Image via WikipediaI remember exactly where I was. I was at Grand Central near the newspaper store. I overheard two women excitedly talk about the guy. I am not much of a TV guy, so I had not watched any of the ongoing speeches at the Democratic Convention. These two white women looked comfortable about how he looked, but they were more excited about what he had said. Whoever this guy was, he was some sort of an arrival. I sensed that before I learned his name, before I saw his face. I immediately walked over to a newspaper stand. There he was pointing his finger into the crowd like in a famous JFK picture. I dropped the rest of my plans for the day and headed straight home. I looked up his speech online and I watched it. I did what I do when I come across a really good music video. I watched it again and again and again. The speech was nothing short of mesmerizing. (Go Outside: Cults)
For the next few days I went all over town taking pictures of anything and everything. The person I was staying with worked at Goldman Sachs. A high school classmate was at Citi. I did go to the many of the tourist spots, but for me it was not about that. The entire city was one big tourist spot for me. (The Al Qaeda, Internet, Globalization)
I would take hundreds of pictures, come back home, download, go back out, take hundreds more pictures. The MTA ran a major loss on my weekly metro pass for those few days. The following evening I got told that a few police officers showed up at the door, they were let in, they walked to the roof, then walked back down and went away.
Soon after Tom Ridge issued an alert. A few days later Bill Clinton went ahead and had a heart attack. John Kerry is the first presidential candidate in history not to have received a bounce from his convention.
Bill Clinton tried very hard to get Hillary to run in 2004, but she refused. That is when I knew she was never going to be president. To be fair to Hillary, I would say the same thing about Obama. If he had not run in 2008, he was just another Evan Bayh, just another pretty face. The world does not run on your schedule, it is the other way round. (Bush Is Anarchy, Hillary Is Monarchy)
There is a reason soccer players are no longer playing after a certain age. Bill Clinton played his last soccer game in 2004.
I love Barack Obama like a brother. We are both Deaniacs from 2004. My love for him is unconditional. Well, almost unconditional. He did need to win in 2008. But other than that he has not needed to do anything else for me.
The next time the police came four years later, it was still a three storey building. This time they did not go to the roof. They stopped on the third floor. Once they had me in their car, they asked, "Which way to the tunnel?" Was that supposed to have been an inside joke?
To Iran, With Love (1)
"They don't do random."
Obama, Reshma
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