Blogging paralysis

As may be evident from the wildly veering tone of my last few entries, I'm having a hard time figuring out what and when to post—a lot of the stuff I would ordinarily post seems trivial in the face of, y'know, hundreds of thousands of people dying from an earthquake and its aftereffects, or friends and (more often) friends-of-friends having cancer and other major medical issues (seems like there's been a lot of such things lately). And then I was waffling about posting about the deaths of Howard Zinn and J. D. Salinger, and yesterday's anniversary of the Challenger explosion, all of which I kind of wanted to note but didn't really have anything interesting to say about.

But at any given time, there's always bad stuff and sad stuff going on (and the above paragraph fails to mention several major recent news items about awful stuff going on around the world, and certainly fails to mention the multitude of personal-scale tragedies that happen every day worldwide [1]). So I'm going to proceed with some of the ordinary blog stuff. I imagine after posting a few entries featuring cute animals and nifty tech, plus some more serious entries about political and social issues, my cognitive dissonance will fade to a dull background roar.

([1] Moments after I posted this entry, Judy Small's "How Many Times" came up in iTunes. "These are the people of our time no less than those whose names and faces grace our papers' pages and our TV screens.")

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