Blue Monday

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

It’s Monday morning in Medialand. Woke up with the blues—or maybe the blahs would be closer to the truth. I’ve got a slight allergic sensitivity to this smoke from the California fires, and it makes it hard for me to sleep. Makes my eyes itch and my throat sore. Gives me weird dreams when I do drift off. Puts me in a sour mood. Just the kind of thing readers look forward to reading about in my little, self-indulgent column about nothing. Of course, that’s kind of the point of the column, and I’ll bet many of you, if not most, are suffering in the same way.

And then I look around and realize, in comparison to the world around me, I am so lucky. There are people who lost everything in the Iowa flooding, more than 70 homes burned in the Northern California fires, and there are people—just like me—living in tents in Reno, as Deidre Pike details in this week’s cover story on page 15. I get a stuffy nose, and it casts a pall over my whole day? Pretty lame, weak.

So, I resolve to reframe my thinking today. I had a great Father’s Day yesterday—Hunter even took me to breakfast at IHOP. I took a nap. The garden’s growing as though I had something to do with it. I infected myself with an ear worm, replacing the negative lyrics from M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” with Santogold’s “L.E.S Artistes”: “Change, change, change, I want to get up out of my skin / tell you what / if I can shake it / I’m ‘a make this something worth dreaming of.”

Look around the world. Nepal is now a republic. Gay couples are getting married in California. Most people survived the floods and fires, and where there’s life, there’s hope. It’s easy to find good news every single day, you just have to look. And the act of looking may just change your mind.