love.

Dad has been on my mind a lot lately.

On the one hand, I am currently reading Cheryl Strayed's "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail," which was one of the last books my dad suggested I read. In it, Strayed recounts her experience as a mid-twenty-something whose life has fallen apart (her mother died quickly and unexpectedly which then led to the disintegration of her marriage). She decides to do a solo hike from southern California all the way up to Washington. I have been gunning to read this book for months because of this simple knowledge that an article he sent me about Strayed was one of the last things he ever sent me in the mail.

Also, I found said article just a few days ago, folded up and tucked inside an envelope which displayed his distinct and jagged handwriting in big letters. I can't tell you how thrilled I was to find another keepsake with his handwriting on it.

The book itself was on my to-read list anyway but even if Dad hadn't suggested it to me, it has reminded me of him in numerous ways. He loved to hike, he loved finding secret spots in nature that nobody else knew about, he loved adventure. One of the places Strayed hikes through is near Lassen Volcanic Park which Dad took Taylor and I to for an outdoorsy weekend one summer. The book also (mildly) reminds me of Jon Krakauer's "Into The Wild," which I read in 2009. My dad loved to read but he hadn't read a book in years - he was more of a magazine, newspaper, radio kind of guy. After reading "Into The Wild," however, I gave him his own copy as a Christmas present which he said he started one week night and never stopped, reaching the last page in the wee hours of the morning before having to get up for work. The name Alexander Supertramp would frequently join our conversations from then on. (Side note: the "Into The Wild" movie was directed by Sean Penn who has a friend in common with my dad. Even though my dad never met him, he loved telling me stories that would start with something like, "I have the funniest story about Sean that I heard the other day....")

But I digress.

On top of all this "Wild" book business, yesterday was also the four-month anniversary of Dad's passing. I'm not sure when, or if, the thirteenth of each month will stop acting as a milestone but at this point in time, I think I just don't know how else to respond to the fact that he's gone. I can't talk to him. I can't see him. I can only count the days that have passed since I last knew he was alive in this world. Time does heal, but in strange and inconsistent ways. We have spent a third of a year without him. I'm not sure if this feels like a lot or little; I only know that we still have a lifetime to go.

Lastly, the most pressing and recent reason Dad has been on my mind: I bit the bullet today and got a tattoo in his honor(!). I've been wanting to get a tattoo of a Gryphon for years, but I'm not quite ready for that yet. A few weeks ago, though, I was digging through my wooden trunk that I keep filled with all sorts of keepsakes: postcards, birthday cards, ticket stubs, and more. I went through the entire stack - things I've been saving since high school - and pulled out everything and anything from Dad. I don't remember the exact moment I decided it but that day, I knew I wanted something in his handwriting as a tattoo. I selected the card he wrote me for my high school graduation. The last line says, "I love you very very much. Dad." The "love," in his exact handwriting from the card, is now forever etched on my forearm. It is a reminder of him, a reminder that he loved me, and a reminder that if you love someone, you should always, always tell them, because you never know when you won't be able to tell them again.

Fun fact: The irony of getting the word "love" inked on my arm on Valentine's Day is not lost on me. Today was also my paternal grandmother's birthday. My dad was close with her. I was close with her. This little twenty minutes of my life that I spent in a tattoo shop with a bald-headed, silver-toothed, fully-tattooed dude helped me connect to two of the most major losses I have ever experienced in my life. It makes for a damn good Valentine's story, I say.

Anyway. All of you out there either love Valentine's Day or hate it but at the very least, I think we can all agree that if you remove all the Hallmark and sugary aspects of the day, it isn't such a terrible thing to have to spend some time telling people we love them. I suggest you go and do that right now.

I'll start with my Dad, who I usually called on this day simply so we could talk about Gigi and wish her a happy birthday together.

I love you very very much, Dad.

maurice sendak.

As I'm sure some of you heard, the children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak passed away yesterday. I, like most people, mostly knew Sendak as the beloved author of Where The Wild Things Are - his most famous children's book, which was also the theme for an amazing museum that was opened at the San Francisco Metropolitan when I was young.

On my second day of teaching at the school for the deaf, my students put on a performance of Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice. On the first of each month, I reviewed the poem of the month from that particular book and the students used it as reading practice for a week. When the students did biographies on famous people, Maurice Sendak was one of their topics. I learned that Sendak was the illustrator of the Little Bear series, which at one point in my childhood, I was reading several times a day.

It is always a shock when a famous person passes away. As a society, we respond the loudest to the passings of glamorous celebrities, especially when they die before their time, like Heath Ledger or Michael Jackson. It is people such as children's authors, though, who I will always value. As a teacher, a book lover, and as someone who cherishes childhood memories, my thoughts are with Maurice Sendak today. May he rest in peace.

champions!!!

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Living in the same city as the Superbowl champions is kind of the greatest thing ever. The whole city is hyped. Unfortunately, I will spend the next two days silently crying over the fact that I can't attend the victory parade tomorrow - talk about a magnitude of a missed opportunity. 

Anyway, the sports critics have really given Eli a hard time all these years (ok, that's according to Nick, obviously. I don't inform myself of such things), but after beating Tom Brady in two Superbowls in four years...I think talk is going to change around here. 

GO. NEW. YORK.

the infinite struggle of east vs. west.

It's time to get honest here. Tonight, the San Francisco 49ers battle the New York Giants for a spot in the Superbowl game and tensions are high.

My friend Lou wrote on my wall the other day, about this upcoming game, "Is this like an existential crisis for you?"

Kind of. I mean, not really. Maybe a little? Ok, here's the deal.

I grew up on Steve Young and Joe Montana and 49er football parties with my parents' friends. I went to Jerry Rice's last 49er game before he became an Oakland Raider. I knew nothing about any of the players, the coaches, or the statistics but the Niners were just in my life and I knew to root for them.

Fast forward to college. The Niners suck. Everybody has forgotten about them, at least outside of the loyalty of the Bay Area. I'm a young, naive college student in Burlington, Vermont where the pressing question of the season is always Giants fan or Patriots fan? Yankees or Red Sox? The New England vs. New York rivalry is something I would come to be very familiar with. My freshman year was when the Yankees played the Red Sox in the playoffs and again, tensions were high (to my old Wills dorm co-residents: excuse the pun). I rooted for the Yankees. Not because I knew anything about them but because I had been dreaming of moving to New York ever since I was a little girl. I was just a fan of New York in general. That is the honest-to-god only reason I chose to root for Derek Jeter and little did I know, I had picked one side of a rivalry that I would never be able to look back on. And who knows, Nick might never have started dating me if I had chosen to root for the Red Sox. You laugh now but I'm pretty serious. Nick is a born-and-raised, die-hard New York fan whether we're talking about the money-sucking, all-dominant, nobody-will-ever-win-as-many-championships Yankees or the struggling, embarrassing underdogs known as the Knickerbockers (when Nick was little, his dad used to tell people they spelled his name with "K."). As this sports-obsessed man would slowly infiltrate my life with sports (when we finally moved in together, my ability to avoid it was completely over), I became a fan in my own right.

I will never know about these New York teams as much as Nick, or watch them as passionately as he does, but I am still cheering for these teams alongside him. New York is my home now and I know more about Eli Manning and Amaré Stoudemire and Curtis Granderson than I know about anybody else on any San Francisco team (I do love that Brian Wilson though. Mmmm). But seriously, I didn't even know Alex Smith's name until that game last weekend against the Saints (which by the way, was one of the best football games I've seen in years).

So, it's pretty clear who I'm rooting for. Especially because my stepdad texted me the other night placing a bet against Nick and I: If the Giants win tonight, John owes us a decked out, labor-induced dinner with wine and appetizers and clean-up too. If the Niners win, we owe him.

So, let's go, Giants. 

That said, the Niners hold a little place in my heart thanks to nostalgia and hometown pride. The red and gold logos invoke memories of driving past Candlestick Park, asking my parents' friends who they were "voting" for when they came over to watch games, listening to my dad screaming at the TV and spilling beer in the process.

Don't get me wrong - I will be pissed if the Giants lose. But if the Niners win, I will feel, at the very least, a smidgeon of pride for everyone back home and will probably wish I could partake in the joy and festivities that I used to know as a child for Niners success.

May the best team win.

three-day-weekend.

On Friday night, Nick and I hopped on the Fung-Wah bus to Boston. The plan was to visit his cousins who live in Marshfield but because we were getting in so late (and Marshfield is in the 'burbs), we planned on spending Friday night with college friends who live right in the city. We didn't get in until 11 p.m. so it was a brief visit with the friends, but still so much fun. We also missed a lot of people so we're going to have to schedule another trip in the future.

The next morning, we woke up in our friend Adam's apartment, got an amazing but ridiculous brunch at The Friendly Toast, then hopped the train to head south to Marshfield. The rest of the weekend was lovely and quaint, filled with driving tours of oceanside towns, lots of football watching, lots of giggling at their adorable 9-month-old son, and just some all-around quality family time. It's always nice to get out of the city and change up the routine a bit.

Nick, demonstrating how we all felt after an insane brunch

But, you guys! There's more. On Saturday morning, I got a text from one of my best (and pregnant) friends from home who had been in a slow and uneventful labor for over 48 hours. Sure enough, I checked my phone, and there it was, a tiny little picture text of her beautiful baby boy who had finally joined us in this world. Richard Anthony Davis Jr., who we will be calling RJ, was born at 9.49 a.m. at 6 lbs., 10 oz., and was 49 cm long. Notice TWO "49" statistics in there. Megan, loyal San Francisco fan, told us all that the 49ers were absolutely going to win that day thanks to RJ's statistics. And they totally did. All I want to do is meet my precious little godson (!) but I have to patiently adore him through pictures and stories until my next trip home. Ain't he a cutie?

look at that hair!

steve jobs.

I had never really paid attention to Steve Jobs. I knew nothing about him except for the fact that he was the mastermind behind some of the most important technological advances of our generation.

That said, hearing of his passing has saddened me to a point of surprise. Maybe it's because of the phenomenal outpouring of grief and respect that has been expressed all over the media since he passed away yesterday. Maybe it's because it became clearly evident that this man truly left his mark before leaving this world. Maybe it's because he was the shining example of following your dreams and sticking to them no matter what.

Whatever the reason is, he will never be forgotten.

Below is a video of Jobs giving a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. I first heard this speech about three years ago but I can't even remember why - I think someone posted it on facebook or maybe sent it to me once I myself graduated from college. Now, in light of Jobs' passing, this speech is being revisited 100 times over as people cherish his wise words and mourn across the world. It's a moving and inspiring speech and I can't help but archive it right here on my little blog so that I can always turn back to it. If nothing else, let's repay Jobs for the contribution he gave our society by keeping these special words in our hearts:

Transcript:


I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

9/11.

 On September 11, 2001, I walked into the school library before my first class and saw everyone sitting in silence, listening to a radio. My friend Alex saw the confused look on my face and pulled me back out into the hallway.

"Do you know what happened?" she asked.

"No..." I said.

"There was a terrorist attack in New York City. Two planes hit the World Trade Center this morning."

I immediately called my mom and told her to turn on the TV. I rushed up to the cafeteria where a mini-television had been set up and gaped at the horrifying images of the second plane crashing into the Twin Towers - an image the whole country is now familiar with.

In the following days and weeks, the sounds and images of that fateful day hung over all of our heads like a dark cloud. But the fact of the matter was...those of us in California were far removed from the situation, unless we had family or friends who lived in New York City, which I didn't. The story of it all captivated me and caused me to shed tears, but it was like watching a documentary of something that happened in another world, in another time.

Fast forward eight and a half years: I have been living in Manhattan for three months. Dylan comes to visit and we go on an NYC tour extravaganza which includes a trip down to Ground Zero. Standing in the plaza just outside the construction site, we look up and find it hard to believe that this was the very spot where the towers once stood, where hundreds and hundreds of people lost their lives that day, where prideful city dwellers lost their sense of security in a matter of moments.

Walking away from the site, I remember Dylan and I talked about how different our experience of 9/11 was as California natives, and how different my perspective of that day is now that I live here.

Every year, around this time, the interviews and reports and reruns of that day are aired all over the radio and television waves, splashed on the front covers of newspapers and magazines. It always makes me cry.

This year, as the tenth anniversary approaches, New York City is stirring with news of terror threats, anticipated riots and marches, and the grand opening of the massive 9/11 memorial project down by Ground Zero. It's a little unnerving. It's a little scary.

This morning, on The Today Show, Matt Lauer reconnected with six teenagers who were on the show ten years ago after they lost their parents in the attacks. They showed one boy's interview with Matt just a few weeks after he lost his father - a firefighter who walked into the frenzy to find people who needed help. In the clip, Matt Lauer told the boy his dad was a hero. At these words, the 10-year-old boy breaks down and as a result, I break down too. Through my tears, I realize I am not the removed California high-schooler that I was ten years ago.

That moment during which I watched Matt Lauer try to console such an innocent child reminded me that even though I may have felt disconnected horror with what happened ten years ago, it doesn't mean I feel disconnected now. On this day, at this moment, New York City is my city. I feel the wrath that the people here felt - they were attacked, they were terrorized, and ten years later, they still remember.

On Sunday, the tenth anniversary, Nick and I don't have plans. Most Sundays we stay home and clean, do laundry, take it easy. Nick has to study for the GREs and I am back in the throes of school and homework but I imagine that on this particular Sunday, we will leave the news on all day and, with the rest of the city, with the rest of the country, remember what happened ten years before.

hurricane irene.

It's hard to believe that three days ago, Nick and I spent almost twelve hours trying to decide whether or not to flee the city before Hurricane Irene came knocking on our door. We ended up deciding to stay but not without being fully prepared. We stocked up on non-perishables, gallons of water, flashlights, batteries, candles and toilet paper. Our friend Eric came over with even more food, some beers, and Scattergories. The three of us were fully prepared to not leave the apartment for a good 24 hours.

We watched a chick-flick (much to their chagrin of course), played Scrabble, played Scattergories, and drank beers and ate the unhealthiest foods in between. We fell asleep around 2 a.m. and wondered if we would have electricity when we woke.



In hindsight, our questions and curiosity seem silly now.

We looked out the window at 7 a.m. and while the winds were blowing like mad, nothing seemed to be shaking or rattling any harder than a regular winter's storm. We finally awoke for good around 10 a.m., looked out the window again, and thought to ourselves, ".....Is that it?"

We took a bike ride later in the day to check out the neighborhood. We found some fallen branches, lots of debris, and one flooded street down by Astoria Park on the East River.


After spending hours talking about how generally underwhelming Irene turned out to be, we learned later that New England wasn't so lucky. Our friend Mary's town of Ludlow, Vermont is completely flooded and old, famous wooden bridges have washed away. Our friends who were at a bachelor party in the Catskills this weekend are stranded there without power until further notice. Helicopters are apparently being used to evacuate people in that area.

The craziest part is that for all the hype that the media stirred over the coming wrath of Irene, it now seems pleased that the storm is over and we can move on with our lives. The tragic results of Irene throughout New England are not over though, and the media is barely shedding any light on it. My thoughts and prayers are with those who are stranded, without power, have lost their homes and possessions, their towns, and more.

Here are some links that show the destruction in Vermont. I truly hope they can recover.


30 photos of Irene's destruction throughout Vermont 


A video of a covered bridge literally washing away


A blog entry regarding the destruction of one of UVM's favorite post-slopes spot, The Alchemist, in Waterbury, VT

ONE MORE DAY!!!

yay/nay.

Words cannot even begin to describe the elation and joy I felt last night when, much to my surprise, after the announcement of Virginia's electoral votes in Obama's name, Barack Obama was, indeed, our new president. The results came in so quickly and the projection of his election came hours before I expected, so the shock was intense. Yet, nothing beat standing in the ballroom at the Hilton Hotel with a couple hundred fellow Democrats jumping and shouting with joy. We were finally safe. My generation no longer needs to worry about finding success in this broken-down economy. My hopes of possibly teaching someday no longer seem unattainable or a waste of time. My tax dollars will not spend an eternity paying for a useless war in Iraq that has unproductively taken so many lives. Things have looked good for Obama for awhile now, but watching his number of his electoral votes grow and then officially winning by a landslide sparked tears in my eyes, butterflies in my stomach, and happiness in my whole entire body. I will never forget for the rest of my life not only the essence of last night, but of the exact moment when I realized Obama was officially going to be my president.

While I was unbelievably proud to be a resident of both the state that started the flow of Obama's electoral vote winnings and the country that finally saw what we needed in Obama, I regret to say that I am disappointed in the state in which I was born and raised. I have always had a ridiculous amount of California pride but with what looks to be the passing of Prop 8, I am hurt and confused by the people of what I consider to be one of the greatest states in the nation. When our supreme court opted to overturn the ban on gay marriage months ago, I KNEW that we would set a standard for the rest of country and that things would slowly but surely look up. Now it looks as if what I KNEW was a load of garbage and that even a huge portion of my fellow democrats would rather preserve the tradition of marriage between a man and a woman than fight for equal rights for all. Honestly, I understand why people disagree on a lot of things, but this I just DON'T UNDERSTAND. Who cares about tradition? Our greatest achievements have been based on putting cracks in the ceiling and paving new roads and opportunities. Our greatest setbacks have been bad priorities and lack of focus on more pressing matters. Maybe people want to preserve tradition, but our time and money and focus should rely on greater things like universal healthcare and bringing home our troops. Allowing for same-sex marriage is one of the few things where if allowed, those who disagree will not be personally affected. Your marriage is not any less legitimate or less special or more overlooked if someone else's same-sex marriage is legitimized. WHO CARES. By voting for Prop 8, you are stripping people of their rights and happiness, but by voting against Prop 8, you still have all your rights and still get to have marriage, and who you marry, as an option. Come on, California, I believe in you. We're better than this.

two days...

Halloween this year was a perfect ending to what has been an almost perfect month. Every single weekend this October has been nothing short of amazing, whether it involved hiking with friends in the phenomenal Vermont fall foliage, trekking to the Big Apple and reuniting with people old and new, or staying in with the roommates and watching Law & Order: SVU while an apple pie bakes in the oven. Lots of friends who have moved home since graduation came into town this weekend for the big celebrations, thus making for the perfect wrap-up for this month. Everyone's costumes and spirits were wonderful, and I would have expected nothing less.

Now that the Halloween cheer has subsided and it is once again, a lazy Sunday, I can't get rid of this looming feeling of anxiety and nervousness as the election rapidly approaches. I. am. so. scared. My generation has a lot to worry about right now - we have just graduated college and are entering the "real world" at a time when the economy is a dark and threatening monster. I won't sit here and blog about all the reasons why I need Obama to win and for McCain to lose, but I will say this: As upset as I was when Bush was re-elected four years ago, nothing will beat the despairing and dark emotional state I may fall in if by Tuesday night, Obama has not been elected.