Mark the date: I’m no longer kissless.

That is all.

I just want to say, before I fuck up and lose it, that this feeling?  Is a very, very, very fine feeling.  And that if I DO fuck up and lose it, then before I fall back into an ugly self-pitying blob, I should remember how great it is to wake up with butterflies and bite your nails by the phone and say good night.

So, since another columnist got to the international election coverage article before me, I had to come up with something fast.

Let me explain myself first, because I know this probably comes as a shock. After all, I spent my first two years at BC rolling my eyes at whatever pop song the campus was loving, and in my unbearably condescending moods would try to explain exactly what social pressures made people think the Pussycat Dolls had any musical merit. I was a pill. To be sure, I had my own guilty pleasures: Justin Timberlake is objectively amazing, I was there on tenterhooks when Britney tried to reemerge at the VMAs last year. And as long as we’re being honest, I still listen to Hanson regularly. But these were ironic interjections in my playlists, for moments when we could all have a laugh at acting like preteens again. Otherwise, when my headphones were on, I had serious music by legitimate rock bands and singer-songwriters playing.

Har har, I know.  The rest.  What sucks about this article (aside from saying that I’m in London and being terribly edited–I really hope the printed edition hasn’t muddled my punctuation the way the website has) is that it’s outrageously exaggerated.  I mean, yes, I’ve been listening to a lot of rap here, but I listen to a lot of rap anyway.  And I also have been listening to a lot of Kate Bush, so it’s not even true.  Really what I wanted to write about was how I’ve started to really enjoy dancing, which has made me appreciate terrible music with good beats more, but I couldn’t because I knew I would be unconsciously influenced by this article, which does a fine job of capturing my sentiments.  (That link points to Trinity News, and I did get the blog editor position.  So all the incongruous font sizes and stuff you see in the TN2 Blog section?  I will be cleaning that up, don’t you worry.)

Man, I have been boring around here, but I SWEAR things are very interesting right now!  I’m doing a lot and I’m getting out of my room and my comfort zone and trying new things.  It’s just not stuff I want to publish online at the moment, you know?  But I promise I’m having fun.

I thought this was my week to do World Record, but it’s not.  I thought of just reusing this one for next week, but then one of the other columnists used my topic, and it’ll be such old news by then that I said forget it.  So, I’ve got to come up with something new by Friday, and frankly the only Irish news I’ve got going on is inappropriate for a personal blog, never mind an independent student newspaper, so it’ll be a struggle near the end of the week.  In the meantime, have a look at what I was planning to publish.

“Are there actually Americans here today? Any of you?”

The four of us raised our hands in triumph.

“Wow, all of you! Er, I don’t think I’m allowed to say it, but… can I say congratulations?”

“Uh, yeah!”

I rarely talk politics because I am simply no good at it—I have no figures or famous trials in my head to cite, I haven’t volunteered or donated, and I usually resort to such talking points as “shut up” and “I’m smarter than you, that’s why.” I also don’t enjoy explaining my beliefs to someone, because it unfailingly comes out as though I’m telling them what to think. But that is probably because I’ve only ever discussed these issues with fellow Americans, the people who need to make the exact same decisions themselves.

So one night in a Killarney hostel, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning talking with a French couple. It was the first intellectual conversation I’d had in ages, about philosophy and sociology and, with only two weeks before the election, politics. For the first time, I actually felt confident in what I was saying, even when all I was saying was drivel about not following the issues as carefully as I could. But that didn’t matter to them, and they didn’t cut me off or call me uninformed. I was a living, breathing American with a decision to make, and I talked them through how I was going to make it.

Being that living, breathing American in this pivotal period in history can be a lot of responsibility to bear when you’ve got the world watching. An international friend, never one to mince words, once caught me eyeing a sign for an on-campus debate about the U.S.’s foreign policy and remarked, “Isn’t it bad knowing that the whole world, well, hates you? Or not hates you. Can’t stand you?”

This isn’t really true—I have not been met with an ounce of outright disdain from any one person for simply being American. But there is always this jump to the election, and wondering why I am in Ireland when I should be voting at home, and this underlying sense that that person is depending on me. The world genuinely cares about what’s going on in America right now. This isn’t really a shock, since I think all American youths have been scolded for not knowing as much about the world as the world knows about us, but it’s still a bit strange to witness. To get the look from someone once they’ve placed your accent, a look that says, “And? What are you going to do about it?”

Thus, my European friends seemed fairly disturbed that I expressed doubt before the outcome when they were so confident that Obama would win. How could I remain such a pessimist when the polls sounded so promising? “You just can’t get your hopes up too high,” I said. “We’ve been let down too many times before.”

My Irish lit. professor saw it differently. “If you pick up today’s paper, you will see a large photo of two women,” he began on Tuesday. “Two women, one with tears rolling down her face, and one with a look of absolute reverence. And you don’t need to know who they’re looking at to know they’re looking at Barack Obama. And I talk about this not because our American students have their eyes fixed to the telly all day today, but because doesn’t that sound familiar? A man who inspires such worship and hope in people? Does such a description not remind us of our good friend Cú Chulainn, that ancient hero whose birth so closely resembles Jesus Christ’s?”

I appreciated the comparison, although it’s one that irks a lot of people. Not me, though. I don’t think Barack Obama is the Second Coming, but isn’t he, at the very least, an inspiration to make the world better? No matter which side you are on, I think the celebration that took place across America and across the world was rooted in hope. It’s not just a buzzword—it’s the feeling that woke me up early on Wednesday morning and has carried me through the rest of the week. It’s what makes me both excited to go home at Christmas but excited to come back in the New Year, because I know that both places are going to be okay. I want so badly to take back what I had told my friends, because what sort of thing is that to think? You can’t get your hopes up too high? Don’t wish too much because it can’t logically come true? What Tuesday has shown is that that is utter nonsense. The election of Barack Obama has made me feel invincible and full of potential to do great things. I want to do good, to make good, to be good, and I want to be the example for all of my international friends: they will see that living, breathing Americans aren’t sitting back or giving up.

</inspirational rhetoric>

I mean, I do feel those things, but they sound a lot emptier when they’re just sitting in a Word document, unpublished, or aimed at the wrong audience.  But anyway, that’s that.  I’ve got an interview with my new school’s newspaper for a section editor position on Wednesday, wish me luck.

[Photo from The Boston Globe's Big Picture]