From the North 40: A rarity: helpful newsy news

I think I can be honest here, so I'll just say right out: I should not be reading, watching, listening to, discussing, covering, or otherwise interacting with news, like the kind found on the other pages of this newspaper. No one should. No matter what my boss says.

An elite 5 percent of news is just news. It informs you. It delights you. You recognize this 5 percent when your first response is something like “huh” or “Well, I’ll be …” or “oh” or even “awww.” Yeah, “awww” is good. The rest of it will just doom you to the crazies, either clinical depression or clinical anger, which might not be a real thing, but it’s like, “AAargh!” angry.

It’s hard to tell which news is news and which news is crazy-making, sometimes images help — criminal mug shots, no; cute kids, happy animals and those boring shots of people lined up around a big check and shaking hands, yes. Anything with headlines or opening statements that include words like trial, sued, taxes, evidence and any form of a word referring to violence, death or Congress, you should run from.

With sound-based media outlets, you’re good if the noise coming from the speakers has a beat and you think you could dance to it. Canned laugh tracks are a good sign, too. Online, look for clues like “LOL” written in the comment section; or the story itself having a link to a kitty video or minions. Otherwise, run. Run for your life.

That’s been my creed from my youthful days when I first couldn’t handle being emotionally befuddled by news. Don’t news up your day. Just don't ... unless (in the mother of all ironies) like me, you actually get a job for which you are paid to read the paper, every newsy, newsed-up, newsed-over news page of it. Even then ...

Some days it’s a testament to my sterling character that I’m not mainlining Prozac. No, really.

But every once in a while, on a rare and beautiful occasion, even the newsy news, the stuff that should be chopping away at my soul, makes me feel not awful — like, maybe, things in my life aren’t so bad after all.

For instance, the other day my husband dropped the bombshell on me that we are going to have to fur out two walls in our house. And if you don’t know carpentry, that means I have to put a 2-by-4 wall on the face of an existing wall. And in case you don’t really grasp the ramifications of that, it means some rooms will be 4 inches narrower. Four inches. I know, take a moment until your head stops spinning.

My living room, a room in which I am supposed to be able to live — with company occasionally taking up space, too — will be more than 4 square feet smaller. Seriously. Four square feet. There are prisons in dark scary places of the world that have smaller isolation cells than this (I read that in the news), so I’m losing, like, a luxury suite out of my living room.

I will only have 192 square feet of living space left in there. That’s, like, a sitting room, not a living room. That’s a room you just sit in, not live in.

I was devastated — then I had to go to work and read the awful news from around the world and get even more depressed.

This is the hardship that is my life.

There I was, forced by The Man and my need for a paycheck, reading about how some illegal migrants got stranded at sea in Asian waters, crammed to triple-occupancy on a little boat in the middle of the big blue, floating around at the mercy of Mother Nature without a motor, without oars, without food, no drinkable water, no amenities, no hope of elbow room before certain death — for months. Yes. They survived this way for months before being rescued.

And you know what? I felt better.

I mean, sure I felt really horrified for those people, on many levels. You would have to be a complete badonka-donk not to.

Deep down, though, it really eased my heartache to put my troubles into perspective thinking: “Look at those people, crammed together in inhumane conditions. Finally, I know there’s someone out there who has experienced my pain. If they knew the tragedy of my life, what I will have to bear in my little sitting room until I die, or move away, they would be horrified for me, too.”

Solidarity, sisters and brothers. Solidarity.

(Come on in, you can't get stranded here in the shallow end at [email protected].)