prepared to be disappointed

Pessimism -- ah yes, you're my friend.

Another election day, and I've imposed a 12-hour news blackout on myself. I'll tune in tonight after all the polls have closed and probably call a couple friends, but I'm not feeling good about things. A reading, therefore from a fellow left radical about pessimism and patience and failure:
"Pragmatists make success a criterion: what failed was bad and false. For his part, Nietzsche the anti-pragmatist understood that the decadent sometimes choose what is bad for them, propelling them along the path of decline. Unintended consequences and reverses have their perverse reasons. Moreover, for those who observe the radical labor of the negative, failures are not only failures: since Hegel and Marx, we have known that things also progress by the 'bad side'" (Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life III, 36).