I woke up this morning neither terrified nor hungover for the first time in months.

It was a weird sensation. At first, I thought I might have come down with the flu, but then I remembered that influenza is supposed to make you feel sick and deathly, not safe, grateful and all smiley. So, I'm thinking that it probably has more to do with the never-ending 2008 elections actually ending. And happily at that.

I walked outside to smoke a cigarette and take the edge off all this healthy positiveness, brushing past my Chinese landlord who was rifling through my mail and gazed across my Queens neighborhood to where a Mexican construction worker was jackhammering into a tree for some reason while his African-American co-worker yelled incomprehensibly at him while making vaguely obscene gestures with his hands, oblivious of the little Yemenite girl being pulled roughly by her angry mother down the street. My elderly Slovenian neighbor was sitting on her porch, as usual, glowering at me in disgust, as usual. I couldn't quite make out what the Italian-American transvestite and the Pakistani cab driver were arguing about, but I gathered it had something to do with the New York Giants.

Looking at all these people, and thinking back upon the events of the past several days, about the huge step forward that our country has taken, about it means to be an American, something occurred to me. Something very profound.

I need to move to a quieter neighborhood.

I hope Barack Obama cuts my taxes so I can afford it.