Monday, November 03, 2008

Why I shouldn't be nervous

All I can do tomorrow is go to the polls and vote. It's too late for me to have any other effect on the outcome of the election, and worrying about the results will do me no good. I have to get through the day. I'm getting up at 6 AM and going to the polls first thing, so I hope the lines will be short. Even in blue Park Slope, I expect long lines early in the morning.

I'm excited about watching the returns come in tomorrow evening. I haven't decided for certain what I'm doing, but I suspect I'll end up at home by myself with my laptop and the HDTV and full control of my election night environment. For some reason, I keep thinking about the 1992 election and how I watched the returns come in that night. I was a freshman at Georgetown, living in Darnall Hall, and it was my first presidential election as a voter. I watched the returns in the dorm lounge with the rest of my floormates, with the occasional stop by my friend Jeremy's room, where he had his computer dialed into Prodigy and was getting state-by-state results online. He and a few friends broke out a bottle of champagne early when Prodigy called the election for Clinton, about 20 minutes before the networks did. I smile when I think of how it was so high-tech at the time to monitor election results online.

Tomorrow night I'll have more than a few tabs open to different news sites, and maybe a bottle of something to drink to celebrate, or to drown my sorrows if things go the other way.

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