To the left!

New president! Hooray!

Apparently people all over the world are celebrating, which I find...distressing. As in, I like Obama and I think he'll do a good job, but I feel like a lot of the enthusiasm from other countries isn't because they think he'll do a good job, but because they think he can't possibly be worse than the last president. I agree with that, but it makes me sad about how the last eight years have been spent.

Well, I think that's true of Europe, anyway. People I met in Egypt didn't talk about politics but were excited that America was going to have a Black president, or they didn't mention it at all (I suspect that there are some serious racial issues going on in Egypt, and I won't pretend to understand them, but it was pretty easy to predict who was going to talk about Obama and who wasn't).

Russians mostly know not to talk about politics with me because a) from a professional standpoint, I can't, and b) they have no room to talk, and, to be fair, I'm not sure they discuss politics with each other. I think they are mostly happy that George W. Bush is gone but also worried about the economy.

But occasionally you come across nutjobby Russians who think that Nostradamus predicted that the last president of the US would be Black and that therefore the US will collapse soon. Do you have these people in America too? The best way to deal with this is to just accept the prophecy and point out that there could be Black presidents after Obama. This really bothers them because a) they were all prepared for you to argue with them about the validity of Nostradamus' prophecies, b) they are most likely racist, whether they know it or not, and c) they really can't argue with that. I have been having fun with this.