Concession speech

Here is a list of things I should have posted by now:
1. A Halloween Extravaganza Gallery featuring a witch, a farmer, Wolverine, a furious-looking cat dressed up in an angel costume, and my husband who went as a Giant Pile of Laundry. It took large amounts of pouting to get him to cut TWO HOLES in a sheet and drape it over his head, and then he just spent the evening slouched under his sheet watching Star Wars through the eye holes. Which were so not in the right places. Honey, your eyes are not as far apart as your ears.
2. An open letter to Presidents of Non-Profit Clubs and Organizations who are slowly sucking the life force out of their volunteer Executive Secretaries with the incessant emailing and the question-asking and the not-paying-attention-to-any-of-the-answers-ing.
3. A thoughtful and intelligent analysis of the event the nightly newscasters keep insisting is the Biggest Election Of My Lifetime. But I do written thoughtful and intelligent analysis about as well as I do out loud- which is to say, HORRIBLY. There are many other places you can go for thoughtful, intelligent, and occasionally entertaining analysis. So instead, I will offer an Election Night Party Recap:

I'm going to leave out all the serious parts. Also, the debating parts, the brow-furrowed parts, the parts where one guest was surprised that we weren't all on the same side, and the part where the party hostess, after midnight and 3 glasses of champagne, got a little teary-eyed about The State Of Things. Ugh. Which means the recap boils down to a heated discussion over whether or not Chris Matthews got a haircut sometime between 7:30 am and 5:30 pm when the hostess was suffering withdrawal over the lack of cable television in her workplace.

Which isn't to say it wasn't a Fantastically Good Time. Because it was. There were streamers, a fair and balanced amount of Kerry and Bush Newsweek clippings artfully arranged and taped to the walls, bellinis AND flirtinis, a laptop each for the way cool maps on cspan.org and cnn.com, and a red white and blue cake. When you voluntarily squirt entire bottles of red and blue food coloring into your nice white cake batter, that's dedication. There were Nader voters and the guy who wrote "BUSH WINS" on his t-shirt with permanent marker. There were also the people who, when filling out the Unbiased Election Entrance Poll, did not put a check mark under Kerry for the question "Looks most like Skeletor". Obviously those people were very very wrong.

(And, confidential to the Party Guests: I swear I did not type "Skeletor" and "Kerry" into Google until just now. Honest. Although, when you're looking at this poll, Maria Shriver wins handily.)

Last night I drove home and counted up all the Kerry signs still hanging out in grassy medians and front yards. Before the election they (and all other political yard signs) were annoying. Now they just look sad. And I was listening to Dar, who is always good for the kind of thoughtful and intelligent analysis that is totally fine to say out loud if you are just sitting by yourself in your car and driving home in the dark. And Dar sang "It's nothing much new, but it'll do". What does that mean? I don't know. But I like the way it rhymes. If Dar and I were friends and she knew that I just used one of her lyrics to help me feel a little better about the future of the free world in general and President Bush in particular, she'd thump me hard with her guitar.

My reaction? Meh. I so don't get the people lying in the streets waiting to get run over because Mr. Bush was reelected. Then again, I'm not so hot on the President and the way he skips out on all our phone dates to talk about why things are the way they are. I've stuck up for you more than a few times, Mr. Bush, and I'm feeling a little abandoned here. Don't think these election results mean we approve. Maybe we just couldn't bring ourselves to vote for Skeletor, no matter how many movie stars tried to convert us to the blessed salvation offered in the Gospel of Michael Moore.

Anyway. There I go with the bloviating and everyone knows that bloviating is Bill O'Reilly's job.

Tomorrow: witches! farmers! piles of laundry!