For some, no news is good news
Writing by treason on Thursday, 23 of August , 2007 at 10:59 am
“Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.”
– Dorothy Parker
I once worked with a woman who systematically lost each of her friends because of a defect in her personality. I started noticing coworkers were jumping the “friend ship” when it became more difficult to organize periodic evenings out.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to go to dinner with the group this week. I just have so much going on right now.”
“And the real reason is?”
“Okay, okay. It’s Carol. I just don’t want to be around her. She’s really starting to bring me down, you know?”
“How so?”
“She’s just so negative.”
“I like negative.”
“I used to, too, but there’s a limit. I spend five minutes with that woman and I’m depressed. I mean, I have to think of my mental health, right? I have my own troubles – I don’t need to deal with hers, too.”
The problem was that the rest of us could look at Carol’s life and see what was positive and she couldn’t. Eventually it became apparent that the only negative thing about her situation was her. If there were issues, she created them.
Time passed and the group disbanded. People left the company and some even left the state. One of the “problems” Carol had was her job, yet even after the rest of us had moved on, she stayed. She spent more than she made, she and her teenage kids lived at the mall and ate out too often, and her husband’s salary couldn’t support their expensive hobby: raising and showing Siberian Huskies.
She was bitter because her dogs never won anything and she blamed it on dog show politics. I suspected the real reason might have been her “defect” and the simple fact that her dogs just weren’t champion material. I’m no Chet Collier, but even I can tell when a dog falls short of its standard. But despite the expense, Carol continued to crate them up and travel all over the country in search of the elusive ribbon.
One day I heard that the bank had foreclosed on their house. We hadn’t been in touch in ages, but I thought about contacting her. I didn’t. By that point I’d learned a valuable lesson: One really can be too negative. I’d confused cynicism with negativism, thinking they were synonymous. They aren’t. Carol wasn’t at all cynical; she was just mortally negative.
She was like the evening news. And now I’m starting to suspect that this is why so many people seem to be so unaware of what’s going on in the world. I mention something that’s been in the news and people look at me as if I’m speaking Shona.
“It’s been in the news for a couple weeks now. The ‘big’ story.”
“Well, I don’t watch the news anymore.”
“It was in the paper… all over the radio – ”
“I don’t listen to the radio. I get those books-on-tape things now. And I stopped reading the paper. Cancelled it because they just piled up so fast. Never even got the rubber bands off them.”
“Where do you get your news then?”
“I don’t. I just decided I don’t want to know anymore. It’s too depressing. I can’t be bothered – I just have so much going on right now.”
I have the opposite problem. I want to know and I go looking for it. Yet I’m finding that there’s a certain resentment welling up in me. I see the news on TV, I read it in the paper and online, and I listen to it on the radio. But I’m noticing lately that I’m becoming angry for being subjected to information that if it weren’t called “news” I’d — for the sake of my mental health — be avoiding.
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