I’m back!

I know I was sorely missed.  I didn’t plan to take quite such a long recess for the Thanksgiving weekend, but things don’t always turn out the way you want.  My only excuse is that I’m beat.  My favorite pastime lately has been napping.  Not my usual state.

I could try blaming this on excess tryptophan even though I broke with tradition and had ham for the big day this year.  (A quick Google search indicates that ham actually has more t-phan than turkey.  Unfortunately it also proves that the amino acid doesn’t make you sleepy in the first place.  Overeating does.)  

Since I don’t have body chemistry on my side and I was amazingly restrained in my intake on Thursday, the only reason I can think of for my torpor is that I’m exhausted from the stress of following the presidential election.  I spent a lot of energy worrying about the possibility of a Romney win, which I expected would be quickly followed by the end of the world as we know it.  (God knows what shape I’d be in if I was actually involved in the campaign.  I’m sure I’d have had an aneurysm by now.)

There’s an axiom in theater that actors get sick as soon as a show closes.  They’ve spent the run putting all of their energy into their performances, then they crash the moment they relax, victims of the cold or flu or whatever else is going around.  It’s part of the ritual.

Since I only became the screaming partisan I am today about five years ago, I can’t be sure the same holds true in politics, but I suspect it is.  For my part, I never really worried that John McCain was going to take the White House – even though we’d never elected a woman or an African-American before.  I definitely wasn’t worried once Sarah Palin came on the scene.  So I was never as wound up as I have been for the past several months.  This time Fox and friends spread their fantasy of the voting public well enough that I didn’t really sleep from September to November.

Hey, did you hear the one about the guy who called 47% of the U.S. population deadbeats and then lost the presidential race with 47% of the vote?  It’s a good one.  And I’d like to thank the other 53% of Americans for saving my sanity.

Now we’re on to the mundanities of governing.  Oh sure, the Republicans are still delusional and somehow think that they didn’t lose on the 6^th, but they’re more funny than scary at this point.  They keep talking big while slowing softening on most of their opinions.   Add to that the de-escalating of the fiscal cliff to the fiscal hill to the fiscal slope to the fiscal curb to the fiscal bump and things are just not as exciting as they were a few weeks ago.  I guess I’ll just use the Holidays to rest up.  If the politicos can’t come to an agreement on taxes and the deficit by December 31, there should be some interesting times to come in 2013.

Who am I kidding?  Lindsay Graham or John McCain or Mitch McConnell or John Boehner or some other nitwit Republican is going to tick me off and I’ll be ranting all over again.

I’m feeling more awake already.