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When I first moved to New York City for Grad School in 2006, I didn't know a living soul here. Like Barack Obama, I attended tiny Occidental College in sunny Los Angeles before heading to a big school on the opposite coast (Unlike him, I went to NYU and not Columbia), but I too found the city cold and intimidating at first. During those first few months, I hadn't met any friends, and being away from my family for the first time, I really started to suffer from loneliness...
And then the 2006 Midterm started to heat up with rumors that the GOP was going to lose and lose big.
I had been flirting with a genuine interest in politics for some time, although I hadn't caught the bug yet. You must understand that for an American of my generation, the first election we ever cast a vote in was the 2000 Bush/Gore catastrophe, so you can't really blame me for feeling cynical. And if the ending to that election was like a Thriller with a downer ending, the one four years later was like a Horror movie where the zombies win; in the meantime, I had gotten more and more depressed that dark forces were taking over the government and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
But for some reason, perhaps because outside of classes my life was fairly boring, I really started to take an interest in American politics, and started reading seriously about every congressional seat we stood a chance of winning, as well as plenty of research on the the opposition. If I remember correctly, that path took me to FreeRepublic (a site I lurked at whenever I wanted to confirm how nuts the opposition was) and then to this place called DEMOCRATICUNDERGROUND.COM, which was touted as the anti-Freeperland by the lunatics themselves. And I was hooked. Although not a joiner by nature, I signed up the evening of the election itself, made my OP an hour or so after we won the House, and never looked back. And of course, once the 2008 election kicked in to high-gear (in 2007, natch) I became practically obsessive. For quite some time, logging on to this site was practically the first thing I did every morning. I waded into the Primary fights as enthusiastically as anyone, joined the Obama camp early on--and, well, you probably know the rest.
Over the course of this time, there have been dramatic ups and downs in my life, as there usually are for people my age. Suffice to say that I now have the social life that I lacked 2 and a half years ago; things are going well on the career front as well, although as a freelancer in this economy, I find myself underemployed more often than not. Still, whenever I find myself alone in my apartment or at a job, with absolutely no one to talk to, I flip over to this site and find a perfectly nice community of diverse yet like-minded people waiting for me whenever I want to engage in my second-favorite hobby (the first is music.)
So I just want to say a general Thank You: to Skinner, to the Mods, to all of you that have made my time here so worth while. We live in a vastly different political era than when I signed up in November of 2006 (Thank God), and I can't wait to see what this country looks like when it comes time to celebrate my 20,000th post. Just like the real world, DU is often fun and exciting, and sometimes dark and ominous--but UNLIKE the real world, it's NEVER been dull.
Here's to you, DU! :toast:
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