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Fear and anxiety can be good things. They can make you look both ways before you cross the street. They can fuel a desire to take care what you put on your kids' dinner plates or whether you lie in the sun. Out of fear you might decide to follow your instincts and avoid the stranger in the parking lot at night or forego bungee jumping from a sketchy-looking apparatus.

Fear and anxiety can also teach you about yourself, though. The experience of anxiety often forces me to examine the rationality of my thought processes. Is it rational to think that Abby might suddenly stop breathing in her sleep? No, probably not. It is rational to think that if she runs pell-mell across the patio in her Crocs she might fall down and abrade something or other? I think so.

Is it rational to fear a pandemic of swine flu? I don't think so -- exactly. I've decided that my reaction isn't going to be fear. It's going to be calm (at least, calm for me) preparation. If it comes down to it, I've got Tamiflu and I've got masks. I keep up on the news and check the WHO and CDC web sites without obsessing or losing sleep over it. I know that pandemics can spread very quickly, so I check more than once a day. I also realize that the government will be engaged in a balancing act between wanting to inform us and wanting to make sure nobody panics, so for myself I engage in a balancing act between being dutiful and succumbing to conspiracy-theory tendencies born of many years of watching apocalyptic movies. It's made a bit easier, somehow, by the clear statements from world health officials that if this flu becomes extremely contagious, it's too late to contain its spread -- all we can do is try to mitigate it. Okay. I can work with that. Preventive measures to try to keep everyone healthy. Tamiflu if they get sick.

In short, I think I'm handling this threat better than I might have in the past. Rationally. Intelligent consumption of media and government information, with just a soupcon of terror. Not so bad.

I promise, a happier topic next time.