And I'll be two steps on the water

It is snowing outside. I am only sorry I do not have the materials on hand to make goat-milk cocoa. I have settled for ginger tea with the last scrapes of Atchafalaya honey.

I started this post, "I am really much less depressed than I had braced myself to be," but that's litotes to no purpose. I am very pleased with the results of this election. As I wrote to ashlyme, "Nothing is perfect and magically fixed, but I think I'll like the country I'm going to live in for the next four years a lot better than if we were looking at a sudden plunge into the right wing. And the senator I voted for won in the face of a breathtakingly racist, anti-intellectual campaign. And Maine and Maryland are behaving like they might belong to a reasonable world. And hey, medical marijuana. I can't take it for anything, but that doesn't matter: it's one step closer to treating it like a drug rather than a drug problem. I like what this says about the country I live in. Maybe our species is not totally fucked after all." Which may still be more proclamatory than the occasion warrants, but I am glad it has been proven that fear-of-the-other is not the only stimulus to which this country responds and that not only does fire not fall from the sky if there are queer women in Congress and a biracial man in the White House, it wasn't some kind of one-off experiment before the mainstream reasserted itself. Or maybe the mainstream is different now. That would be okay, too.

It seems to have stopped snowing in the course of composing this post. So much for that nor'easter. But I have a cat trying to eat the tag off my tea now (much good it may do him: this is Yogi tea, so the bags all come with inspirational, often incomprehensible platitudes like "Act selfless, you will be infinite" or "By honoring your words, you are honored") and that makes me happy in other ways, so I'll take it.