Sunday Sentiment: Too Much Information

I believe that I've shared with you my commitment to myself to slow down, yes? Smell the flowers a bit? Well, this week---as usual---I managed to work myself into quite the tizzy, contrary to my best intentions to be Zen.

I'd been reading this book called The War for Wealth. Imagine, if you will, Thomas Friedman of The World is Flat as a realistic but pessimistic German, and you've got an idea of this book, which pretty much says that the U.S.'s glory days are behind us and that we're sliding into permanent status as a second-tier economy, right after we've pissed everyone off. Good stuff, yeah?

THEN, we had an economist and geo-political expert visit us at work. He squeezed us in between his meeting with Dick Cheney and some Pentagon officials to deliver to us with cool objectivism his message that oil is likely to be at $400 a gallon by next year and that Israel is likely to go to war with Iran and that Iran has nukes in about 50 different locations.

So, after a long week at work and all the running around that my week tends to entail, I had a total meltdown on Thursday night. I can only take so much. And to have all this information is one of the liabilities of living in DC and working with insiders. You see, I love listening to NPR, reading the latest business book during my Metro ride, and then promoting the world 's thought-leaders for a paycheck. In fact, I drink it up, and I feel like I've become smarter since I've come to DC. But Thursday, I had been on a global economy binge, and it was time to resist the temptation for information. After all, I have to live in this world, too.