Wake up Song

I have a bunch of posts at least half way done for this blog, but for some reason they haven't made it up yet. There's one about the guy I was staying with, another about a guy I met in Durham, and another on church. Those will show up eventually, but I was inspired to put down a few words about something that happened tonight.

In the first post on this blog, I wrote about how I'm not sure how to handle all the thanks and praise I've been getting from friends and strangers for my work on the campaign. At the time, it made me feel awkward, because I wanted to respond with something like, "Honestly, I was just doing my job, and probably a lot of other people would have done it better." That's not what I would say of course, but it was always lingering behind my words. I've gotten better at taking in the thanks of others, but there was still something external about it. The praise only affected me to a point, and my responses came from that amount of depth, and no further.

Tonight all that was nowhere on my mind when I went to see a friend's episodic, gay soap opera. Every week they perform at a bar that has an upstairs part with a stage. I'd been there once before for karaoke night when I delivered a stirring rendition of Sweet Jane. The show follows the drama and exploits of a bunch of gay folk in Chicago. I was lucky enough to see the musical episode. Toward the end, completely unrelated to the plot, a character ran on stage and said "I've been living under a rock for the last month, who won the presidential election?" At that moment the cast broke into an ode to Obama. It was funny and silly like most of the rest of the show, but in those 20 seconds of song I found myself feeling unexpectedly proud. When Obama won I was happy that he would be the next president, and that the journey was over. When he started naming cabinet positions, I got excited because it made the idea of him being president more real to me. When the gay musical interrupted itself to be happy about his victory, it hit me in the chest. No one (that I know of) has ever felt the need to write and perform a song in celebration of something I was a part of.

My mind is satisfied knowing that we have a president who may just be able to steer this country through the layered, textured mess we find ourselves in, but my body doesn't know so much about that. It can't taste the recession. It can't see the wars. It can't touch the issues around where we get our energy. It heard the song though. It heard it and it liked it. Feelings source from our bodies and while the rules of bodies are logical, they are often hidden from our conscious minds. I could tell other people that I prefer that they thank me in song, but it might make more sense to tell myself that a lot of people are really happy about this, and some of them are just going to read the New York Times and thank the Obama staffers they happen to come across.