My two moments crying after the election:

1) At the Chuy election results party, I was talking with a (middle-aged) (hispanic) woman whose family had been in the city for a couple generations and were old union, and a (slightly younger) (middle-aged) (black) guy who had worked in the public schools and was part of gun control campaigns.

I had had a couple glasses of red wine from the open bar, and we were all talking intensely, though sometimes music from the live band would make us groove (like their cover of Earth, Wind and Fire's "September" made me and the woman dance around a bit as we talked; she even got me a drink, as I guess she had offered to the guy before I got there; "Finally!", she was like, after I accepted and right before she turned to head to the convention center's cash bar to go get her drink and mine).

Anyhow, we were all talking about whether Rahm would crack down now, and the guy was talking about how a lot of people who had publicly come out in support of Chuy would likely lose jobs, if Rahm had control of them, then began talking about how Rahm would break the unions.

He was so earnest and it pained him so much, I just teared up.

I apologized, and said it was really just getting to me, the reality of having to think like that.

"That's okay," the woman was like.

2) After shutting down the convention center and staying out really late at the bar where people went after the convention center, and then stopping by another bar for a night cap that turned into 2 when the pro-Chuy bartender bought me another drink at last call, I headed home and then slept in till noon the next day.

All that day I was mopey and tired, both from the election and from the lack of sleep (I very rarely get hung over, though I do get tired the next day a lot from going to bed so late and poor sleep from having some drinks, which seems to me to be more about sleep quality than being hung over per se).

Anyhow, after lazing around all day and doing lesson prep work from home, I went to start cooking, and to cheer me up, I went to put Katy Perry's Teenage Dream album on the CD player.

The day was very grey and gloomy, and for whatever reason, as "Teenage Dream" began, the upbeat lyrics and the grey day and the fact that I was trying to cheer myself up really got to me, and I just cried, since the contrast between the peppy music and how I had felt but was not paying attention to was just too much, and called attention to my mood.

Overall, that's pretty ridiculous, when you consider the lyrics:

you think I'm pretty /
without any makeup on /
you think I'm funny /
when I tell the punchline wrong...

As the CD went on, the really peppy songs that I loved the most tended to make me cry, esp. "California Girls" and "Firework", though oddly not "Last Friday Night".

What really made me bawl, too, was the "Firework" lyrics about cheering up, particularly her observation -

after a hurricane /
comes a rainbow 

- though most of the time during that song I kept thinking how the lyrics were really self-focused, and not so much about societal change, and I was kind of appalled about that.