[riot?]

In case you haven't heard, last night the winner of the 2012 presidential election was announced. I know, I know. Everyone's talking about it today. But I promise you this: the election is not the main focus of this post.

Okay so let's get this over with: I'm disappointed Romney lost.

I have to admit that I was bad last night and went to bed at like 9 PM. In my defense, Rachel and I had gone to Hampden the night before for dinner and drinks at 13.5% to celebrate Rachel passing the bar. I tried absinthe for the first time. No I didn't stumble home but I did get home around the time I would normally go to sleep with a bit of a buzz still goin' on. Turns out half an absinthe cocktail while waiting for your dinner will do that to you. Oops!  Needless to say I was on the struggle bus Tuesday while I was at work. Thankfully my boss was kind enough to allow me to leave at 4 PM to go vote. Thankfully I did just that because I was in and out in about 10 minutes. 8 of those 10 minutes were spent confusing the daylights out of the poor little old lady checking me in. It turns out that having an out of state license that didn't list my middle name fried her circuits. Eventually we got that all straightened out and I popped right into a booth to vote.

Then I went home, went for a run, ate dinner and crashed early having made peace with the fact that I wouldn't find out the election results until the next morning. Life, however, had other plans. Funny how often life does that.

So there I was, sleeping peacefully, when I heard this ridiculously loud noise. I thrashed about spastically for a minute having been cruelly jolted from my sleep. Meanwhile, the following ran through my brain:

"DEAR GOD THEY'RE RIOTING. THEY'RE GOING TO COME UP THE FIRE ESCAPE AND GET ME. THE WHOLE CITY IS GOING TO BURN DOWN. I MUST HIDE THE BIRDS IN THE CLOSET!!"

So it turns out that rational thought is not my thing when awoken from sleep unexpectedly.

After I finally untangled myself from my sheets, sending a decorative pillow out of the loft and onto the sofa in the process, I calmed down enough to realize that what I was hearing was fireworks, not gunshots or homemade bombs. Hey it's Baltimore, where you can never take a loud noise for granted as just as a firework or a car backfiring. The shouting turned out to have been cheers, not angry riots.

Funny side note: I heard someone screaming on Halloween and was legitimately convinced that I was overhearing a murder. I ran to the window, cell phone in hand, only to hear the screamer shout "trick or treat!" then burst into hysterical giggles. I sent a pillow flying that time too but thankfully I was already on the sofa so it didn't fly too far.  I think the one last night hit the birdcage on the way down, which did not help my generally confused and alarmed state.

Source: megustamemes.tumblr.com via Ashley on Pinterest

Ah. Good to know I'm not the only one with this problem.

Back to the election. So I grabbed my phone and checked online. It turns out that Obama had just been announced as the winner. Bummed that my candidate lost but pleased that my city wasn't in full-on revolt, I snuggled back under my comforter and went back to sleep.

I wish I could say that I found out the results at some swanky watch party and share with you pictures of me in a fancy cocktail dress, hobnobbing with the Baltimore elite (is there even such a thing?). But no, I was in bed wearing a pair of fluffy pajama pants, a t-shirt I got for free at Block Party last spring, and a hair style that can only truly be described as swamp monster-esque. Ah well, maybe in 4 years I'll be able to share with you a swanky election party story.

As a quick side note, I do want to say (again) just how darn excited I am that Maryland passed Question 6 yesterday. That means that this wonderful state voted to move one step closer to equality, at least when it comes to who may legally marry whom. I'm also glad that Maryland has protected everyone's freedom of choice in this regard by not mandating that religious organizations perform marriages they don't agree with. I personally find the anti-gay marriage arguments too tenuous to sustain. If your concern is truly the sanctity of marriage and not just your personal comfort, why are you not working to prevent atheists from marrying? I hate to echo what's been said so many times but it's too true: how is a loving, committed, God-fearing same-sex couple marrying more destructive to your marriage than Kim Kardashian's laughably brief marriage? I also don't see how a man marrying another man will affect your marriage. Okay so maybe there will be two less available men for all us single women. But when they get married they aren't going to open a rift in the space-time continuum or start sacrificing infants. Similar arguments were made for maintaining segregation. Guess what? Blacks and whites now use the same facilities and even marry each other. Has Armageddon begun? Absolutely not. This is the same issue: we've taken religion and perverted it to justify discriminating against what makes us socially uncomfortable. Marriage does not exclusively belong to one religion or another; it's long been a social institution as well as a religious one. Ultimately I don't believe in forcing my religious views on others. Instead, I believe in striving to live a life pleasing to God because at the end of the day I can only determine ONE person's fate: my own. That's not to say I don't care deeply about other people. That's simply to say that I truly believe that we are each responsible for working out our own salvation.

Alright so that wasn't such a quick side note, but I felt it was important to make a public statement on the topic.

I promise I'm off my soapbox now. And I also promise that no matter how you voted--for Obama or Romney, for Question 6 or against it--I still love you just as much as I did before.

Excuse me but I must go brew some tea. You see, the heat at the office appears to be something I like to call "not working" so I'm currently a little popsicle in desperate need of warmth. Ciao!

Image from here.