Blanket fort desired

I dunno. I'm having one of those days where all the unhappiness people around me are experiencing (someone I know getting online hate, someone who lost a loved one....) is weighing me down and the whole world just seems like a sad place.

Part of it is the awful news story I heard last night, and the way it was presented. I decided to catch a few minutes of the 9 pm semi-local news. They were running a story from Houston - which is farther from me than Chicago is, I think - so I'm sure it's the sensationalism of it.

I can't not say what it was, but it's horrible. Fundamentally, a father had two of his kids call their mother (his estranged wife) and then he killed them. In cold blood. And she found them. And the father ran away and tried to kill himself but failed at that.

The worst part though was that they had footage of either the mother or an aunt of the kids (or even just a female friend of the family, I don't know) and she was crying with that keening wail that seems like such a primal thing - it made me shudder and involuntarily tear up. I had to switch away, partly because it was so painful to contemplate, but mainly because I was disgusted at the news reporters doing that.

(And then this morning: "amateur video" showing that small plane in California, where everyone was killed, going down).

If I had any control over mores of how things were done, one thing would be that: No shoving a camera in the face of a grieving relative. No showing accident footage. If you have to preface what you're going to show with "Some of this footage may be graphic," you take that as a direction that you are NOT to show it.

And of course, all the "gotcha"-ing back and forth,, all the cases where someone who disagrees with someone's policies or ideas decides instead to attack their appearance or family or make up insulting nicknames for them (all of which make me far less likely to pay attention to the person's argument, no matter how good it might be). Yes, I know people say "The other side fights dirty" but I also say "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"

And I'm just.....kind of done. This happens to me periodically, where it feels like the weight of badness or just plain meanness in the world kind of crushes me.

I mowed and edged this morning: it had to be done, it provided me some exercise, and (hopefully) it's going to rain later this week, but I thought of a couple things:

1. One of the things I like about kids' programming is that by and large it avoids the political. The messages it presents tends to be more things like "be kind to one another" or "trust the person who has experience about something" or "honesty is the best policy" or whatever. And I have remarked before at times that I am a "bear of very little brain" in some ways, and I prefer those messages than the weird and wooly world that politics seems to have become.

I also don't enjoy schadenfreude much any more - where a bad thing happens to a "bad" person. Oh, when it's instant karma, maybe I can kind of shrug and go "you get what you put out in this world" but I'd be happier if the "bad" person didn't do the bad things to begin with.

(Actually, in my Sunday school lesson yesterday - over Romans 2:1-12 - we talked about the danger of labeling "whole people" as "bad" - a sort of othering - instead of saying "this particular action they are doing is a problem because it's damaging to the community." The problem with dismissing someone as "bad" - well, it's like banning speech. You get to ban the speech you dislike, but then someone else will dislike YOUR speech and ban you. We're all "bad" in some way.)

2. If I could have anything today, instead of washing my hair/practicing piano/maybe running out to refill my Claritin and then going over to work after lunch, I'd spend the day in craft stores. I'd love to go to a Michael's (there is not one within an hour of me) or even the JoAnn's I always go to, or maybe go to quilt shops and yarn stores and just wander around looking at the stuff and thinking about the possibilities of what I could make with it. Or getting to look at bunches of new craft books and contemplate the patterns.

I can't do that, though. I'm telling myself if I do a few useful things this week (getting the invitation-to-the-salad-supper letter written for our scholarship recipients, finalizing my syllabi, re-doing my lab packet), Friday I can take and go to Whitesboro and get a *little* bit of that. (And maybe stop at the JoAnn's on the way home).

But yeah. I can tell I'm feeling some distress over stuff. I have been reading "A Trick of the Light," another Gamache mystery (and apparently I missed one in the sequence because there are events alluded to I don't remember from the previous book*)

(*Yup. I haven't read "Bury Your Dead" yet and this list has it set immediately before. And now I'm apprehensive to read it, based on some of the stuff the current book alludes to...)

But anyway. After hearing that news story (about the child murder) last night, I looked at it, and was just like "I can't." And I didn't quite feel like reading more on "The Grey King" at the moment, because, without TOO much spoiling - let's just say this website would not be too happy with some of the events in the book.

But I needed to read something before bed. I thought of going full-regression and pulling either Winnie-the-Pooh or The 101 Dalmations off the shelf, but then I thought: non-fiction should do it, the right kind of non-fiction, nothing about war or disease.....maybe history of science, because in general that shows human ingenuity and how stuff gets better....

So I looked on my shelves and found "The Riddle of the Compass." It's a slightly older book (mine is the 2001 paperback) and I remember I bought it back when it first came out. I figured: it's unlikely to be distressing so this might work.

Yeah. It seems thus far (about 30 pages in) to be (a) very readable, (b) interesting, and (c) doesn't make me more upset with the human race than I already am. I'm learning a little bit about sidereal navigation and I'm hoping when the author gets to the point where sextants were invented, he explains them a little more because I never fully understood how they worked....

But yeah. I don't know if I'm the only person who's ever had to put a book aside because events of the outside world made continuing to read it too distressing, but....I've done that quite frequently. (I never finished "Gulliver's Travels" because its cynicism got to me too much, at a time when already bad stuff was going on in the world)