Iraq and a hard place

Over the last few years I have come to hate the news. I pretty much never watch the news, because it makes me so upset. I've always hated local news because it was depressing, but I used to at least find national and international news interesting. That changed pretty much entirely once Bush took office. Every time I would read the paper there was more about Iraq, or some other thing he had done that pissed me off to no end. Most of the time when I would watch the news I would end up having to watch some maddening clip of him making some stupid speech or comment. Not only would it make me mad, but I just literally can't stand to listen to the man speak. It actually makes me go nuts. So I basically just gave up the news. Went cold turkey. I mean I watch the news every now and then. And sometimes I'll read sections of the paper besides Style and the Sunday Source, but not all that often. I realize that sometimes this puts me in situations where I seem kind of stupid and out of the loop, but I just get in such a funk from news of what's actually going on that I put up with that. And I do get a decent amount of news by way of word of mouth. I also know that people I really care about don't really care if I am sometimes out of the loop and have to ask them what is going on when they are talking about something. But the entire situation may change. Today Carla asked me if I had heard about the murders of sex workers in Ipswich, because Carla is my link to UK news. I obviously had not heard about them, but given my rather morbid streak I was intrigued and googled it. The first thing that came up was a BBC News article. So I read it. And was reminded how much I DON'T hate BBC News. So I went to the main headlines page and was confronted with "Growing pressure: US president is caught between Iraq and a hard place." Now that is a really fabulous headline. I mean how can you not love a headline like that. And a news outlet that uses it. So despite all the awful, and upsetting things that happen in the world everyday that I have been trying to avoid reading about for the last four years, maybe more, I am now going to try and keep up again via the BBC News. I hope that because they are a news outlet that doesn't make me absolutely insane I will actually be able to do it. Also from my point of view, things are looking up a little so maybe it won't ALL be bad news anymore. Cheers to that.