someday just began.

i wrote this on a beach in grand cayman on a biz trip in may 07, as you may recall. prescient!

talk about life benchmarks. this is a planetary benchmark.

still, let me relate it to little ol me.

this will be the third inaugural ill remember.

i remember the day clinton got sworn in in 93. tamara m had given me a tiny black and white watchman the year before for my bar mitzvah. i never used it, but i brought it to school that day in eighth grade. the ceremony conveniently took place during my class's lunch hour. i sat in the dalton cafeteria with a few of my similarly precociously nerdy friends looking over my shoulder, watching something my father - and the world at large - had tacitly convinced me i might never see in my lifetime, even though i was but 13: a democratic president taking office.

i remember feeling much as i would feel in october 96, when the yanks won the series for the first time in my life: i cant believe this is actually happening. it seemed too good to be true. like, i shouldnt get to feel this light and airy and happy about something so ostensibly external, something so far from my day-to-day life. something that seemed more symbolic than anything else.

dubya's day was fittingly melancholic for me. it was on a saturday during mlk weekend. i had flown home from ann arbor in no small part b.c i was still smarting from my breakup with j.go, and also b.c i wanted to spend more quality time with aya before she went back to brown. i remember watching that swearing in with her and my mom, from the latter's old bedroom. maybe it was a blessing in disguise that i was in a daze. seeing bush's ascension didnt cut me to the quick as i thought it should have; i was generally numb. then we watched clinton give a long, wistful speech, after which he was finally pried away, his fingernail marks trailing a wake from the spotlight.

im curious to see how this inauguration consolidates in my mind.