[I really meant to post about this yesterday. Sorry about that.]

Mardi Gras! Fat Tuesday! What a bizarre tradition. Leave it to the Catholics to decide that the most appropriate way to ready themselves for forty days of Lenten abstinence and penitence is to get rip-roaring drunk. I celebrated by eating a vegan chocolate cookie in the Whole Foods Cafe while wearing the free Mardi Gras beads they were handing out (no, I did not have to flash the cashier for them). And wouldn’t you know it, I felt guilty about the dessert, too. I guess I will always be a recovering Catholic.

Super Tuesday! I’m embarrassed to say that I’m still not exactly sure how all this delegate business works, nor did I actually vote, as I am still registered in Chicago and figured it wasn’t worth the drive to cast my ballot since Obama was going to sweep Illinois anyway.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce that Vanity Fairest is officially endorsing Barack Obama for the presidency. After eight years of this malarky, I’d be pretty happy to see any Democrat in office, but Barack Obama is the first candidate I’ve experienced in my adult life that really does it for me. In the same kind of way that Bill Clinton did it for our moms back in the day, if you know what I mean.

Long before the Ted and Caroline endorsed Obama and the papers started calling him the JFK of Generation X, Rob and I were talking about how much the Obamas reminded us of the Kennedys. Down to the cute kids and wife with the pearls and flippy hairdo.

Seriously, though. If this becomes a legitimate pattern, Elizabeth is going to start getting some marriage proposals from aspiring leaders of the free world. I mean:


Jackie O, Michelle O, Elizabeth … O?!?

More significantly, Barack is the kind of guy, we agreed, for whom we would throw ourselves in front of a bullet. (Well, OK, I said I would, Rob nodded and thought I was nuts, but close enough.) Before now, I couldn’t imagine crying over the assassination of any president of my time the way our nation mourned for JFK.

Now, I get misty just thinking about it. And nearly all those dramatic speeches of his reduce me to tears.

I am proud to be a Democrat seeing a woman and a black man on our ballot, and I would be proud to be an American to have someone in the White House who can instill that kind of emotion and belief and hope in our people. The kind of person who gives you goosebumps and makes you believe that we can, and that its time to get to work.

My friend Julia sent me an email the other day, discussing her feelings about Obama from her perspective as a doctoral candidate in psychiatry at Stanford and a psychology fellow at Yale. (Hope I got that close to right, Julia. You smart people and your complicated degrees!) She had a very unique perspective that I thought is worth sharing. She says:

“As someone who interacts literally every day with the broken health care system, recent returnees from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, people below the poverty line, and immigrants … I watch every day as people who are hopeless give up on their lives, relationships, and the world.

“One thing that psychological science has shown us over and over again is that a motivated person can do infinitely more than a person going through the motions of a task. Cognitive therapy works better when you supercharge it with discussions aimed at increasing the patient’s motivation to change. … Patients do better in therapy when the therapist manages to “instill hope” in the first session. People get better in treatment for psychiatric and medical disorders if they believe that the treatment will help them. Everywhere you look, there is empirical support for the fact that hope and motivation to change are more than a side note – they are in many cases the determining factor in moving beyond seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

“I’m voting for Obama because, given the fact that I think the candidates’ platforms are fairly similar, I can think of no more important cause than giving my support to the candidate whose speech and message is so clearly inspirational to people from such varied places, creeds, races, political affiliations, age groups, socio-economic groups, etc. When seeking change, the only thing more important than instilling hope is actually getting people to the table (can’t do one without the other!) and I whole-heartedly believe in Obama’s ability to do both.

“This isn’t a fluffy issue that distracts from the main agenda items. Years of research indicates that this is the issue that determines whether people/groups/systems move forward or stay stuck.

“No matter how it turns out, I hope you are able to able to find a way to believe that America can continue to move forward towards its lofty goals: to treat all people equally, to reward hard work with success, to value invention and innovation, and to provide freedom and justice to all.”

So there. I’m voting for Obama because my psychiatrist says its the only real way I can find peace in myself and in the world.

Also, he kind of looks like Grover:
Barack

And finally, yesterday was also super-cell Tuesday. Late last night, a huge “super-cell” storm ripped through the South, including metro Nashville. I was driving home from obedience school when I flipped on 92.9 FM for my daily dose of Delilah, which was being interrupted by continuous storm tracking updates.

It was barely misting where I was, and I don’t tend to get nervous about these things. But as I approached home, the sky turned about eight shades of black and lightning tore through the sky all around me as hail hammed down on my leased car (nice).

Suddenly, they announced that a tornado had touched down on Highway 100 (my street!) about half a mile from where we live, and was headed down my street, toward my house, as I was driving in from the opposite direction!

Rob was in his car, too, and we both drove about 80 miles an hour down our street, pulled into the garage, tires squealing, grabbed some flashlights and hightailed it into the closet. (We don’t have basements in tornado country. That would make too much sense.)

Now Molly was just loving the closet, since she’s not otherwise allowed in there because the laundry basket is too much of a temptation. Rob was pacing around in his usual caged-animal fashion, contemplating our certain death. And while I am not usually nervous about these things, there’s something about imagining the strength of a wind that could rip our house out from around us that can make your stomach hurt. I mean, there’s nothing to grab on to!

Fortunately, we were spared, as were the handful of others we know in Nashville. We emerged from the closet to discover that our house had not landed in Oz and was, in fact, still intact in Tennessee.

I’m not going to say I wasn’t a little disappointed.