I don’t turn on the news much. I leave it to my wife, who is always up on the latest gossip, to fill me in on anything relevant… Britney did something whacky, somebody famous died, there’s an asteroid coming in a few days to end life as we know it… you know… important stuff. The rest of the news is generally a combination of irrelevant to my life and depressing. One or the other I might not mind exposing myself to, but both? Forget it.
It gets to the point that I’ll spend weeks of my life not turning on the news once and, for TV-served brain food, subsist mainly on a varied diet of Science Channel, History Channel, Sci-Fi Channel and whatever whacky Japanese game show I can find on G4. Sometimes I check the stock market, but even that’s getting depressing lately. Then I’ll feed my morbid curiosity for a week, watching all the news that’s fit to hang yourself to, before retreating again into my little box of denial.
The beauty of the internet is that I can, for the most part, choose the news I want. Sure, there are snippets in the headlines to dodge. I know, for example, that Gov. Eliot Spitzer is tied to prostitution and is tendering his resignation. I even know what his favorite escort looks like thanks to a picture on the front page of one news outlet (very important stuff, you see). I guess the latter might be a nice conversation starter should somebody happen to see her sitting across from them at Starbucks. But I’m blissfully oblivious to most of the sordid details about that and other stories.
My salvation on the web is the ability to bypass the big news sites (msnbc, cnn, fox, etc) and custom search for something, anything, that will serve to boost my spirits. One such find that I feel worthy of mention is Honesty Blog. This blog, barely a year old, is largely reader-fed and serves up one inspirational story about people behaving decently after another. It’s definitely one of my go-to’s for a little bit of cheer in an otherwise down-themed news world and serves to remind me that people aren’t that bad, it’s just mostly bad people who make it to the front page on the major outlets.
Be kind to yourself and pay http://www.honestyblog.com/ a visit. You’ll be glad you did.