Eccentric Flower:199809/im getting too annoyed

twenty-nine september ninety eight eleven a m

i'm getting too annoyed

Hope everyone's back now. All systems are up and running and email to the usual address should reach me just fine.

I think I've discovered why Americans don't like being aware of newslike events. It depresses them. Americans hate being depressed.

There are plenty of cultures which adore depression. The French smoke long brown cigarettes and muse existentially about how tragic and pointless life is. The Jewish diaspora collectively feels that angst is a very important part of life. The English take all of life in with a uniform sort of stoic tolerance. Many Slavic nationalities take it on faith that misery is the normal state of things.

Of course, in the case of the latter, conditions in their home countries are miserable - of the states which cut loose from the Soviet Union, only the three little Baltic states up by Finland are having any kind of prosperity - but it becomes so ingrained that it's hard to shake. I have a Romanian emigre as co-worker. She's doing well - very prosperously, by my trailer-park standards - but is possibly the single most fatalistic person I have ever met.

It's not that none of these cultures is capable of cutting loose or experiencing joy, it's just that those are considered brief and rare interludes in an otherwise nasty existence.

We Americans, on the other hand, are brought up to expect jam yesterday, jam today, and jam tomorrow. Is it better to live insisting on a perpetually rosy outlook? Or, as some Europeans would insist, are we just deceiving ourselves and setting ourselves up for our extremely high national psychoanalysis bills? Do the French even believe in psychologists?

What prompted this musing is that every time I read the newspaper I get really unhappy about something. Realizing this is doing me no good: I am unhappier about the fact that the newspaper consistently makes me cranky than I am about any of the bad news items themselves.

Yesterday I randomly picked up a section of The Wall Street Journal to read while I ate my lunch. I saw a story about how pesticide manufacturers have resumed testing their products on humans, saying that the new toxicity regulations make it necessary (the government says that's not true). Yes, humans are being given small doses of pesticides - and some humans are apparently stupid enough to do it. The ones mentioned in the article were formulations of good old malathion and diazinon, the pair I refer to as The Ortho Twins.

You know, I read today that the grain surplus is so bad in this country, and the market so diminished by the Asian crisis, that the price per bushel for corn or wheat (corn's at about $1.75) is well below the lowest possible cost to produce the stuff. Farmers are guaranteed a loss. Why do we need pesticides in the first place? Let the bugs eat some of it. What the heck.

Then I read that one particular brand of birth control pill - made by Ortho - is outselling all the others, with a 12% market share. Why? Because this birth-control pill is the only one which is legally allowed to say that it helps fight acne.

All birth-control pills do, of course; estrogen does the trick. But somehow Ortho finagled approval to make this pitch, and with ads targeted directly at insecure teenage girls ("Can a birth-control pill help clear up your skin?") the results have been spectacular. Medical folks tell stories about girls coming in and requesting this brand by name, even when a different pill with a different dosage level would be better for their needs.

This is not what we need. But it also shouldn't annoy me as much as it does.

I worry that I'm getting so annoyed about everything I read in the papers that I'm going to burn out my annoyance muscles prematurely.

On the other hand, maybe that would be nice. Then I could go out and play in the wind, blissful.

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