The past several days have admittedly been a bit challenging for me, but one thing that has really perked me up is how freaking excited people around me are for the election today.  The level of energy that is buzzing around both national and local elections is something that I have never experienced before.  It warms me.  People, both in California and Washington, whom I never thought of as very political, are sporting election-themed gtalk messages (and gtalk messages really are the new bumper sticker), planning their entire day around making it to the polls, and have really put in time and effort to learn what they are voting about and what it all means.

I get excited about people being excited about things.  It doesn’t matter what it is, but when I see somebody get really excited about something, it reassures me that that person cares about something and can appreciate the happy things in life.  Maybe that is why I married Mike- seriously, he really defines getting excited about something and doing whatever it takes to accomplish his goal.  His goals may be a little weird- cool vaccuum cleaners, crazy cars, giant monitors and insane fish tanks- but i admire that he can get excited about something (even if it does involve him telling me that now he wants to buy a Honda S2000.  ::sigh::).  And when I see this many people getting this worked up about an election, something that all too often gets taken for granted, I get back a little bit of my faith, not only in the political process, but in the fact that people have hope.

This year I voted absentee in California.  I knew I wouldn’t get properly caught up on Washington politics, and I didn’t want to pass up the chance to vote no on some of the California state elections- NO on Prop 8, NO on Prop 4 and YES on Prop 2, among others.  I actually miss the process of walking into a polling place and casting my vote the semi-old-fashioned way- it makes me nostalgic for my grandma, who worked the polls at EVERY election until her death last year.  I always kept my registration at my parents’ house so that I could go have lunch with her while she manned the polling place wearing a star-spangled paper hat and passing out “I Voted” stickers to everybody as they walked out.  She was opinionated, a little brash and extremely progressive in her thoughts, so I think she would have agreed with which rectangles I filled in this year.