what the world needs now

is a little more panic, like i need a hole in my head.

honestly, i can feel it. i'm a germophobe. i live in Texas, which is pretty close to Mexico. some of my neighbors have relatives in Mexico whom they may or may not have visited recently. my kids spend 2 hours a day in a YMCA kid care room.

so i should be all decked out in a hazmat suit and respirator, right?

but somehow, i'm not buying this one. and i may be wrong in the end, this may be all they've hyped it up to be.

i can't help but wonder about the state of the world in relation to how we perceive it. i can't help but hope that the world is in such a messy quandary because we were told it is, and we believed it.

consider the swine flu (or the bird flu, or terrorism, or the economy...etc.) . if there was no television pumping fear in the family rooms of the world, if there was no internet with it's abundance of every sort of information...well, people wouldn't be too worried about all this, now would they?

i want to imagine a utopia where all communication comes from passing travellers and things are slow and simple. i just want to imagine that for a second, ok?

(i'm going to make a confession here: sometimes i really, really wish i lived in Middle Earth. i wish it hard enough that it may actually be a disorder of some sort...)