Election!

We are in Apia for the afternoon to watch election coverage at the American embassy. I was hoping to get some picture of that event and post them here, but they confiscated my camera and my cell phone literally as soon as I walked in the door. So no pictures today.

Obama's gonna win. I'm very confident now. As soon as Ohio was projected a win, it's pretty much sealed.

Pretty cool watching at the embassy, although it feels like we're all at Discovery Zone or Chuck E. Cheese or Gymboree because we came in when the party started and there was an outer room with a TV, but we all walked into the inner room with the TV. I sat front center, cause I'm all about election coverage, and the room grew pretty raucous. Peace Corps don't get to see each other too often, so any occasion that provides an opportunity for people to get together becomes more about the socializing and less about the central event. Even if the central event is the most important political event in our lifetimes.

In any case, I really shouldn't talk being that I left to come down here to the internet cafe. But when I did finally leave, I had to walk out through the outer room... where it turns out that everyone 55+ was watching TV. It essentially felt like the parents' room. It was not raucous at all. You could actually hear James Carville blathering on about cajun-flavored politics. It felt a little silly.

As far as the rest of life goes, the village is okay. It's grown strangely routine to not have running water. I've also begun to perfect the act of bucket showering. I admit we've only been back there for 3 days, and I don't know that I'll feel as okay after another 3 weeks.

One story before I go...

I woke up at 12:45 this morning and felt an ant (or what I think was an ant) crawling on my ear. So I swatted at it... and it crawled INTO my ear. So I freaked out a little. Having an insect in your ear canal is one of the worst feelings of non-pain that there is in this world. After I stopped panicking, I remembered advice that I'd heard somewhere about sleeping with the light on so that the insect can see where the light is and climb out accordingly. While my current sleeping situation doesn't lend itself to having a light that I can easily turn on at 1 o'clock in the morning, I managed to find my cell phone, which has a built in flashlight. So I laid there for approximately 18 minutes while this ant explores the inner workings of my ear. All of it completely audible, and all of it creepy as hell.

And then it crawled out. And I swatted at it again. And it was gone. So I don't know that it was an ant. But I do know that it was gross.

The end. HuffingtonPost is now calling Obama "President-Elect". I realize that I'm understating my own elation over the insane momentousness of this moment, but that's because if I told you how I want to give everyone in the internet cafe a hug right now and run outside and shout in the streets, it would still not be enough to capture the level of joy and relief and wonder and excitement and awe and mind-blowing, tear-jerking happiness that I feel.

So it's cool. Obama's gonna win. Awesome.