(Shut your mouth!)

(We can dig it!)

Even though he's talking about something else, Barney Frank has introduced a term which totally applies to how I feel right now: post-partisan depression.

The way it applies to me is this:

Pretty much for the last two years, I realize I had been living for the 2008 elections. It had become so important to me to see a regime change in this country that I love, it was pretty much all I thought about or did. In the morning, I would listen to the news as I showered, then race to the computer to read that same news. And, of course, to read the blogs.

Then I would go to work, where I compulsively checked the blogs in my spare time, waiting for any tidbit of information I could be outraged or exuberant about.

Home again, I continuing scouring the intertubes for any information. Politics was my wife, it was my life, to cop a phrase.

Now, I find that I don't really know what to do with myself. I'm finding it hard to be entertained or diverted by any of my old media favorites - magazines don't interest me so much, my records and CDs lie gathering dust in the corner. I can get about three pages into any book before I nod off.

Essentially, without the eternal contest going on outside my window, I find myself listless and at loose ends. Lately, I've taken to trying to start fights in my neighborhood, by randomly launching water balloons into backyards using a giant slingshot. Given that its been below zero for the last few days, this hasn't really been too effective, though.

Oh, what to do now?