It’s been a couple days now, and it keeps happening — and at the oddest times, too. Sometimes I can control it and sometimes I just let it happen, let the people on the subway stare. My breath hitches kinda funny, hiccups, and my throat and voicebox shake like a bus on a bumpy road. My eyes tear up every time and I’ve just sort of stopped wiping it away.

I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad when it happens, mostly I’m just swallowed up by the enormity of the feeling. It’s like being a particle of plankton and getting swallowed up by a gigantic, benevolent whale.

America elected Barack Obama to be the President of the United States on Tuesday night, and the emotional aftershocks just keep coming.

So along with the spontaneous, random sobs of joy and relief, I’m having this recurring hallucination. Or maybe it’s a daydream. But whatever.

Every time I see, hear, or imagine somebody doing something incredibly well, that person has Barack Obama’s head.

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Iceland’s got a lot going for it: fresh, clean air, perfect water, jaw-dropping scenery and gorgeous, gorgeous inhabitants. They don’t go in for comically death-defying fattening foods like we do here in the States. It’s not their style. But generally speaking, you can find better food in a pet store than you can in Iceland.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect here, of course. Having once learned the hard way that Gravy Train does not secrete anything close in flavor to real gravy when you add water, I do know the difference.

It’s just that because Iceland is so far away from everything and everyone else, and a country made of Arctic tundra, there’s no such thing as fresh local produce. Whatever is grown locally is grown in geothermal greenhouses and everything else has to be flown in from Europe. This drives up prices for pretty much everything on the island. And it makes for some seriously strange sandwiches that cost at least ten bucks. Like this one, snapped at a gas station outside of Vik:

I emailed a few Icelandic acquaintances, just to make sure I was reading the label correctly. That last letter isn’t one we have in English, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a cognate game-changer. They all wrote back, saying essentially the same thing: “Yep, that is a Bacon Nacho Sandwich.”
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Sometimes a piece of poetry, prose, visual art or music manages to transcend the perceived boundaries that separate us.  On those rare occasions, disparities of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and political affiliation are stripped away, and we stand bare-assed and grinning, basking in the blinding light of our common ridiculousness.  Click away, and soak it in:

(Via The Triumph of Bullshit. Requires sound and Flash player.)