About every month or so I need to stay up all night. I feel justified in saying 'need.' My body seems to hold the mistaken belief that the day has twenty-five hours. (Here's a sympathetic alternative-medicinistic article that treats the subject.) That's why I stayed up last night until 5:30 AM and got up at 9:30.
Usually I can spend this time doing useful things, or at least reading a favorite novel. Last night I spent working myself into a downward emotional spiral. Whee.
One thing that helped was finding this old piece by Eve Tushnet. I'll excerpt a bit:
Recently I had a bad weekend. A really, really lousy, stressed-out, low, hateful weekend. And at some point I realized something: You know, I used to feel like this all the time! Thinking over it, actually, I used to feel worse than that, all the time. Like between the ages of, say, five or six, and 20. After 20 or so, I've had frequent bad patches, grim little self-hate-fiestas, but they've been interludes between longer calm, basically happy stretches. This correlates very roughly with my entrance into the Church, which is interesting; I don't know what to say except "interesting," because entering the Church has certainly provoked new anxieties and fairly painful self-assessments. But there it is.
This is similar to my own experience. The darkest parts of my life came before I joined the Church at 18. After that came the long slow climb that continues today, punctuated by sharp slides (like yesterday's) followed by quick reversals.
I don't consider the New York Times a credible news source.
This actually has very little to do with liberal bias, or the recent flap about that country club. I believe the incident which finally turned me off the Times occurred even before Howell Raines became the editor.
In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial by Marcia Angell, M.D. endorsing single-payer health care. (You can read about that here). This rated a front-page news story and an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times ignored it. I believe the Health headline of the day was "Man With Icepick Through Eye Will Live."
I don't care whether the Times supports or opposes single-payer. But in order to maintain its credibility as an impartial news source, the Times should at least try to cover the main health news of the day, don't you think?