Today

I’m so excited/nervous/barfy/worried about how today is going to unfold. I have my hunches and my hopes, but we all know those don’t amount to a hill of vomit-flavored jelly beans.

I remember being so full of hope in 2004 and then feeling all that slip away like sand in my fingers. Dirty, stinking, fickle sand that I clearly never had a grasp on anyway. Waking up and knowing Bush had managed to pull it out and that so many people I know and loved helped him just wrecked me. I was embarrassed and angry and just defeated at the prospect of four more years being led by a borderline evil and ineloquent fucktard. Knowing the Dubya era is now coming to a close and that it might actually give way to something positive and potentially unifying fills me with hope and the delicious saltwater tears of pride.

I don’t know how I will handle another defeat. No, really. If this country unites in complacency and fear and puts Grumpy and Dopey in office, I am going to have to take some time to think real hard about what that means.

I have never worked a presidential election at a real paper before. We’ll have pizza and cookies and I’ll be swilling coffee, so chances are I might go into sugar shock before it’s all over. I’m going in early and staying late to make sure we do it right. Also, because my nerves are about to eat me alive and sitting around the apartment in my pajamas isn’t making me feel any better.

History is about to be made, y’all. Let’s be on the good side of it.

(Election-day work pimpage: The CA has a really cool project mapping local polling places and what’s happening at them.)