So, I've now been 1.5 days into my politics hiatus. I get scarily obsessed with it from time to time and start to believe that every thing that happens has enormous consequences that will result in everyone I love dying and the planet exploding. I wake up in the middle of the night worried over things I cannot control. The 24 hour news cycle is bad for all of us. Really bad.Additionally, I've grown weary of the snark. I used to love snark. But the internet is festooned with snark of the worst kind; artificial, trite and overdone. 99% of the political snark on the internet is to genuine satire what Precious Moments or "Love Is" are to genuine sentiment.
I'll come back to politics. I think it's important to know what's going on and what with the hysterical partisanship of the country these days, it's easier to get the whole story from the intertoobz than it is from the "impartiality is reporting what each side says and not bothering with analysis or fact checking" traditional media. Also, I love it. But, for a week or so I'm steering clear. I need a break. I'm sick of politics and I'm sick of snark.
But I could NEVER be sick of the internet.
So what to do? If I'm avoiding my political blogs, what do I read while I'm eating my lunch? And this happy afternoon, I have made the awesomest discovery. There's this fellow named Zach Handlen who is recapping Star Trek: TNG over at The Onion's AV Club. And he's doing it in a way that's thoughtful and entertaining, but not particularly snarky. And if anything invites snark, it's Star Trek. But I, like so many, unabashedly love it. And this Zach Handlen guy is writing to those of us who love that show. So this lunchtime, instead of growing increasingly irritated by a preponderance of "cave" puns made by people who know they swiped that pun from somewhere but are still devoted to the idea of their own cleverness, I sipped my Diet Coke, ate some soup and revisited the question of Wesley Crusher, who was such a problematic character. Didn't you just hate him? Except for those times he was awesome? Or when you felt really fond of him?
Lunchtimes have gotten so much better, it didn't really matter that my soup was kind of gross.
