I'm tired.

Yesterday's tragic news segued into today's tragic news. Yesterday's news left me stressed and twitchy just about all day. Today's news left me with almost-immediate aches and pains from head to toe. Stress hurts, have no doubt.

I've always believed that I'm a fairly difficult person to horrify -- I simply tend to be too cynical and pessimistic to be seriously affected by most bad news... but hearing about jetliners hijacked solely to make a big boom and ratchet up the death count, and watching video of the plane crashing into the second tower and of the two towers collapsing to the ground left me literally slack-jawed with horror, marveling at the magnitude of the disaster even as a cynical little voice inside was whispering that I should close my mouth and try to salvage my cynical, disaffected reputation.

But every time they replayed and replayed and replayed those video clips of thousands of lives being snuffed out, I got more used to them, which felt even more horrible.

And after a full two days of tragic news and horrific scenes and enraged calls for revenge -- forgive me -- I'm tired. I want to have something else to talk about, to think about, to have dreams about. I tried writing unrelated nodes, but everything twisted back around to The Topic At Hand. I tried watching a Powerpuff Girls cartoon -- nice and light and silly, I thought -- but now the giant monsters destroying Townsville weren't very funny. I tried reading some old Silver Age comic books, but now the concept of a world where superheroes prevented all disasters felt as offensive as our world, where no one prevents the disasters.

It's just Tuesday, but this has been a terrible, terrible week.