I’ve been having trouble waking up in the mornings.

My pattern, since I was in junior high, is to have my clock radio set to Morning Edition. I’ve never had to set the volume loud–usually my brain start listening to what’s being said, and that’ll wake me up.

Recently, this plan hasn’t been working as well as it used to. The radio goes off, I wake up, then I actually hear what is being said, and block it out, because I just don’t want to listen any more to news about death, explosions, terrorists attacks, or reductions in our civil rights. So I find myself for the first time since I was a teenager, falling back asleep.

Now it’s not like I’m going to be late for work–it just means that I have to skip exercising or have less time to exercise in the morning. But the whole thing is eerie. I’m a news junkie–I love the news. Say what you like about NPR, but I get a mix of state, national, and international news WITHOUT annoying commercials. (You want to know the real reason why I sometimes forget to listen to the WVU games? The awful, incredibly annoying commercials. I hate them.)

In college, being a townie, I hung out at the lair (Mountainlair, i.e. WVU Student Union) all the time. I was almost always there to see what we sometimes referred to as “The Bad News” or the lunchtime Pittsburgh news. It was amazing how they never ever had anything good to report. Just murders and fires and floods.

I’m beginning to feel that way about the news in general now. When I go to the BBC News website, I tend to check the Science & Nature and Technology news. I get daily news headlines in my e-mail. For the past several months the only ones I’ve regularly read have been the Charleston Gazette, since it gives me state news. I’m totally avoiding national and international news.

Is it just me? Or has the news really been this awful for the past couple years, and I’m only just now getting burned out? I mean, avoidance behavior is way up–I’m turning off the radio earlier and earlier to read (or recently, so we can watch a couple of episodes of Babylon 5.)

Is this feeling of dread and doom ever going to go away?