Self-Imposed News Blackout

I've been really behind in my reading for what seems like the last several years. Reading books that usually took no time to finish seems to stretch into ungodly lengths, and don't even mention keeping up with all the magazines I subscribe to. Add on top of that the New York Times that I receive every day, and, as you can imagine, it adds up to a lot of reading material to devour during a given day, week, month.

When I leave for any amount of time, naturally, I suspend my paper delivery. And while I can still buy the paper when I'm at home, I still feel less a sense of obligation to read it thoroughly or on time, and I feel much more relaxed with regard to my reading schedule, if you want to call it that.

I'm not sure why I had never thought of this before, but why can't I suspend it for a time even while I'm home? There's nothing that says I can't still be here and not have it delivered for a time, right? Right, so I figured I'd try it for a few days to try to finish a book that's been lingering on my nightstand, and just to give myself a break from it all. How would this turn out?

It turns out that, I didn't miss being out of the loop all that much. While I did feel a certain sense of unawareness, and even out of touch with the world for a bit (I really do not look at news sites on the web. I can't stand reading them, and would much rather have a newspaper in my hands than staring at at screen.) and somewhat ignorant of events, I soon felt a little sense of relief. It was nice not feeling the obligation to have to read the paper every day. I wouldn't want to do this all the time, but the break did serve its purpose and allowed me to catch up and finish my book and just live a little easier.

The other thing I noticed, though, was that I was out of the loop enough to have any sort of anger at the affairs of the world subside substantially. I think you have to be a truly devout critic of the president to hate him 24/7, but it's really hard to muster up any sort of animus towards him when I wasn't reading the paper on a daily basis and, primarily, the editorial page, that lambastes him daily.

I don't think I want to live without the news on a such a frequent basis, but I do believe I will be taking these respites even when I don't leave town more often in the future.

RE: Death Celebration?

I wrote in a previous post about the outpouring of joy at the death of Jerry Falwell not to long ago. My point in that post, if I had one, was that I didn't personally see that as being a good thing to become comfortable with doing. V., whose excellent blog I have a link to on my sidebar, resent me an email discussion I had with her when President Reagan died, and the similarities between my post and that email are pretty striking, and it appears that I had much the same problem then as I did recently with Falwell's death.

However, what caused me to revisit this was not only rereading that email exchange, but also a conversation I had with a coworker regarding the same issue. It was pointed out to me that unless you had to live under the persecution that Falwell and his ilk advocated, then it's hard to really gauge what type of reaction one would have to such a person's death. I guess the adage about walking in one's shoes is truer in this regard than I had thought.

On the other hand, though, there's also the issue of whether or not you're sinking to the level of that which you feel persecuted by when you engage in a celebration of their death. Isn't that the point when someone tells you that if you do such and such, then that person has won? I'm not really advocating one side or another here, but I find it interesting to think about the fact that certain things that would seem to be questionable in one context aren't in another.

I had all but forgotten about the Verve's song "Bittersweet Symphony" until I recently watched a documentary on the British music scene in the late '90s called Live Forever. They briefly played it during a montage of images, and it just reminded of how great the track really is. I remember when it was released that it somehow got adopted, as certain songs do, into the sports world, and, I could be wrong, but I seem to recall it was played during a Nike commercial as well. Regardless, it's a great track that has an unmistakable sound to it. It's one of those songs that gives me goosebumps just hearing the opening.

Oh, and the video is pretty cool, too.