Morning
I woke up at a friend's flat wondering where I was... The television was on, and talking heads were babbling about Gore this and George 'Dubyah that. "Oh wait, I'm supposed to vote right?" I raced to the polling place at USF to find it packed with fellow college students, and remembered one important fact: I had registered to vote to late and thus had no place in the current election. "Oh well," I thought, "my vote wouldn'tve made a difference in this geriatric state anyway..." Off to work I went, and the election was out of my mind.
Evening
Even before I walked into my friend's flat and saw the TV and heard their discussion, I knew something was amiss. Florida - the state that until recently was just home of Disneyworld and Miami Beach and more senior citizens than you can shake a Medicare bill at - had become the focal point of news coverage, and was too close to call! Wow, my home state was the final battleground of the first presidential election of the 21st century. Needless to say, few of us got much sleep.
History was being made, and was truely on hold that evening. We gave up on NBC and TV in general after the anchors ran out of useless quotes and just kept pointing at Florida on the map mumbling about "25 electoral college votes" and so on and so forth. We figured the counting would be done, and because the numbers showed Bush so far ahead that Jeb!'s bro' would have the presidency. Imagine our surprise when we returned to see that Gore had indeed conceded! A few went to sleep at this news, convinced that a right-wing conspiracy was in power (their words) and that was the end of the story. The rest of us stayed up and chatted while the muted TV was kept on to provide light...
None of the rest of us got any sleep. Gore retracted his concession and George W. Bush might not have won the election! Oddness indeed, we said. Florida's voters, not including myself, were deciding the election in the end... And all I could do was watch.
Epilogue
We'll see how it all turns out... Looks like it'll take awhile to get it resolved. Either way, history hangs in the balance - quite literally.