Since the October 1 holiday, I have been spending my time working and following two major issues: 1) the U.S. presidential campaign; and 2) the global financial meltdown. As neither of these two huge media events have centered on China, I have found it quite difficult to focus on local issues. As a result, emulating John McCain’s reaction to the U.S. financial crisis, I suspended my blogging for a while to wait and see how these issues were going to play out. In my case, the suspension was real.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve turned into a news junkie.

Seems like we are at the end of the beginning on both of these stories, so it seems safe to venture back into posting. A couple of comments on these issues to clear the air:

1) Election — I don’t believe in luck (good or bad), so I have no problem saying that it looks like Obama is going to win — if he ultimately loses, don’t blame me for jinxing it.

Anything can happen, but it looks pretty good for him right now. Couldn’t say that a couple of weeks ago, but now things are on a discernible trajectory. Hopefully I can now stop hitting refresh on my RSS reader every three seconds to see if a new poll or article has come in to my U.S. Politics folder. I’ve been horribly addicted recently, and it’s got to stop.

Apparently I’m not the only one suffering from this problem, outlined in clinical fashion below:

OCED: Obsessive Compulsive Election Disorder.

In this particular psychological response to variables, the person is unable or unwilling to tear themselves away from media coverage of the upcoming election.

Reports are flooding in from every corner of the country, red, blue, purple and green states alike. Ordinary people with no previous history of repetitive behaviors are suddenly checking polling websites every 1/2 hour. The words Zogby, Gallup, Fivethirtyeight, Rasmussen are now sprinkled in to conversations at playgrounds, coffee shops, parties and after the workout at the Y.

Others find themselves unable to relinquish the remote as they leap-frog between CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBS, PBS & ABC, looking for the pundits, experts and talking heads with the latest updates on undecided voters from battleground states.

The symptoms of an informed electorate.

More informed electorate for sure, and for some, it’s extreme, thus the name OCED, Obsessive Compuslive Election Disorder. Here’s some signs that you might be afflicted:

* You check and re-check your favorite post more than twice a day hoping for an update
* You have commented on articles and blog posts using a clever pseudonym
* You can’t sleep, worried about the how voters in West Virginia are going to decide
* You’ve watched Tina Fey more this week than in the past few years on 30 Rock
* You find yourself forwarding emails to every casual acquaintance who expresses even a mild like-minded opinion on the issues
* For the first time ever you understand the term Margin of Error
* You bounce between Huffington, National Review, The Atlantic & DrudgeReport

The side effects:

1. Nausea as events beyond your control unfold before your eyes
2. Headache as you try to understand Confidence intervals and Margin of error statistics
3. Upset stomach from too many Advil and Tylenol swallowed for #1 & #2 above
4. Putting off work related projects to check latest polling numbers from Missouri

Right. Either way, the news will slow down two weeks from now. Compared to the situation eight years ago when I experienced a presidential election while living in Beijing with no blogs or podcasts with which to feed the news habit, and many of the big U.S. papers online were blocked, I do appreciate being able to access information from home so easily.

On the other hand, all this stuff is seriously sucking the life out of me. I need some sort of kick-ass AI to take over my incoming info, distill it, and feed it to me in daily bursts of concentrated news goodness. Technology always lags behind what I really need. Damn.

On to issue #2.

2. Financial meltdown — this issue has taken slightly less of my time than the election because there are fewer things to read about it. Seems incredible given the gravity of the situation, but it’s true. The media doesn’t really like stories about the economy, global or domestic, because such topics are more difficult to research than stories about what kind of car Obama owns, how many times McCain blinked his eyes during the last debate, or how ignorant Sarah Palin is (FYI, that last topic requires very little research and is therefore preferred by most editors). Moreover, most journalism majors, as with a lot of lawyers, don’t have a clue when it comes to econ. In the interest of full disclosure, I have a limited econ background and know nothing about finance. This explains my weird fascination with what’s going on right now — I understand about half of it, enough to make me curious.

In between checking the news feeds every few seconds, I take a look at the markets. Asia in the morning, Europe in the afternoon and evening, and the U.S. at night. It’s been rather entertaining the past few weeks, to say the least.

Anyway, it seems that we are now at the point where pundits are starting to use the phrase "end of the beginning." Very nice, in a flippant kind of way. What they mean is that the short-term liquidity crisis seems to be easing slightly, and the credit market is showing signs of life. Not much life, but enough for some folks to start breathing again, climb off the ledge, or whatever other sort of illustration you prefer.

The credit crisis is/was the most immediate problem. If it is slightly better (after gobs of money have been injected into banks globally), we now have the luxury of looking at the next problem, which perhaps is a looming recession. Lots of fun that will be.

That being said, a global recession is something I can understand and comment on, something that will have a direct effect on the economy here (one that I understand better than trying to figure out to what extent Chinese banks are holding icky Western debt).

All in all, therefore, it seems like a good time to recalibrate the RSS reader, close Yahoo! Finance, and return to China issues. I have noticed a similar dropoff in activity from other blogs in the past couple of weeks as well — not sure if the explanation for this is the same as mine, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I have noticed more activity from my fellow bloggers in the past few days, though, which is a good sign that life is returning to normal, whatever that may be.