd had reached "several thousand." there were GW cross country team members running and singing, a guy wandering around in his underwear, people in suits, people with cameras, off duty security guards, kids who looked 15, old hippie activist types, young punk activist types. but everybody was happy and yelling. the streets were basically a constant stream of cars honking continuously, and pedestrians running with their arms up down the middle of the street shouting happily.

dc returned 92% in favor of obama by the last count i saw. and on the streets last night you could certainly tell. everyone was out. everyone was shouting or honking. and for once, nobody seemed to care how slowly traffic was moving.