"Love your accent. Where are you from?" asks the owner of a small restaurant in the tiny town of Warrnambool, Australia.

"The States," I reply automatically, and I immediately regret my answer. To play it safe, my two friends I agreed to be "Canadian" during our recent weeklong road trip, and I had just slipped up.

Luckily, this man was delighted to see Americans — who are almost surely a rarity in Warrnambool. "Whereabouts are you from?" he asks eagerly.

"Pennsylvania," I tell him.

"Right! Where the plane went down! Great!" he replies, his enthusiasm only growing.

An awkward silence engulfs my table. For a millisecond, I half-expected him to ask for my autograph.

He didn't mean to be callous. He was innocently excited to know something about my home state, and he didn't realize his comment was rather inappropriate.

The moment passes and the conversation moves on. But the uncomfortable feeling in my stomach remains.

It's not the first time I've felt this way. Earlier in the semester, when I told my new Australian acquaintances I was from Penn State, those who recognized the university immediately responded with either: "Right! With the racist death threats!" or "Right! You're the ones who riot."

Riiiiiight. That's us.

These are the events about our state and our campus that have made global headlines. Foreigners don't hear about our fab Creamery ice cream, our beautiful fall foliage or our Thon fundraising efforts.

These things, though important to us, don't exactly pull in the ratings on a global level. That's because news is, by definition, events that are out of the ordinary.

News is about images of the atypical — of conflict, strife and suffering. That's what gets ratings and readership. And everyday life, when filtered through the selective lens of the media, emerges in this distorted state.

I know this firsthand because I'm a journalism major with four semesters of newsroom experience at The Daily Collegian.

I've taken part in plenty of meetings where editors sit behind closed doors, discussing the day's events and selecting which articles are worthy of inclusion in the next day's newspaper — and which ones will never see the light of day. It's not an evil conspiracy to deceive the public; it's just the way the media works due to public demand and time and budget limitations.

An example: No doubt you've seen the images of protesters in Jakarta, Indonesia, angrily hurling rocks at the U.S. embassy.

That's news. That's the image that gets broadcast around the world, reaching our homes and forming our perceptions of reality. Wow, we think, people from Jakarta must really detest Americans.

What we don't hear about are the peaceful, tolerant moments between Americans and Indonesians. We don't hear about people rising above nationalistic rhetoric and hateful stereotypes and just plain getting along. It's not newsworthy.

It was time to switch partners at my ballroom dance class this week, and the guy I was due to dance with was a Muslim from Jakarta. As I approach him, I feel a momentary hesitation as the scene of the Jakarta rock-throwers flashes before my eyes.

I wonder what flashes before his — perhaps a hateful American, looking into a CNN camera and proclaiming that all Muslims should be killed. I'm concerned that it might be a bit awkward for us to dance together in light of current world events.

But I'm wrong. We smile and nod at each other, twirling around the dance floor, laughing as we step on each other's toes. When it's time for us to switch partners again, we say the customary "Thanks for that" in unison. But it doesn't feel routine. It feels weighty in its ordinariness. Genuine. Meaningful. Symbolic.

"American Girl, Indonesian Guy Dance, Laugh." It's not going to make the front page of any newspaper in my lifetime. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. And not just happening to me — happening everywhere, all over the globe.

Sometimes I turn off my TV at the end of the night feeling dejected and hopeless after the parade of violent, distressing images.

I have to force myself to acknowledge that the upsetting events I see in the news are, by definition, unusual. I take them seriously, learn from them and try to do my part to end them, but I remind myself that in spite of global conflict and pain, life goes on.

We need to remember that instances of peace, love, hope and understanding are occurring whether we hear about them or not.

And we need to remember that the bad news we hear — the plane crashes, the riots, the death threats and the rock throwers — are only a small part of a larger picture. A significant and painful part, to be sure, but not the whole picture.