Idols
That was absolutely horrendous
I need to give up American Idol. I am ashamed to watch it. Tonight, during one of his blunt criticisms, Simon said that the show was not about art and artists. It was shocking, but he was simply admitting something we all knew. It’s all about finding a new product to sell. As much as I enjoy watching many of the contestants sing, it makes me sad to think their prize for winning will be their dehumanization. They will become an idol, and though idols are worshiped, ultimately they are objects with a short shelf-life. When the idol goes away, what happens to the human?
I have a good friend — a songwriter — who hates everything American Idol stands for, and he is ashamed of me for watching. I don’t blame him. I am ashamed of me. But it is a guilty pleasure. Unfortunately, it is a guilty pleasure that steals hours of my life.
On that note, I now share my three biggest time wasters, the important things that at their best improve my life, but very often serve little purpose than to distract me from what is really important.
Television
It’s not that there isn’t quality stuff out there. There are amazing shows like Lost and The Office that are worth your evening. But for every quality program, there are ten mediocre reality shows and unintelligent sitcoms. Sure, I can learn a lot from the Discovery Channel. But I can also learn a lot taking a walk around my neighborhood pond. I can learn a lot from attempting a new hobby. I can lay on a blanket in the backyard and come up with new constellations.
I am afraid of the quiet, and I am afraid I might miss something, when I realize that I miss much more when I am stuck to the couch.
The World Wide Web
Yep, my job depends on the internet. This blog depends on the internet. But I can spend hours googling and facebooking, trying to come up with the ultimate tweet. There are times I sit and stare at this blog. I have nothing to say. I think about my day, and the time I wasted searching for the perfect cat-training technique on Yahoo, and the reason that coherent thought eludes me becomes obvious.
The internet is a tool, and like all tools, it is best used when needed and then stuck back on the shelf in the garage. Believe me, I am not a techno-phobic, Facebook-is-the-end-of-the-world, unplugger. I love using tools like twitter and wordpress. But, again, I use that tool word. Use them often, but use them wisely.
Randominity
I made up that word. I know I made it up because my blogging software has just given it the little, dotted, red underline that indicates a misspelled word. But it is not spelled incorrectly, because that’s the way I spelled it when I made it up. A neologism is never a misspelling.
… And that last paragraph was the perfect example of randominity. To me, I thrive off of — and I think need — a certain level of randomness in my life. It’s where the best stories come from. But the difference between randomness and my new word, randominity, is that randominity is a lifestyle. I am hurt by a lack of scheduling. And I am not talking about a disorganized work day or missing meetings. I am talking about the little things, like making time to blog, or clean the litter boxes, or go on a walk by the pond.
I need to be more intentional about scheduling time to let my mind wonder, as opposed to doing it when I should be doing something else. If I don’t pencil it in, I might never do it. Randominity. Type it enough, and the red-dotted underline goes away.
Man, am I reading what I am writing?
March 11th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Alec - thanks for your comment today. I hadn’t really thought about the ‘uncertainty’ angle of quitting, though it’s very real and paralyzing.
Good luck quitting Idol. I’m trying to not waste my time channel surfing when there’s nothing on and rather do something worthwhile.