Now, I know that these are really just words, and that especially in politics words don’t usually mean a thing until something actually gets done, but still… the sheer existence of this section, on a page called “Civil Rights,” on the website of the White House! The website that, to quote a line from one of the first blog posts under its new leadership, will “serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.” The official electronic mouthpiece, in other words. The one-stop resource for all things related to the new presidential administration, its views, policies, and current plans.

And a resource that’s being used, at least in part, to talk about support for things like repealing the military’’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy… and support for repealing the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” and expanding the rights given to same-sex couples to include all of the more than 1,100 federal benefits as well… and even support for expanding adoption rights, in language that can’t get much plainer or more direct: “[President Obama] thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.”

… Wow. Just… wow. Talk about a turn-around from the previous administration, eh? Again, it may not be “real” in the political sense until the legislation’s drafted and things get changed and repealed and enacted in the proper way – and I’m sure that, even for Obama himself, there are plenty of hoops to jump through – but it’s still amazing, not to mention supremely uplifting, to know – hard as it may be to believe -  that on the actual website of the President of the United States, there is FINALLY direct, unequivocal support for LGBT people and their rights in words that don’t reek of two-faced, patronizing hypocrisy.

Change has come, indeed.

Yep, news. And lots of it. Whether it’s the oft-updated drop-down of “Latest BBC Headlines” that comes standard as a Live Bookmark in Firefox or the seemingly exhaustive (and sometimes, exhausting) list of stories I see in my frequent trips to Google News, I have been reading the news like there’s no tomorrow. (Of course, to hear some journalists tell it, there might not be. Global collapse, anyone?)

Okay, so maybe I’m not reading every single story I see. I mean, let’s face it, do I really care that so-and-so is now playing for such-and-such team or that Actor X has broken up with Actress Y and is now dating Model Z? Sorry, just doesn’t matter to me. I can’t help but wonder, though, if in my desire to stay informed about everything else in the world, I might be going a bit overboard. Overdosing on reality. Filling myself up with stories that – in the long run – are not really all that relevant.

Granted, that might be the case for most people and for most of the news they take in. A lot of the stories we read, watch, or hear about are ones we probably didn’t need to know, anyway. And even more importantly, given the state of the world and how “negative” much of the news is, is it even healthy to take it all in if it doesn’t personally affect us?

But how do we know that it won’t affect us unless we know about it? And even if it doesn’t, even if a story’s about something taking place thousands and thousands of miles away on a different continent across an ocean in some farflung part of the world, isn’t it good to know about it, anyway? See how other people live, struggle, and (hopefully) survive? I ask myself these questions, but I’m not always sure of the answers.

In the quest to stay informed about the goings-on on this big little planet of ours, how much information is too much?