Some families set their dramas on the stage of a castle, a city apartment, a suburban bungalow. Mine was wed to the four wheels of a 1990 Toyota truck.

It didn’t define who we were as a family, but it was a pliant witness to our own definition in southern California, the vessel we steered on paper routes in the San Fernando Valley, the commute to Riverside, then Anaheim Hills, then Cypress, the distance between contract work in City of Industry and classes in Irvine, the journey from Downey to anywhere. In some way, we were defined by how we interacted with the Los Angeles sprawl, how far across it we were willing to travel to grasp our ambitions.

It seems appropriate that the story of an immigrant family is not one of nobility but mobility, the nomadism etched into our DNA. In early morning hours of my childhood, my father would shine a flashlight on a driveway and me or Mikey would throw a copy of the LA Times into the target. Some people start all-nightering in college; I had my first when I was eight years old, in the bed of that truck, surrounded by newspapers. There was no air conditioning and no clock, one cupholder, and a radio with perpetually shot speakers, even after Scott and I installed a new pair (along with new headlights) in between oil changes at his house. Arguments over who would drive it and when were a feature of the thicker years of my sibling rivalry.

Angelenos are prone to defining others by the cars they drive, and at the University of Civics and Integras, the truck was an anomaly. Driving it in Orange County at odd hours of night inspired my dread of racial profiling — I have recently ceased the habit of checking my tail lights, but it was most often the falsified probable cause for traffic stops. I befriended different people, dated different women because of what I drove. If we are defined by the company we keep, the truck allowed a less materialistic conduit for my definition (that was inevitably inextricable from helping people move).

And as a family we also defined our setting. In its dents and leaks were scars of my father’s impulsiveness, my brother’s entropy, my workaholic fatigue. Depending on who was driving, the seat moved forward or backward, but the side mirrors always remained in place. Between classes I would recline in the passenger seat and take naps and awaken to find the windows fogged. In that passenger window, I could still make out the faint imprint of the original dot-matrix printed sticker. It cost my father around $11,000 when he bought it brand new in 1990. He named it Bear.

I remember the day I passed my driving test, that moment leaving Arthur’s for the Bell Gardens DMV where all those years of playing catch with a set of keys were rendered practice for that moment when two divergent schedules would make it necessary. I drove it to Las Vegas less than a month later, got a speeding ticket for going 101 mph downhill after the San Bernardino Mountains, and on the drive back home, called my mother on her vacation in New Jersey to explain why there would be a citation in the mail. The debt from that incident would deepen and lead to the start of the Spazowham Design Group. I remember picking up my father from work once after a long rush-hour commute and being angry with him for making me wait at the parking lot of his office, arguing with my mother about money and driving away. It was a vehicle of my rebellion.

I remember driving to Long Beach Airport with two suitcases in the bed in June 2005. This was the last day I would claim Bear as “my truck.” My brother called me today and told me the head gasket blew on his way to work last week. The repair would cost thousands of dollars, and he said it felt like putting the family dog to sleep. After I hung up the phone, my colleagues remarked it sounded like a pet had died, or a relative. But for an inanimate object, steel and plastic and rubber, it was special to the men of my family because in those 18 years of California traffic it seemed we spent more time with this machine than any of our friends, and perhaps with each other. It was a vehicle of our solitude.

From the Church of Christ parking lot next to that tiny Lindell Avenue apartment and the Corinthian on Florence, I moved about 3,000 miles to Washington, D.C. We’re a family awash in iPods with a son in graduate school. My mother no longer needs to work for us to make ends meet. We waste food. Over the post-mortem phone calls, I asked what’s next, if there’s another Bear in their future. Mikey’s buying his first brand-new car next week, planning to spend just a shade under $20,000. If we wanted to buy another Toyota truck, for another 18-year-run, we could.

If you ever want to quantify how far you have to go to make it in this country, for reference’s sake, my family put 258,346.6 miles on Bear. It was a vehicle of our social mobility, reminding us of where we started in 1990 as a young, fractured clan with a tenuous grasp of our new cultural context, of where we had been everyday in making ourselves (to a degree) a functional family at ease in America. Some choose to buy new cars to express their achievements to the world, to mark the level of success they enjoyed; I think we kept driving the same old truck as a reminder that we still have farther to go before we’re satisfied.

That, and to haul shit.

Please forgive the continuing election post-mortem.

This is required viewing for anybody who confuses sporting a lapel pin for true patriotism (nicked from The Daily Dish). I question and doubt my government because I want it to be better, because its impact on the world is undeniable. All those baseball games where people stood respectfully and listened to a celebrity of dubious talent sing the national anthem were just practice for this moment. Eddie Izzard said about the American national anthem: “70% of what people react to is the look, you know, it’s how you look; and 20% is about how you sound; and only 10% is what you say.” But that crowd on St. Mark’s Place knew and believed 100% of what they were saying. The awkward pause before ‘banner,’ where the crowd collectively catches its breath to belt out the last three words of that phrase, gives me chills.

Courtney took this picture of me in the crowd at James Hoban’s. Even if in the future I am happily married with five children, this past Tuesday may still be one of the top 5 best days of my life.

And just as 25 years and 364 days is just a night of sleep away from 26 even, I know that though the president-elect is now preparing for the quantum leap into residence of the Oval Office, the deep, fundamental flaws that bore this cynicism and disbelief have yet to be addressed. The ecstasy that washed over crowds was just rain water; the ground supply still needs to be cleansed of its bitterness. Until then, I still worry. I’m always prepared to be let down, to be told I’m wrong again, to be part of a minority stewing over beer and waiting for vindication.

I’ve been listening to “Changes” by 2pac pretty much constantly since the morning of 5 November. My iTunes library is rarely sorted by artist, but that morning, it was, and this song was at the top of the list. I remember riding around Irvine with Rishi and Ky Vinh, this song blasting and us commenting in between laments about our respective existential crises that it was still relevant in 2005. That two lines of that song — and although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president — were rendered moot in one night is why St. Mark’s Place burst into song, why I can’t stop grinning, why I stick my tongue out at the sky not to spite the heavens but to catch a drop of rain.

After the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, I became acutely aware of how voter fraud and suppression are perpetrated and how the simple process of tallying a majority can get so damn complicated. I don’t doubt that it happened again yesterday, that there were places where voters were intimidated, places where good citizens were confused for felons, places where the vote just didn’t work. And I don’t doubt that it will happen again. I fear this is just an inherent assumption of the millennial voter.

But those practices don’t scale, not for a margin of victory like this. I undertook my birthday rituals — noodles, haircut, and more liquor than advisable — but I don’t know how to celebrate something like this, how being in a majority is supposed to feel, how to feel when something I’ve wanted for years is uncompromisingly, by law, scheduled to happen. It wasn’t just some random lesser-of-two-evils Democrat who won but the one who when I watched the DNC keynote in 2004 I knew instinctively had to be president in my lifetime.

And that instinct, over time, was confirmed with a political platform and manner reasonably proximal to mine for him to earn my vote yesterday morning. And though I may come to regret this decision in November 2012, I doubt it. I know this feeling well, perhaps too well, and for as improbable to me as that outcome is four years from now, I regret more now the times in my life I was certain of a future but unable or unwilling to defend my vision. Yesterday’s euphoria was borne of that vindication, that private victory that marked the end of my September, writ large for over 63 million people hardly a month later.

When I left the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on East Capitol Street yesterday morning, I put my headphones back on and the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow” was playing. And it asks, this time tomorrow, where will we be? This time tomorrow, what will we know?

Over dinner, I raised a glass to victories, big and small, for us to celebrate something everyday. When I left Bourbon, not even last call when Obama had finished his victory speech, I told the cab driver my address and sat silently for the ride home through a light rain. I don’t know how to celebrate something like this. All I got for my birthday was a big, stupid grin and I’m still wearing it.

I woke up at 9 am to my Umbrella Today message, half an hour ahead of my alarm. E Street was strafed with jackhammers. I’ll retire FiveThirtyEight from my daily surfing, frame the cover of my DC Voter’s Guide. And the big, stupid grin: I could get used to it.