Vacillating Velocity

The best evidence I’ve seen yet that President-Elect Obama is not just a political figure but a popular one is only a few blocks away. Before the election, in the cute little shopping district near me, there was a table set up outside of Peet’s coffee most days. They sold what appeared to be official Obama / Biden merchandise. Well, now that the election’s over, not only are they still there, not only have they expanded (two tables, baby!), but they have a competitor! Some guy set up a table across the sidewalk and is selling what are clearly low-quality, cash-in t-shirts.

I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other on this, but it’s interesting to note.

So there’s this new (ish?) business on Telegraph a few blocks from UC Berkeley campus – it’s a cereal joint. I mean, that’s the best phrase I can come up with to describe it. As near as I can tell, it’s a place to go and buy single servings of cereal. I’ve never actually been inside, mind you, since that sounds beyond unappealing. Indeed, I remember my first thought being “well, that won’t take long to go out of business.”
Imagine my amusement, today, when I noticed that the vintage clothing store roughly across the street had put, on their marquee:

DUDE, WHAT’S WITH THAT CEREAL STORE?

Oh yeah, did you hear? Barack Obama won the presidency. Not just won. WON. (More on the margins , and more specifically geography, in these neat maps) First of all, I’d like to thank Meantime IPA, which I was enjoying a bottle of whilst watching the election results, and whose sweet and complex hoppiness I credit with the win.

Seriously, though, it was an amazing thing. Many people have spent much time expressing the whole thing much more eloquently than I can in these fifteen minutes before class, but I will say that it was the first time I got a thrill out of the actual act of voting. I almost shed tears. For once, I was voting for someone I believed in, not against someone I abhorred. For once, I feel the possibility of an intelligent, rational, compassionate and pragmatic direction for the country to head in. I admit it, he got me:

I feel hope.

I woke up before my alarm this morning and lay lazily in bed. Upon hearing the creaks and groans of someone shuffling around upstairs, I began to tune my ears to a different kind of noise. Rain. The splatter of the drops on asphalt, the rustling of tree leaves as the water cascades through their boughs. I listened intently, but the sound I hoped to hear wasn’t there.

Since the downpour earlier this week, when I awoke to those familiar sounds, I’ve been hoping every morning to hear it again. It doesn’t make the most sense; one of the first things I do in the mornings is walk a half-mile to an uncovered bus stop. I’ve got an umbrella, though, and I’ve always quite liked the rain, both being out in it, and staying inside from it.

It struck me, though, as lay listening for something that wasn’t there, that what I really wanted, more than the rain, was to hear silence. That eerie lack of sound that comes along with the blanketing of the world in sheets of white. I want to wake up to snow.

It’s the biggest yearning I’ve felt in a while for life up in the rockies. I think about it routinely; riding multiple busses to school every day reminds me of those days when I’d have to hitchhike to work, and the timing is about equally reliable. Also, I wait for my first bus of the day across from a casual carpool pickup zone, where people practice organized hitchhiking every day.

At least this winter, I’ll be able to head to the mountains routinely, and chase after that winter wonderland of my dreams.