Tired

I'm just tired. I think it's partly the "worst" allergy season in years (but they said that about last year, too), and the sudden onset of heat and humidity (dear God, what is the summer going to be like, if they're predicting 90 degrees for Palm Sunday?). But I think it's also what's going on in the world.

I haven't really said anything about the Martin/Zimmerman issue. Whenever I see something getting played up big in the media, and it seems like there's a simple narrative, I get a little suspicious. I also think that my input is not needed: I'm not a witness, I'm not an expert.

So many things I see in the news lately dismay me. Both the fact that the event happened to begin with (there's so much violence in the world) and also the way commentators want to spin the information to make it fit their own personal narrative.

It's one of those times that I have to remind myself that most of the things that go on in the world really don't affect me directly. I've started largely ignoring the news (except for a few minutes of local news, and that mainly to catch the weather). The place inside my head is a nicer place than the outside world. And really, save for voting in November, there's not a lot I can do to influence things. Oh, I mean, there are things I can do locally to affect individual people's lives...I can continue to do the volunteer work I do, or I can pick up trash off the roadside, or I can go to a committee meeting I'd really rather not but at which something important is going to be decided and I have some knowledge of the situation. But I can't influence the Supreme Court or write a budget for the U.S. that won't sink us further into debt, or eliminate the possibility of the Taliban rising again once we leave Afghanistan.

I wonder if maybe one of the problems of the 24-hour news cycle is that people begin to think of things having an immediate and extreme impact on their lives when those things are taking place half a world away. Or they think they can somehow change things by feeling strongly about them.

I don't know. I'm just very tired right now.