Lydia Schoch

There are so many depressing news items which we should read because they’re important. But I feel that the above examples just don’t come into this category. News shouldn’t be about shocking people and making them feel miserable about freak accidents, and I know that if something like this happened to one of my own family, I wouldn’t want it sensationalized all over the world.

– From Too Much Information via LindaHuber19.

The post I’m responding to today is pretty short. I recommend checking it out before you continue on with this one.

One of the biggest reasons why I have largely stopped consuming the news is due to how much it relies on fear and anger to attract readers. Sensationalistic stories win out over anything else that’s going on, and this imbalanced perspective exaggerates some dangers while completely ignoring much more serious ones.

Photo by Juanedc from Zaragoza, España.

I agree with Linda. This isn’t what the news should cover.

The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to find news sources that avoid fear-mongering because those tactics are so effective at capturing people’s attention. I’m not pointing fingers at any one political ideology here. Everyone does it.

So how do we respond to it? Opting out of keeping up with current events won’t work for everyone. A lot of people genuinely enjoy discussing what’s been happening around the world.

I have noticed that small, local newspapers, blogs, and radio/TV stations are more willing to highlight positive stories from their communities.  Many years ago my brother and sister-in-law were both interviewed about their experiences as short-term volunteers in other countries. Their trips were happy, memorable occasions that made for uplifting news.

The dosage matter as well. There is a difference between skimming a blog and spending hours a day watching depressing or misleading stories. The limit for every person will vary, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with finding a balance between staying informed and avoiding truthy tales of horror.

My final piece of advice is simple: look for hope. Longterm readers know what a big fan I am of Cathryn Wellner’s blog. It’s one of the major reasons why I’m not quite as strict about avoiding the news as I was a few years ago.

Readers, what do you think?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, short stories, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Thank Goodness It’s Friday…or, Not via jtvancouver. What one teacher has learned about the glaring need for individualized attention from his students. He talks about poverty a lot in his piece, but I’ve seen similarly unhealthy cycles play out in families from every social class.  At first I was a little worried that he was writing off an entire group of people based on the dysfunctions of a few of them, but I’m sure longterm readers know that I wouldn’t be recommending this post if that was actually what occurred.

Wishes for Sons. Feministing has been publishing one poem a day this month because April is apparently National Poetry Month. This is my favourite one so far.

Why You Should Never, Ever, Ever Get a Tattoo (but Having a Baby Is Fine) via incurable hippie. The parallels between the two are astounding.

The Men Who Left Were White. This is a really thought-provoking post about identity, ancestors, and those mail order genetic tests that a lot of people have been trying out lately. It’s interesting to see just what these tests can reveal.

From Cogs via wordblender:

The pros and cons

People like me
I have a nice face
My physical features aren’t atrocious

From Repairing the World:

By the time Lila and Bridger arrived, the sitting room floor was already part savannah. Yellow grass grew on dirt where hardwood had once been. The border between grass and floor hissed and threw up sparks as the savannah crept towards the davenport on one side, the longcase clock on another and towards Lila on a third. On the fourth, the grass seemed to stretch through a wide hole in the far wall to a pale green horizon. The intrusion, however, couldn’t have breached the far wall yet.

My to-read list grew dangerously slim as winter melted into spring, so I was very glad to pick up my friend Daphne Ashling Purpus’ newest book, Dragon Magic.

It revisits the same universe where Dragon Riders and The Egg That Wouldn’t Hatch took place, although it also works well as a standalone novel. I loved the gorgeous cover she chose as soon as I saw it.

There are plot twists in this book that make it difficult for me to discuss what happens in great detail, but I will say that I was totally surprised by several of them. This was my favourite book in the series so far, and I’d recommend it to anyone in the mood for an imaginative young adult fantasy novel.

What have you been reading?

The last few months have been a bit quieter for entertaining search engine queries that lead new readers to this blog. I suspect that Google’s new algorithim is filtering out some of the funniest ones before I can read them.

search engine questions. This is the most meta search phrase ever. I feel like answering it would trap me in a space time anomaly like on that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the ship kept blowing up over and over again.

What issues can a non-theistic worldview easily create? None that I’ve found so far.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of skepticism? I’m beginning to suspect that a lot of my new followers find this blog through questions like this. I wonder how many of them stick around once they realize I’m not that interested in debates?

Otters getting married. I fully support marriage ceremonies for otters. Especially if they wear silly hats and get extra fish.

Why is food such an enemy for me? If you don’t keep the unhealthiest treats in your house, it’s much harder to over-indulge. It’s worth it to me to pay a little more for single-serving snacks to remove that temptation.

How to re-charge your wand. I tweeted about this a few days after it showed up in Google Analytics, but it still makes me chuckle.

Would myths and legends survive in the 21st century? The Internet is a powerful tool. One of the things it’s done over the last 15-20 years is discredit many myths and legends that used to be much more widespread. Snopes.com is a great example of how this works.

If the embedded link doesn’t work,  click here.

The best cities are full of warm, inviting public spaces like this one. I’ve lived in Toronto for about 9 years and still haven’t discovered all it has to offer.

I also thought this video was a nice follow-up to my last post here.

Photo by Ralf Ostermann.

As I’ve mentioned several times on this blog recently, I’ve been quite antsy for spring to arrive this year.

Combine a long, cold winter with living in a bachelor apartment and one ends up with cabin fever after a few months.

Yesterday was the first semi-warm day we’ve had in 2014. Drew and I celebrated by buying vegan donuts and taking a nice, long walk.

I’d been looking forward to this sort of thing for so many months that it took me a little bit to settle into it. Is it going to get really hot outside in a week or two like it did last April? I wonder if there’s any truth to the theory that cold winters lead to hot summers? 

My mind was so focused on what ifs that I barely noticed the first dog we passed.

And then we saw another one. And another one.

Scruffy dogs and white, fluffy dogs who had clearly recently been to the groomer. Chubby puppies and skinny ones. Toy poodles wearing adorable, fitted jackets and a gentle Marmaduke look-alike who probably weighs more than I do.

Every one of them was gleefully happy to be outside, though.  There was prancing, sniffing, and one cute little guy who got so excited he accidentally flipped himself over after his human tried to encourage him to keep walking. He’d suddenly become mesmerized by a flower planter. The scents that tickled his nose from it must have been glorious.

None of them thought about the future. They were just happy to be outside on a clear, blue day and feel the first tinge of warmth from the sun we’ve noticed in months.

As I watched them I felt all of my other thoughts melt away.  As someone who spends so much time thinking about the future it was refreshing to step away from it for a little while.

Maybe I should take walks more often.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, comic strips, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

I Think I Was a “Slut” in My 20’s via AwkwardGirlLA. This is a really interesting blog post about what women have to do in order to be considered “sluts.”

Close Call.  Funny stuff.

We Are Not Given a Good Life or a Bad Life. My thoughts exactly.

Narcissus via jdubquca. This feels like the perfect poem with which to celebrate the warm weather that’s finally arrived here in Toronto.

A Message From Narnia, to Those Still in the Dark. Longterm readers might remember how much I loved the Narnia books as a kid. What’s really interesting, I think, is to go back and reread books from your childhood. This poem references some of the messages in this series that are more applicable to adults than they (probably) are to younger readers.

From Green Sunday via joshuamneff:

in the heart of the heart of my head i found:

mosscovered bones & jewelled monsters

Part mystery, part sci-fi/fantasy, Just Gone follows Mother Angelique (who has dedicated her life to running a domestic violence shelter) and the two traumatized kids she takes in when their mother is accidentally murdered. During the course of figuring out how best to help Jamal and Chantay, Mother Angelique begins hearing them talk about Wacky Jacky. At first she thinks Jamal has invented this character in order to help him cope with the chaos and violence that has disrupted so much of his young life.

And then very strange things start happening when Jamal is around.

Mother Angelique’s unique voice is what lead me to recommend this book. She isn’t necessarily someone I’d like in real life, but I appreciate her no-nonsense attitude and lifelong commitment to helping people in crisis. Her straight-laced personality is also a great contrast to Jamal’s colourful stories about where Wacky Jacky comes from and what he does to adults who harm kids.

What have you been reading?

The Saga Of Biorn from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.

A distant relative I’ve never actually met died a few months ago. Recently another family member gave us a copy of his funeral program. Over nine decades of life were summarized in a few short sentences. His birth, his marriage, his death.

Those three dates, while obviously important, cover an extremely small portion of his life.  As I read the program I wondered what had been left out about him. Not in a negative way at all, mind you. It was more a curiosity about all of those personality quirks and other minor details about any of us that tend to be slowly forgotten after we die.

This short film made me think of the legacy each one of us will leave behind when we die. There’s only so much control we have over when that happens, how it happens, and what others think of us after we’re gone.

Everything else I want to say about The Saga of Biorn contains spoilers, so please go watch it. I’d love to discuss the ending with someone!

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, poetry, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

From As I Sketch Each Year via Lael_Lenehan:

As I sketch each year,
I fill the base of a jar, with a
fabricated world of dreams
ranging in realities

Why’s Enough. There’s something to be said for this.

The Elusive Happy Family via CynthiaHarriso1. The unvarnished honesty in this post is refreshing. It takes a lot of courage to talk about such personal matters, especially when everything doesn’t necessarily go according to plan.

I am Bad. I completely understand where this columnist is coming from. Unnecessary, prolonged noise  is a huge pet peeve of mine as well. There is no reason to, say, leave a TV  or radio on when no one is using it or speak loudly when a normal tone is audible. As a preacher’s kid I used to quietly slip out of the sanctuary during the loudest songs. The music was playful, it was just so loud that I could no longer hear myself think. I needed a few minutes of only moderate noise in order to reorganize my mind.

Yard Sale Madness via JamesLEtoile. A clever essay about the dark side of yard sales. I’ve never understood the appeal of driving to someone else’s home in order to haggle over a $0.25 t-shirt. At least  secondhand shops offer a wide variety items in a temperature-controlled environment. Yard sales don’t.

From Huggers Gonna Hug:

What people think about me is none of my business.

The words hit me like a sledgehammer. Such a seeming contradiction, such a paradox, but only because we have it backwards when we allow people’s opinions of us to affect us. We are who we are. Our actions and thoughts define us. How someone interprets those actions is none of our business.

If you’ve ever wondered what your parents or grandparents didn’t tell you about their lives before they had kids, I think you’ll love Rocket Girl.

This biography of an incredibly secretive scientist is written by her son. Mary Sherman Morgan ran away from home at 19 to escape her abusive, poverty-stricken family who never would have approved of her attending college. Little did they know that their daughter was about to become the first female rocket scientist in the U.S. or that she and a colleague would solve a problem that was threatening to completely derail manned space flights

What I liked most about this biography is how honest George D. Morgan was about his mother’s shortcomings. It’s easy to sugarcoat the life of someone you love, but he doesn’t shy away from the details of her life that don’t always put her in the best light.

What have you been reading?

Picture by LinguistAtLarge.

Do you remember the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden talks about his single-serving friends? He’s referring to the nice people you meet, say, while travelling and then never see again.

I’ve started striking up conversations with people I don’t really know. They’re not quite single-serving friends as we live in the same city (and sometimes even the same building), but if there’s something friendly to say while we’re waiting in line or squished together on an elevator I’m beginning to say it.

We don’t know each other’s names, but for a few minutes we share camaraderie. Often this works out well. And then there are those other times.

It was one of the last chilly days of the winter that wouldn’t end when an exhausted-looking woman and I boarded the same elevator. Her cheeks were ruddy and her hair looked a bit windblown.

“It is really cold out there?” I asked. I knew the forecast had called for pretty cold temperatures for this time in March, but I didn’t remember hearing anything about a windchill or strong winds.

Her shoulders drooped.

“I’m just so used to working two or three jobs,” she said. “I think I’m going to go back to sleep.” Her fatigue dripped furiously onto the mud-caked floor.

Eventually she figured out what I was actually asking, and we both agreed that Toronto is trapped in an everlasting winter without the promise of Christmas.*

But for 30 seconds I was very amused by the direction of our conversation.

What have you (mis)heard lately?

*Or at least that’s what it feels like.

If the embedded video doesn’t work, click here.