One of the things I can say with some certainty is that for my entire life -- except maybe a few precious seconds at the beginning -- I've had an unusual name. Granted, it's not funny like Dick Butkiss or painfully multi-syllabic, but it's somehow just different enough to be mispronounced or otherwise confused on a near daily basis. In sixth grade, probably the second day of what was inevitably going to be an awkward and unpleasant middle school experience, I was wrongly assigned to the boys' gym class. Tonight as we were leaving dinner, my step-brother's uncle (my step uncle in law?) called me "Donyelle" and then straight up "Danielle." Last year, when someone else was named the most beautiful girl with two men's names, I couldn't help but take it personally (after all, I was the only competition!).

All this having been said, one would think I'm pretty used to these confusions and slights by now. Somehow, though, whether it's because I started a job that involves constantly spelling my name to the people at Empire car service, or frequenting a Starbucks that's populous enough to require giving a name (my last: more masculine, but easier to spell), somehow things seem to have gotten worse in the past six months. The only perk, at least that I can see, is I can exploit my "large scary man" imaginary identity when I send people scathing emails about incorrect invoices.

As of two minutes ago, I am seriously concerned that I am getting dumber. This concern stems from, most recently, the fact that I misspelled the name of the person whose signature I was forging on a child's birthday card immediately after having it spelled to me, then spelled "dumber" "dummer" when trying to recount this same incident via gchat. Which I guess reflects a problem not so much of intelligence lost (though I imagine I've also lost some of my critical reasoning skills, those get tested less frequently at the office) but mental acuity, sharpness.

Basically, I think I'm losing my edge. And maybe reaction time.

The only solution I can conceive of, at the moment, would be to administer a series of timed exams to myself (I used to be great at timed exams!) or maybe try to teach myself new Photoshop tricks and then apply them under deadline. Either of these would be kind of weird and probably not very useful, but as I spend more time stumbling through the day, I'm starting to feel like my connection to reality is slipping. Like I have trouble remembering conversations I had while sober. But I'm having really vivid dreams. Which is no good.

Undeniably, Barack Obama's win on Tuesday evening represented what may be a major, game changing shift in American politics. I cried during McCain's speech, I cried during Obama's speech (a lot, especially when he talked about buying his daughters a dog). I almost just cried a little when I heard the Eastern European cleaning lady in my office say something that sounded like "Obama," but could have been nearly anything else because I wasn't really listening.

So I pondered whether Wednesday would feel like the first day of the rest of forever. And for a while it sort of did. I smiled at people on the subway with Obama stickers/t-shirts/hats/pins, and I never smile at people on the subway (a co-worker joined me on the A this morning and after waving I ignored him for the rest trip because the subway is special alone iPod time). The NYTimes was extraordinarily hard to get (I had to settle for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is still better than the Bellingham Herald), and the newspaper business is otherwise basically ceasing to exist, so that has to be a big deal.

But then some things were the same, like all the people who are sometimes mean to me at work were mean all together and I was really tired because I've been having Restless Leg Syndrome (seriously? seriously.) and it makes it hard to sleep and then I had a headache for no reason at all.

All in all, what it probably means is that Barack Obama does not cure Restless Leg Syndrome.

Yesterday evening, while walking home from my volunteer job (Who me? Volunteer? Actually, yes. With children! Sort of.) and expending all my attention and energy into crafting a flawlessly clever text to a friend who had suffered a moderate-but-not-legitimately-tragic misfortune, a man made eye contact (as best he could, given that I was glued to my phone's 1" by 2.5" screen) and said "Excuse me." Then he said it again, so I looked up because obviously he was talking to me. Obviously, because my neighborhood is pretty much a ghost town after dark (but in the safe-feeling way, like my childhood cul-de-sac was empty after dinner time), and also obviously because strangers love to stop me on the street and ask bizarrely specific directions to places they aren't even close to. I have no idea why I am the target for this phenomenon.

So I look up and smile, because he's an older man who obviously needs my direction-giving services. And then he says, again, "Excuse me," and then "I was wondering if there's any place around here that sells pussy?"

Which, among other things, indicated that he really was lost because (especially given the recent reduction in corporate expense accounts and the number of folks who have them), my neighborhood doesn't even have a place that sells pizza after 10:30pm.