Me and Dorian Gray

So it's Inauguration Day, and I'm really, deliriously happy. I'm not really going to write about my joy though, because I am finding that my muse prefers to sing when I am cranky. It is as if I don't possess the vocabulary to write about joyful things. I barely have the words to speak of them, and thus it has been a largely silent day.

In particular though, I'm so sceptical about people and life that I have a hard time living in the moment. Yes, it is slightly happy-making that a Democrat won this time instead of a Republican. Yes, it is utterly dumbfounding that we have elected someone who is not white, with an immigrant for a father, so young, so audacious, so relatively untried (actually that last bit is not quite so happy). I live in a country that has moved from widespread segregation and vote suppression to electing a black man in 40 years, and I've watched the inauguration next to the man I wouldn't have been allowed to marry back then. That is just... cool. But tomorrow, real life resumes, and I just don't know if any of us, much less the politicians that we routinely twist into farcical distortions of human beings, can work for something better.

Like I said, my eloquence has left me for the day (speaking of which, does anyone else fall into a flaming rage when a highly educated and/or accomplished black person is described as articulate? Of course they are articulate, you...) (Of course, I'll fall into a flaming rage if I'm stuck behind someone driving 64mph on a 65mph highway, so I may not be the best gauge of intolerable behavior). I perceive myself as a beautiful, rotund (the diet? not working) version of Dorian Gray, radiant and youthful on the outside, with a wizened little nut on the inside where a sentimental heart should be. Perhaps my refusal to fully engage with my "feelings" (cue Yentl) will keep my face young without resorting to surgery and chemicals. The upside here is that my lovely, incredibly unhealthy husband will find himself with a trophy wife in just 10 years or so, without going through the expense and bother of finding a new woman! Now that's change I can believe in.