stretch out your legs and dance with me

it's pretty amusing to look back and read the last personal post i made on this blog.  it seems to have been written on the first day of february 2007, which by my count is 21 months ago.  it doesn't really seem all that long by some counts: i remember exactly where i was sitting when i made it (right over there on my kitchen table, at the chair that faces the door), and i'm pretty sure i remember the odd mix of self-pity and self-loathing that drove me to write it.  it reads relatively positively if you'd just happen upon it and read it without knowing who wrote it, but i don't really have that luxury, and so i know the whole thing is bullshit.  that was no turning point.  no epiphanies came to me that day.

like i said, by one or two measures, february 2007 doesn't seem that long ago, but across other wavelengths of my life, along other strands of the great swirling mass of spaghetti that is my life, that was a long, long time ago.  i wasn't happy in those days, which wasn't particularly anyone's fault, not even mine, i don't think.  i gained a lot of things in the last 21 months that i really needed, and i lost some of the things that i probably shouldn't have had.  most importantly, of course, i re-evaluated the things i had and still have, and i determined that they were the most important things in my life.  i am of course talking about one specific thing especially, and i think making an effort to establish that as a presence in my life until the day i die has been pretty key to my being happy over the last couple months.  sure, it involved a pretty hefty monetary investment, and yeah, it's a hell of a lot of work at a time when i have absolutely no free time, but it's made me happy and it will continue to do so for my entire life.  so it's worth it.

i stopped taking medication for my stomach in april, right after i started my new job.  i started school officially in late august, unofficially 12 months prior.  i proposed to lindsay 27 days ago.  i made my first donation to the obama campaign one year and one month ago, three months before the iowa caucuses and three months and a couple days before lindsay and i went to costa rica.  i became 25 years old 16 months ago, then 26 years old 4 months ago, and then i went to new york city and washington dc 3 months ago.  i met a penguin almost exactly 11 months ago.  these are the things i've done since february 2007.

it's pretty much true that i only write when i get in a very specific mood.  i haven't yet determined what exactly causes this mood, or even what this mood really is.  it's kind of like nostalgia, but it almost never involves looking back--present company notwithstanding.  i can't imagine what this blog would look like to someone who doesn't know me; good thing nobody reads it, much less people who don't know me.  but i'd think that someone reading it would think that i'm always like this, always taking small, seemingly-insignificant things in my life and turing them into some larger metaphor or trying to pull some deeper meaning out of relatively everyday things.  but that's not entirely true, imaginary reader who doesn't interact with me on a daily or semi-often basis--well, it's a little true, i guess, but it's not the entire story.  i would say that the mood that i'm in when i start thinking like this just happens to be the mood that makes me want to write.  this wistful, over-analytical, and yes, pretentious style of meandering thought is really just how my brain works when i get that weird voice in the back of my head that tells me to write it down, whatever it is.  these moods seem to be more and more rare (see the last 21 months of posts here for evidence), so i might as well get it all out of my system before i fall asleep.

were i to be tasked with making some sense out of the third paragraph's mash of chronological points of interest in my life, i'd have to say, and not just because tomorrow happens to be november 4, that october 6, 2007 was a pretty important day for me.  i can't really remember if i recognized that fact at the time, but at the very least it has become something of a symbol for how the next year would be.  i had just started taking classes again and getting back into the swing of thinking about things that really matter, and so 10/06/07 marks the day that i decided that politics was in fact something i cared enough about to actually invest some meaningful sense of myself in, however small and effortless my contribution might be.  i've gone up and down in my enthusiasm for the obama campaign and the american electoral system in general over the past year, but that point still remains as the time in which the real political world started to matter to me.  after that decision, the decision to work for my masters was easier, which gave me a direction again and pushed me to work out some of the things that i'd been letting stack up.  allow me one of my metaphors: the campaign for me was like playing fantasy football.  it's easier to be interested when you have a stake, when you feel like part of the competition.

it's always been interesting to me that the obama campaign would latch on to the word "hope."  obviously, it's clear what the campaign wants it to mean: hope for the future of america, hope that we can succeed as a nation if we change the policies that brought us here.  but when i see a poster with a picture of a black man and those four capital letters, i think of a different slogan: i hope we can elect him.  i hope we can be what we haven't been for 230 years.  the campaign's hope is a noun, mine is a verb; theirs is a positive emotion, a rallying cry for unity and brotherhood and a brighter future, mine is a despairing cry for help, a way for me to hide my disappointment in a thick cloak of sarcasm.  barack obama wants america to prove him right, and i want america to prove me wrong.

so with that, i'm going to bed.  the polls open in about six hours.  do the right thing, america.  and if you could also vote down prop 8, that would be great.  thanks.