An inauguration AND a snow day?

(I wasn’t going to be able to watch the inauguration today, but then God shook out his dandruff on our little southernness (that can be a word, right?) and gave us the day off so we can watch. Guess God’s a democrat. Who knew.)

I very rarely proclaim my love for CNN, but I was very much in favor of them interrupting their live shot of the VIP platform and whatnot in order to show us the moving van sitting outside of the White House, with a few boxes stacked around it, waiting to be loaded.

I also need to proclaim my love, just like practically every other single person in the world, for Sasha and Melia Obama.

Something else I’m a fan of.

You might not know that YA means young adult, and it’s the way those of us in the know (and those in the publishing industry and the writing industry and the library world and most everyone else) refer to young adult literature. Through my newfound love of John Green, his brother Hank, Brotherhood 2.0 (now known as The Vlog Brothers), and the Nerdfighters, I was introducted to YA for Obama. On this website, lots of YA authors are contributing blog posts for Obama. YA authors everyone knows, like Judy Blume. I find that very cool.

Enjoyable

Actually, this is more than enjoyable. This is quite enjoyable.

Change, hope, and a living wage: What I learned at the Obama rally.

I’m not a very political person. In the past I’ve been apathetic at best. I did go hear John Edwards speak at OU in 2004, an exciting event mainly because I was standing right next to the Bush supporters who were marching back and forth with a big “We Love George W. Bush” sign and chanting something that made it difficult to hear what Edwards was rambling on about. For some reason I’ve gotten pretty caught up in this election, though. I heard Obama speak at Winthrop during the primaries, and while I might have enjoyed the experience more than the speaking, I was there and supportive. The fun times involved Kyle begging me to go, me looking it up on-line and seeing that we were supposed to have tickets to get in, Kyle claiming we could get in without tickets, standing in a long line out in the cold and wet, and Kyle almost losing his pants trying to make it through the metal detector*.

In order to have more fun with Obama, I accepted the News Goat’s invitation to go to the Obama rally in Charlotte. I got to have my first ride on the light rail (super fun!), and then we got off and began the hike to the end of the line. Tickets were being handed out by lots of Obama campaign workers, so we easily secured tickets; all we had to do was get to the end of the line.

Easier said than done.

When we finally got to the end of the line, I took a picture to mark our arrival:

I took out my handy-dandy TomTom in order to figure out how long the line actually was. 1.4 miles, baby. That’s a lot of line.

The News Goat is attempting to break into photo journalism, so he made several attempts to capture the emotional essence of a bunch of Obama supporters waiting in line to hear Obama. Surprisingly there wasn’t any complaining or bitching, and even though there were a lot of children who had to have been bored out of their minds, there didn’t seem to be a lot of annoying children whining about being hungry/tired/bored. If Obama wanted to, I bet he could add this into his platform. Change, hope, and small children behaving themselves.

More line.

And more line. I’m pretty sure there’s a joke here involving the Wrong Way sign, but I’m not inspired enough to create one right now. I like to think the News Goat framed this shot this way on purpose, but I really don’t think he’s that good at this photo thing.

Eventually we got bored of the line, and started taking pictures of other things.

I took this artsy picture of the top of the Bank of America building.

The News Goat took a picture of me. I don’t like it at all and wouldn’t post it, but I’m amazed and astounded by the massive amount of freckles I’m sporting. Look at me! I’m a freak!

I took a picture of the News Goat taking pictures of the line. Or something. Perhaps he was angling for a nice shot of someone’s ass. Since he didn’t send me this picture, I’m pretty sure it’s indecent. He didn’t appreciate this picture, just like I don’t appreciate the one above, so we’re even.

Then, because we were REALLY getting tired of standing in line, we started taking pictures of each other taking pictures of each other. Except the News Goat didn’t send his picture to me, so I obviously look like the bigger dork here. Thanks, Goat.

We started to realize we weren’t going to actually make it close enough to hear Obama, but we stayed in line and stuck it out. We’re hard core Obama supporters like that. We finally made it to the end of the line, which wasn’t so much the end of the line as it was where the line melted into a huge blob of people who weren’t geting through the security checkpoint but were still under the impression they could be a part of the rally.

Is Obama even up there?

Because we’re good Obama supporters, we stood in the blob of people and listened to the keywords, which were the only parts of the speech we could hear. Everyone clapped when he said “hope,” “change,” “healthcare,” “living wage,” “Charlotte,” and “vote.” Then we left and hiked over to the light rail station. Roughly a million people were packing the light rail that day, so we invaded other people’s personal space and discussed how we didn’t really need to buy tickets since no one was checking for them. Overall it was a good time, and my hope in humanity was restored a little bit due to the niceness of Obama supporters.

The only thing that would have made it better would have been if it was a Sarah Palin rally. I love Sarah Palin, if only because Sara Benincasa’s parody of her:

* You don’t need to remove your belt to go through the metal detector. You really don’t need to if the guy running the metal detector tells you not to remove your belt.