a day in a surreal life

surreal - having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic

today is friday. tuesday was three days ago. it feels like three weeks. and i'm three weeks of tired in three days...

this week has been a whirlwind of epic proportion. i'm in the middle of a tornado, and it's not the eye.

on tuesday, we won. the collective we made a statement to the country and the world that we are different. we have torn down the barriers of race, worked through the hate and bigotry, said 'no' to the failed policies of george w. bush, and made it abundantly clear that we want change.

on tuesday, i won. i won the greatest achievement of my life. for the first time in my entire life, i gave my _everything_ and found, at the end of a long, exhausting and great journey, that giving everything can and does pay back in spades. i won. though my contributions, in the grand scheme of things, are/were fairly miniscule, i know i made a difference. and i couldn't be more proud that i did change the world (a little bit). i know this, even if i can't really feel and know what that means.

winning the election is and was the greatest feeling of accomplishment i've ever known. the sweet taste of victory still lingers, three days later. but it was seeing indiana turn blue that gave me a real and personal sense of unrivaled pride and joy. it was the most rewarding piece of the electoral thumping we handed to the republican party. and it will be with me till the end of my days. indiana went blue. indiana. i did that. obviously i wasn't alone as it took a large army of soldiers of change, but i was a big part of that, and it makes it all the more personal.

in the three days since tuesday, i have had a conference call with barack obama in which he praised this victory as "ours" and said that he expected to see many of us in washington in january, i applied for one of those washington positions, hopped onto a plane to san francisco to get back to that day job work i've long been relegating to the back burner, ran a meeting i've been anticipating for weeks, and booked a trip to spend a week in paradise with hallway boy (though he's the one that did the actual planning and booking of that trip).

i'm tired. i'm emotionally and mentally drained. it hasn't even registered (not really) that this journey has ended, that this thing is over, that we won, that barack obama is our next president. i'm swirling about some cloudy, beautiful dream in which america and i have taken a step in the right direction, but can't even wake up enough to truly savor what that means, or where i play in to whatever comes next. i'm simply floating in the peripheral wave of the celebratory mood of our country, without allowing its meaning, its end, and its beginning to really sink in...

i think i'm just stuck in the blues of what now. i'm three days this side of tuesday and i don't know who or what i am or what and who i'm meant to be and how i'm meant to play a role in the world we're destined to change. i just know i'm tired, i can't see through the fuzz of the past week and the past nine months, and i can't see tomorrow or any day beyond... 'what now?' is all i really see, know, and feel. what now???