A few days ago, I was roused in the middle of the night by loud rapping at my front door. I shuffled groggily from my bed and opened the door to find a mustached, burly man staring me down. He flashed his badge, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection crest embossed into gleaming metal.

Breathe easy, my comrades. You will not be forced to read about the dreaded E-word while pretending to pay attention in your Friday morning lecture. There will be no mention of Obama, McCain, Palin, or Biden, no mention of booths, or fraud, or turnout, or analysis — well, except those mentions. All of you who survived the last week of campaign coverage without having an epileptic fit deserve a federal tax credit for therapy and Xanax. I know the CNN “first polls close” ticker nearly took me out. I kept mistaking it for a countdown to the apocalypse. But I made it through, baby. And I voted. I voted in my first general election.

Canada and the United States know many fundamental differences. People on both sides of the border are quick to point out the primordial divides like Canadian beer versus American beige water, U.S. states versus Canadian provinces, or America’s global military might versus the Canadian non-army. Fortunately, none of these differences threaten to the vitality of Canado-American trade or the proper functioning of the National Hockey League.

If you’re reading this hot off the press, you must have missed the bus to Boston, or maybe Mommy doesn’t want you home for Fall Break. I’m in Montréal preparing for Canadian Thanksgiving (which is not, as most Americans believe, an imaginary holiday). If you find a ride home, you’ll honor Columbus on Monday. I’ll be eating turkey with my grandparents in manifest observation of the “action of grace,” as we call it in French. It’s not Christmas, but Fall Break nonetheless fills me wit the kind of illicit joy I get from drinking skim milk straight from the carton and walking around my apartment naked. Days off are so wrong, but they feel so right.

The French like to say that “a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.” Cyclops phobia aside, I’ve never said no to the fromage. Ever. Ask the jeans I wore in Paris. James Joyce, on the other hand, called cheese the “corpse of milk.” No offense, Jimbo, but it’s so much more than that. Milk does not become cheese to die. Milk becomes cheese to transcend, well, everything.