So here it is...

But I feel like it needs to be said. I don't want to act like this is just any other night. It isn't. The last seven (I'm giving much of the 1st year to W. as a "gimme") years have hurt. I wish I knew how to not take it personally. But some stuff has felt really personal. I know researchers who got telephone scary calls to suss out their "beliefs" about ideological, not scientific, issues. Some lost their funding. When you work really hard to try to do good science--to know that that is a possibility iis devastating. It's been a scary time to be outside the dominant heterosexual norm. The politics of hate have been frightening. It's been a scary time when questioning meant being called "un-American," which has really hurt because I come from a military family where my dad missed a huge chunk of my childhood (before cell phones & internet calling---when he was on a mission, he was just gone for a couple of weeks), so how freakin' dare they label people like me "un-American" for thinking that there HAD TO BE A BETTER WAY....

Yeah, I have some "baggage" now.

And yet, oddly enough, I have hope.

It's funny....I find myself tonight connected to friends that I've been tied to on other nights. In 2004, as things just went to hell, and it got later & later, and I got drunker & drunker (I mean really, what other option was there?), I called out West to my friend C. because his time-zone was one of the last at a somewhat reasonable hour.

I sobbed. And was probably incoherent.

Life kept being fairly grim. I kept putting one foot in front of the other. But I had a sense by 2006 that the housing market was starting to implode long before they started to talk about it on the news--mostly because C. & Y. really needed to sell a condo in southern CA so they could move to Athens. They ended up living with me for a while. It was like a life-preserver in both concrete & emotional ways. I'm so grateful for that time. They got settled in Athens, but then I left. Life is funny that way sometimes. I don't doubt that I needed to go--partly for professional reasons but also now I know it was right because I've found someone to love--but man, it hurt so much to go.

It hurts tonight to be back in Athens, because it reminds me of what I left. It's bittersweet. It also feels like coming full circle, now that I think that there is hope to be had.

Tomorrow (which is just thirty minutes away) is a big day. I shall have hope again. How is that for dramatic? (I've learned something from a decade in the south) The hope has been slowly bubbling up since Election Day. But I didn't really want to get my hopes up until now. I wasn't wiling to believe until we got to January 20th.

And here we almost are.