Day 3 - The Anger Phase

Day 3 and I must have reached the anger phase of this process!  I'm actually a little angry with TV today!

We all like different things, we all draw different lines and have different preferences.  What one person considers entertaining, another may not.  For example, there are a number of crime shows on TV nowadays.  Many people find their entertainment watching someone get murdered, or a child get kidnapped and I can say that I can't grasp that.  I definitely can't find my entertainment there.  Then there are the reality type shows where people act as if they are not acting.  They are just living their lives as if there was no camera there.  I suspect that they are acting to some extent and that acting, in my opinion, stinks!  Then there are the sit-coms.  I haven't watched one in a REALLY long time, but I was just talking to a friend about one of her favorites.  It's called Modern Family.  I've never seen it, but based on the description, it seems to take things that I find don't match up with my, ummm, preferences and make light of them.  In a way, they are trying to make things that I don't necessarily buy into, acceptable.  I don't find humor in these things since I tend to look beyond the "acting" and search for the deeper moral message (to a fault I do this!). 

Then there was the movie called Awakenings.  I was watching this movie just a short time prior to my TV boycott.  This movie is intensely emotional and had me weeping so badly that I was getting blurry vision!  Yes, some wouldn't call that entertainment, but it entertained me to the extent that it had an impact on my soul.  While this impact on my soul was taking place, cut to commercial... Oil of Olay... a wonderful  super model (I'm sure she really is... nothing against her!  Really!) trying to tell me that wrinkles are ugly and unacceptable in our society and that to be "pretty" and acceptable, I should buy this lotion that costs $28 dollars that promises to make me look younger.  What if I don't want to look younger (well... ) !  I thought "How has the media tricked us into believing that this is what's important, that this is what we need to spend our money on???".  How can they do that?!  How have the accomplished such trickery!  This commercial in contrast to the emotional life struggles of the people in the movie Awakenings made me feel sick about where we are as a human race.  I was so angry.

In retrospect, I think this was the moment that I decided that TV had to go.  It's been 3 days and I'm feeling a little, teeny-bit lost at moments (like now), but overall it's been somewhat easy considering my anger at the above programming choices and commercials.

So... today I've completed my bday list (well almost, still waiting on some responses), put my 2009 tax stuff in a box, worked at my main job, talked on the phone for awhile, went to the grocery store, did laundry, cleaned the kitchen.  Right now I'm cooking an Amy's Non-Dairy, Rice Crust, Spinach pizza and drinking a Sam Adams Octoberfest (it is Friday!).  Yum