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.

CUSTOMS AGENT: Miz Girardin, I am here to take you into custody pursuant to Title IV of the USA PATRIOT Act of October 26th, 2001, of which you are in direct violation.

ME: Title IV! Border Security! Is it something I wrote? I knew I shouldn’t have said that thing about McCarthy…

CUSTOMS AGENT: Our intelligence services have gathered information on your un-American activities. You have broken the three sacred clauses of Americanness. You are unmarried, correct?

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.

Most unfortunate, however, is the one thing that manages to bring us all together. We in the United States and Canada are united across our long and porous border by our disregard for international law.

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.

Cheese ferments at the delicate intersection of culture and politics. It is essentially the culinary equivalent of Jesus.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy likes to call Barack Obama his “pal,” and French women swoon over his smile and well-proportioned ears. But any boost that Monsieur Obama might give to the trans-Atlantic Camembert trade come November threatens to be undone by the Palin blip on the election radar.

Sarah Palin reminds us of the fundamental divide between the francophone and anglophone worlds: SEX.

Sarah Palin takes me back to everything I learned about sex in France (and lest you think that this is a pornographic exercise, let me point out that my grandmother reads this).

Before I went abroad last June, I could have put Danielle Steele out of business with the compendium of raunchy sexcapades I had collected from friends since high school.

Eight weeks ago, I came back to my parents’ home in suburban Chicago after having spent thirteen months working and studying in France. I lived in both Marseille and Paris and traveled to 45 other cities in 14 countries. I had the time of my life and, admittedly, consumed far too many bottles of wine.

As the return to America loomed, the prospect of returning home became increasingly dreadful. My wine consumption rose to exceed food and water consumption combined.